Produced by David Starner, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.
1920
1914,BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
This edition is authorized by Leonid Andreyev, who hasselected the plays included in it.
All Dramatic rights reserved byEdwin Björkman
For the last twenty years Leonid Andreyev and Maxim Gorky haveby turns occupied the centre of the stage of Russian literature.Prophetic vision is no longer required for an estimate of theirpermanent contribution to the intellectual and literary developmentof Russia. It represents the highest ideal expression of a periodin Russian history that was pregnant with stirring and far-reachingevents—the period of revolution and counter-revolution. It was aperiod when Russian society passed from mood to mood at an extremelyrapid tempo: from energetic aggressiveness, exultation, high hope,and confident trust in the triumph of the people's cause to apatheticinaction, gloom, despair, frivolity, and religious mysticism. Thisimportant dramatic epoch in the national life of Russia Andreyevand Gorky wrote down with such force and passion that they becamerecognized at once as the leading exponents of their time.
Despite this close external association, their work differsessentially in character. In fact, it is scarcely possible toconceive of greater artistic contrasts. Gorky is plain, direct, broad,realistic, elemental. His art is native, not acquired. Civilizationand what learning he obtained later through the reading of books haveinfluenced, not the manner or method of his writing, but only itspurpose and occasionally its subject matter. It is significant towatch the dismal failure Gorky makes of it whenever, in concession tothe modern literary fashion, he attempts the mystical. Symbolism isforeign to him except in its broadest aspects. His characters, thoughhailing from a world but little known, and often extreme and extremelypeculiar, are on the whole normal.
Andreyev, on the other hand, is a child of civilization, steeped inits culture, and while as rebellious against some of the things ofcivilization as Gorky, he reacts to them in quite a different way.He is wondrously sensitive to every development, quickly appropriateswhat is new, and always keeps in the vanguard. His art is theresultant of all that the past ages have given us, of the things thatwe have learned in our own day, and of what we are just now learning.With this art Andreyev succeeds in communicating ideas, thoughts, andfeelings so fine, so tenuous, so indefinite as to appear to transcendhuman expression. He does not care whether the things