Leonid Andreyev: An Introduction

Author(s): Daniel Gerould

Source: Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1981), pp. 110-112
Published by: Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3245230 .
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 Leonid Andreyev

Daniel Gerould

After Chekhov and Gorky, the most widely read and discussed Russian
author of the early twentieth century was Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919).
Given to wild drinking bouts, fits of extreme depression, and gloomy
philosophizing about human existence, the handsome young writer, with
his flowing mane of black hair and dark, penetrating eyes, created a sensa-
tion in the literary world, first for his shocking stories of madness and hor-
ror, such as The Red Laugh, The Seven That Were Hanged, and Thought
(recently used by the Czech Pavel Kohout as the basis for his Poor
Murderer),and then for the some thirty plays composed between 1905 and
1916 in which he exploited a variety of modernist themes and techniques in
fashion at that time. But even before his early death in 1919 at the age of
forty-eight, Andreyev's immense popularity and fame had begun to slip bad-
ly, and he ended his days in poverty, a sick and embittered man. According
to his contemporary, the poet Alexander Blok, Andreyev,
moreyere than any
other writer, expressed the fear and trembling characteristic of those
fateful times.

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Best known in the West for his eerie drama of circus life, He Who Gets Slap-
ped (presented by the Theatre Guild in 1922 and later made into a silent film
with Lon Chaney), Andreyev is difficult to place within any one literary or
theatrical movement of the period. Always a source of controversy, he has
been condemned by leftist social critics and by aesthetic elitists. In a letter
of 1912 to Maxim Gorky, his closest friend for many years, Andreyev asks:
"Who am I?-for blue-blooded decadents, a despicable realist; for con-
genital realists, a suspect symbolist." In fact, Andreyev departed from the
strict artistic canons of both naturalism and symbolism in an attempt to
find a synthesis of their opposing tendencies. When in 1906 his modern
allegory, The Life of Man, was about to be staged at the Moscow Art
Theatre (it had first been directed by Meyerhold at the Kommissarzhev-
skaya Theatre and is still occasionally performed in the USSR), Andreyev
wrote to Stanislavsky, who at the time was also searching for a new form of
theatre, "If in Chekhov and even in Maeterlinck the stage should present life
then here in this production the stage should offer only a reflection of life.
Not even for one minute should the spectator forget that he is watching a
play-that he is in the theatre.... And the actors themselves, as they play
their roles, should not forget that they are actors." Inspired by Poe's tales,
Goya's graphics, and the Russian folk puppet theatre of Petrushka, the
author of The Life of Man-himself a painter-developed a bold expres-
sionistic style blending light, color, sound, shape, and rhythmic speech in a
complex whole. His characters, lacking individual traits and particularized
motivations, are personifications of social and psychic phenomena,
dramatizations of states of mind.

Written between 1913 and 1916, Requiem' was planned by Andreyev as his
swan song, an artistic and ideological last will and testament. The least
known of all the writer's works (it fell victim to the on-rush of history), it is
his masterpiece, dense with an enigmatic poetry of the theatre. Obsessed
with thoughts of death and the coming end, Andreyev in his later years
would often recall the unknown visitor who had called on Mozart and com-
missioned him to write a Requiem that was soon to become the dying com-
poser's own. Andreyev's Requiem is intimately autobiographical in its por-
trayal of the author's sense of loss and solitude, but it dramatizes not only a
personal crisis, but also a vast historical and cultural breakdown.

Requiem was given a brilliant production at the Kommissarzhevsky Theatre

in Moscow (where Fyodor continued the experimental work begun by his
sister Vera in St. Petersburg) in December, 1916, under the direction of
Vasilii Sakhnovsky.2 Composed during the devastations of World War I, An-
dreyev's sinister drama reached the stage on the eve of Rasputin's
assassination (all theatres were immediately closed after the murder)and
re-appeared briefly in 1917 before the February Revolution toppled the
Tsarist Empire. Thereafter it disappeared into the encroaching darkness
and primordial chaos, much as its own characters are swallowed by the
void of infinite space. A study in the somber tonalities of shadows, Re-
quiem is a dirge for a dying civilization, a burial rite for an exhausted

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theatrical tradition, as well as a deathwatch of the soul awaiting final
dissolution.

Although it gives a foretaste of Pirandello's ingenious theatre-in-the-

theatre, Andreyev's theatrum mundi is located in a single consciousness
and poised over an abyss. In the deserted house of the author's brain,
behind its impenetrable walls, a midnight drama of disintegrating thought
is played out in a private theatre of the mind, with ghosts as actors and
grotesquely painted wooden dummies as audience. Here Andreyev makes
striking theatrical use of the dramatis personae as puppets-manikins-
marionettes, a concept that has fascinated avant-gardists from Maeterlinck
and Gordon Craig to Tadeusz Kantor. For in Requiem no living characters
are in search of an author, but the creator himself is at an impasse, playing
a desperate end game with dead vioces of the past. Variations on nothing,
Andreyev's Requiem can be read as Beckettian meditation on human isola-
tion and loneliness, on the futility of human aspirations in a black universe
in which man is condemned to death. It is also an ironic and corrosive work
of auto-demolition stripping down theatre to its constituent parts and
reducing the dramatic event to paralysis and derision.

After the October Revolution, Andreyev fled to his country house in Finland
not far from the Russian border.There, plagued by dreadful headaches, his
eyes growing more and more haunted, the now largely forgotten author
fulminated against the Bolsheviks. In April, 1919 during a nearby bombing
attack occasioned by the raging Civil War, Andreyev's heart-already
weakened by one of several youthful suicide attempts-simply gave out.

Notes

'Requiemwas first publishedin 1917 in Strada,Volume2, a St. Petersburgan-

thologyof contemporaryliterature.Itwas reprintedin 1930in Moscowas partof an
Andreyev memorial collection of reminiscences.
2Sakhnovsky (1886-1945) also staged Sologub's Vanka the Butler and the Page
Jean and Wedekind's Pandora's Box at the Kommissarzhevsky Theatre. He later
became one of the leading directors at the Moscow Art Theatre.

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