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Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev Edit Profile

also known asJames Lynch

novelistplaywrightwriter

Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer, who is considered to be a father of Expressionism in Russian literature.

Background

Ethnicity: Andreyev's mother hailed from an old Polish aristocratic, though impoverished, family, while he also claimed Ukrainian and Finnish ancestry.

Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was born on June 18, 1871, in Oryol, Russia, to a middle-class family.

Education

Andreyev was graduated from a local high school, entered the University of St. Petersburg, but later transferred to the School of Jurisprudence, Moscow University, from which he was graduated in 1897.

Career

Andreyev began to write while he was at college but met with repeated failure and in 1897 he took a job as reporter, first on the Moscow Herald and later on the Courier. In 1898, he published Bargamot and Garaska, a short story which reflected the influence of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Charles Dickens, whose works, according to Andreyev himself, he had read "a dozen times," as well as the influence of the literary technique of Anton Chekhov. Bargamot and Garaska was the work of a writer of great promise, and it attracted the attention of Maxim Gorky, who was just becoming an influential figure in Russian letters. Gorky helped Andreyev with advice and instruction and in 1900 induced him to join the literary circle Znanye ("Knowledge"), made up of a group of young writers intent on preserving the social and realist traditions of nineteenth-century Russian literature.

In 1901, Andreyev published his first book of short stories, which included The Little Angel, The Grand Slam, The Lie, Silence, and Once upon a Time. Written in vivid, realistic style, the stories confirmed Gorky's earlier appraisal of Andreyev's talent, and he became at once a literary celebrity. Although Andreyev showed little interest in social and political issues, he remained a member of the Gorky circle until 1905. To this period belong the bulk of his short stories, among which may be mentioned Laughter, The Wall, The Abyss, Thought, In the Fog, and Life of Father Vassily Fiveisky.

His revulsion to the horrors of war is reflected in The Red Laugh, written during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Much of Andreyev's popularity in the period following 1905 was due to his success as a playwright. His first play, To the Stars, appeared in 1905, and from then on until 1917 he published at least one play a year. Most of his dramas, including The Life of Man (1906), King Hunger (1907), The Black Maskers (1908), Anathema (1909), Honor (1912), The Waltz of Dogs (1914), and He Who Gets Slapped (1916), are symbolical in what seems to be a deliberately sensational manner and have now lost much of their appeal.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Andreyev emigrated to Finland, where he attacked the Communist control of his homeland. His last work, Satan's Diary (1919), shows his decline as an artist.

Achievements

Leonid Andreyev is known as a dark, even nihilistic, dramatist and novelist who epitomized the pessimistic intellectual streak in Russian culture and who addressed social, political, and philosophical issues in his plays and novels.

As a playwright, Andreyev may have been the first Russian to bring symbolism to the stage; as a novelist, he has been compared with writers such as Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Edgar Allan Poe in the way he focused on the grimmer side of human nature and the torments of existence. Perhaps Andreyev’s best-known play is He Who Gets Slapped (1921), a troubling play about a circus clown (“He”) whose performance centers on being.

Works

Views

Almost all of Andreyev's writings reflect, in one way or another, the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, and the theme repeatedly dwelt upon is that of disillusionment with everything that man holds dear. Andreyev exposes man's traditional reverence for honor, faith, truth, and nobility as a veneration of a hoax or a mirage, of something that does not actually exist. All his heroes are lonely individuals without power, faith in themselves, or security. Their world is evil, and their only remedy is death.

Andreyev's inclination towards mysticism and symbolism is reflected also in his prose. After 1905, he wrote comparatively few stories in the tradition of realism, but many deal with the supernatural and attempt to instill in the reader a terror of the unknowable. In contrast to this mystical trend are Andreyev's psychological and realistic short story The Seven Who Were Hanged (1908) and Sashka Zhegulev (1911), his one novel.

Membership

Through Gorky, Andreyev became a member of the Moscow Sreda literary group, and published many of his works in Gorky's Znanie collections.

Personality

Though critics are divided when assessing the importance of Andreyev’s individual works, within his own country and within the wider literary world, they agree that this anguished author somehow mirrored the emotional facets of his culture. Andreyev’s turbulent, even excessive literary tactics and brooding subject matter may not have pleased everyone, and yet his works, in the words of William Lyon Phelps in Essays on Russian Novelists, were “stamped by powerful individuality.”

Quotes from others about the person

Interests

Connections

Andreyev was married to Alexandra Veligorskaia, a niece of Taras Shevchenko. She died of puerperal fever in 1906. They had two sons, Daniil Andreyev, a poet and mystic, and Vadim Andreyev.

In 1908, Leonid Andreyev married Anna Denisevich, and decided to separate his two little boys, keeping Vadim with him and sending Daniil to live with Aleksandra's sister.

late-wife:: Alexandra Veligorskaia
Wife:: Anna Denisevich
Son:: Daniil Andreyev
Son:: Vadim Andreyev
Friend:: Maxim Gorky

References

Memoirs and Madness: Leonid Andreev Through the Prism of the Literary Portrait Memoirs and Madness examines memoir as a literary genre, investigates the creation of Leonid Andreev's posthumous legacy by his contemporaries, and explores the possibility that Andreev, Russia's leading literary figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, suffered from mental illness.
2006
The Great Books of Russia
1968
Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev
1928
International Dictionary of the Theatre: Playwrights
1993
Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature. This book analyzes the impact of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground (1864) and its protagonist, the Underground Man, upon Russian literature. It is concerned with the different ways in which Russian writers responded to Notes from the Underground, with the whole complex of underground psychology, philosophy, and imagery.
1958
Leonid Andreyev: A Critical Study
1924
Russian Writers: Their Lives And Literature
1954
A History of Russian Literature
1955
Contemporary Russian Novelists
1913
Twentieth Century Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present
1979