Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919), short-story writer and dramatist, was born in the provincial town of Oriol, the son of a surveyor. As a struggling law student, first at Moscow and then at St. Petersburg University, Andreyev experienced great hardship. His bouts of heavy drinking date from this period, and an early suicide attempt left him with a permanent heart ailment. A failure as a lawyer, Andreyev entered literature by way of journalism, first as a court reporter and later as a feuilletonist. A story published in the Moscow Courier in 1898 caught the attention of Maksim Gorky, who was generous with support and encouragement. Although close for a number of years to the group of writers, realists in literature and socialists in politics, who had gathered about Gorky under the imprint of the Znanie (“Knowledge”) publishing house, Andreyev remained fundamentally apolitical; his strength lay, as Gorky observed, in his “uncanny understanding of everything that concerned the dark aspects, the contradictions of man’s soul, the ferment of the instincts.” After 1905, during which he spent two weeks in prison for permitting his apartment to be used as a meeting place by the Marxist Social Democratic party, Andreyev’s path increasingly diverged from that of his erstwhile mentor.
The publication in 1901 of his first collection of stories brought Andreyev fame, and he was soon established as the most popular and controversial writer of his generation. The year 1908, in the course of which he published his most famous story, “The Seven Who Were Hanged,” and moved into a luxurious art nouveau villa on the coast of Finland, marks the apogee of his success; the ensuing years witnessed a catastrophic decline of his reputation among the intelligentsia. A passionate foe of the Bolsheviks, Andreyev remained in White-controlled Finland after the October Revolution, isolated, despairing and in conditions of worsening material hardship. In 1919 he addressed an S.O.S. to the allied forces, calling upon them to drive the Bolsheviks out of Russia. In the Soviet Union the famed writer’s death passed almost unnoticed.
In his own day, the faults of Andreyev’s writing—the rhetorical, careless style, the melodramatic effects, the philosophical pretensions—were overlooked or forgiven by many for the quality of the anguish it conveyed. In Blok’s striking phrase, Andreyev had been the scream that a sick and insane Russia had let forth in the agonizing years immediately preceding and following the 1905 Revolution. Unfortunately, Blok added, he had continued to scream after everything had calmed down. Such an evaluation reflects the changing attitude of the Symbolists to Andreyev’s work.
The relations between Andreyev and Symbolism were uneasy on both sides. Andreyev felt himself to be an outsider among contemporary literary groupings: “for the nobly born decadents, a despised realist; for the congenital realists a despised symbolist.” He was drawn toward the Symbolist aesthetic, yet in the presence of the Symbolists themselves he had an uncomfortable sense of inferiority. For their part, the Symbolists, while admitting his talent, were patronizing enough: “an uncultured talent” (Briusov), “a Russian foreign to culture” (Gippius) are entirely characteristic comments. Blok, who sensed a spiritual kinship between himself and Andreyev (“the chaos in each of us called out to the other”), was at first inclined to defend him against snobbish detractors, praising him for posing the great questions of life “as children do, relentlessly”; but even Blok came at length to reject Andreyev as a kind of grotesque Doppelgänger—“an amalgam of horrors of a mystical order that are very close to me.” It is certain, however, that no account of Russian Symbolism, and particularly of Russian Symbolism and the theatre, can leave Andreyev out of account—as a popularizer he played a unique role.
Andreyev’s interest in the theatre dated back to his days as a journalist, when he had written enthusiastic reviews of the Moscow Art Theatre’s productions of Chekhov and Ibsen. He shared Blok’s dislike of the all-powerful director, and in 1909 attempted to organize an “authors’ theatre” which would have no permanent director to impose his own interpretation on the dramatist’s creation. A prolific playwright (he would often turn out a play in the space of a week), Andreyev wrote some twenty full-length dramas between 1905 and 1916 as well as eight shorter pieces. He was as much the dramatic voice of his own generation as Chekhov had been of the previous one.
Andreyev’s plays occupy an intermediary position between Symbolism and realism; significantly, his first great success, The Life of Man, was staged by both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, directors closely associated with realism and Symbolism in the theatre. In his early dramas To the Stars and Savva, Andreyev claimed to be “the continuator of Chekhov” in that he was “a hater of the naked symbol and of naked, shameless reality.” Soon, however, Andreyev was calling for a “stylized drama,” for “broad generalizations” that were “unthinkable in the drama of everyday life.” In his attempt at a modern mystery play, The Life of Man (1906), Andreyev offered a model of just such a stylized and generalized drama, following it with others in a similar vein—King Hunger (1907), The Black Maskers (1908), Anathema (1909) and The Ocean (1911). In these plays Andreyev effectively reduced the complexities of Symbolism to a not too demanding allegorism, allowing the public the illusion of grappling with profound philosophical problems while offering them the strong situations and simplified characters of melodrama.
In addition to his “symbolic” plays, Andreyev produced a number of stage works in a more traditional manner, among them the dramas of student life The Days of Our Life (1908) and Gaudeamus (1910) and a cycle of dramas dealing with sexual problems in a bourgeois milieu. The late “myth-play,” He Who Gets Slapped (1916), in which Andreyev attempts to “bury” the Psyche myth in a modern circus setting, is an attempt at a synthesis of his two styles.
Rather than one of Andreyev’s plays (which have been widely translated), the present volume offers selection from his lively “Letters about the Theatre.” While he is admirably sensitive to the peculiar quality of Chekhov’s plays, Andreyev’s general ideas about the present and future of the drama are not particularly original or profound: his actionless “panpsychological drama” has much in common with Maeterlinck’s “static theatre,” and his vision of a theatre absorbed into life clearly owes not a little to Evreinov’s “theatricalization of life” and “theatre for oneself.” The “Letters,” then, present with characteristic panache a number of ideas current in “advanced” theatrical circles of the time.
