Leonid Andreyev

Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev, the foremost representative of Russian expressionism in literature, was born in 1871 in the Oryol region. From his father, a bank employee, he inherited a love for nature as well as for alcohol. He studied law in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Eccentric and melancholic (manic-depressive, according to his later biographers), he fell into depression and made several suicide attempts—in 1894, he even shot himself, but the bullet merely wounded him—and eventually abandoned his studies to devote himself to literature. As an amateur, he engaged in painting and photography, initially experimenting with black-and-white stereoscopic images and later (around 1908) with the color photographic process of the Lumiere brothers, pioneers of cinema. He worked as a police reporter for the newspaper "Moscow Courier." He began publishing short stories in newspapers in 1898, attracting the interest of Maxim Gorky, who introduced him to the literary circles of Moscow. His first collection of short stories was published in 1901. The following year, he published, among others, two of his most famous stories: "In the Fog" and "The Abyss"—the latter, the story of a teenager who murders a prostitute and then commits suicide, received sharp criticism from Leo Tolstoy. In 1904, with the story "The Red Laugh," he turned against the Russo-Japanese War and became involved in the movement against Tsarism. A year later, with the outbreak of the revolution, he was arrested by the secret police and imprisoned. He then fled to Europe, where he lived in Italy as a guest of Gorky. Later, he acquired a house in Finland, very close to St. Petersburg. Between the 1905 revolution and the outbreak of World War I (1914), he wrote several plays, which were successfully staged in Moscow, Vienna, Berlin, and other cities by directors such as Stanislavski, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Meyerhold. As the October Revolution approached and especially after its triumph in 1917, Andreyev mostly published political texts, increasingly hostile to the Bolsheviks. He died in Finland in 1917. Forty years later, after Stalin's death, his remains were moved to the "Poets' Alley" at the Leningrad cemetery.