LEONID ANDREYEV
THEATRE AND THE INNER LIFE
(FROM “LETTERS ABOUT THE THEATRE—LETTER ONE”48)
Does the theatre need action in its consecrated form of deeds and movements on the stage—a form not only accepted by all theatres but even espoused as the sole and indispensable way to salvation?
To this heretical question I will venture to answer no. There is no necessity for such action, inasmuch as Life itself in its most dramatic and tragic collisions draws away from external action, retreating ever further into the depths of the soul, into the silence and outward stillness of intellectual experience.
Rereading Benvenuto Cellini’s memoirs, I was struck by the enormous number of events in the life of this artist-adventurer: so many escapes, murders, unexpected turns of fortune, losses and discoveries, loves and friendships. Truly, the average man of today will not record as many events in his entire life as Cellini encountered in the short journey from his house to the city gates! And this is true not of Cellini alone, but of all who lived the life of that time, with its bandits, dukes and monks, its rapiers and mandolins. In those days a man was interesting only if he was a mover and a doer; and the man who remained in one place was deprived of experience, of life itself—he was like a stone by the roadside about which there is nothing to be said.
But just step forward a few centuries and you are confronted with the life … let us say, of Nietzsche, the most tragic of modern heroes. Where are the events, the movement, the deeds in his life? There are none. In the days of his youth, when he wore the uniform of a Prussian soldier, Nietzsche was at his least dramatic: the drama begins at the very moment that the stillness and silence of the study descend upon his life. It is here that we will find the agonizing reappraisal of all values, the tragic struggle, the break with Wagner, the seductions of Zarathustra. And what of the stage after this?
The stage is impotent and dumb. Submissive to the immutable law of action, it refuses to give us, it cannot give us the Nietzsche we find so important, so essential, offering us instead, in enormous quantities, the useless, empty Cellini, wooden sword and all, whom we have long outgrown. Life has gone inside, but the theatre has remained at the threshold. Understand this and you will understand why not a single drama of the last few decades has reached the heights of the modern novel or has been able to compare with it; why Dostoevsky did not write a single drama; why Tolstoi, so profound in the novel, is primitive in his plays; why that cunning fox Maeterlinck dressed his thoughts up in breeches and set his doubts scurrying about the boards. Follow my thought to the end and you will understand why Ostrovsky, who relies on the externals of life, is so enchantingly theatrical (and thus no longer needed) and why Chekhov is so needed and so “untheatrical.”
I am not saying that events no longer take place, that no one acts, that history has come to a standstill. No: the journal of events is crowded enough, there are plenty of murders and suicides, of complicated frauds, cunning intrigues and strenuous hand-to-hand combats, but … all this has lost much of its dramatic value. Life has become more psychological, if I may so express myself; a new hero—the intellect—has joined the ranks of the elemental passions and those “eternal” heroes of drama: love and hunger. Not hunger, not love, not ambition, but thought, human thought, with all its suffering and struggle, is the true hero of modern life, and consequently deserves primacy of place in the drama. Even the bad dramatists and the bad audiences of the present day have begun to understand that the external presentation of a struggle, however much blood may be shed on stage, is the least dramatic thing about it. The dramatic moment is not when the worker takes to the streets, but when word of the new life first reaches his ear, when his timid, feeble, inert thought suddenly rears up like a maddened horse and at a single leap carries its rider into a shining wonderland. The dramatic moment is not when the soldiers arrive in response to the factory owner’s demand and are readying their weapons, but when in the silence of sleepless nocturnal self-communing the factory owner struggles with two truths and cannot bring his conscience or his tormented mind to accept either one. The same is true of modern love—here too, as in every profound manifestation of life, action no longer finds external expression, but has retreated inward to the depths, to the seeming immobility of emotional experience.
An interesting particular. For the hero’s weightiest thoughts, pondered in solitude, there once existed the soliloquy; but today’s realistic drama has done away with even this last possibility, pitiful enough, of withdrawal to the depths: the soliloquy has been abolished. It is curious to see the sly tricks resorted to by dramatists who feel the necessity for at least a brief soliloquy but dare not introduce one openly: talk to a deaf old man, to a stove, to a glove, anything as long as you don’t talk alone on stage—it’s unnatural, it isn’t lifelike. In order to be lifelike you have to perform one action after another without stopping, to chatter away incessantly like an inebriated parrot and never once fall to thinking for more than twenty seconds!
They keep on painting the same old portrait of life, modeled on the old masters, and they fail to notice that any likeness has long since vanished and they are not painting a living face, but only copying an old picture.
1912
LEONID ANDREYEV
THE FAILURE OF THE SYMBOLIST THEATRE
(FROM “LETTERS ABOUT THE THEATRE
—LETTER ONE”)
The impoverishment of dramatic literature … You know, of course, that there is in progress a desperate struggle for the theatre between the symbolists and the “healthy” realists; you know, of course, that at the present time—an extremely sad one for literature in general—“healthy” realism has won the day. But have you noticed that for some reason this victory coincides with the impoverishment of dramatic literature and the decline of the theatre? Like the landowner in Saltykov-Shchedrin who, as a result of a misunderstanding, conceived a hatred for peasants and killed them off to clear the air, only to sink into a hopeless state of misery and starvation—the public and the theatre between them have joyfully exterminated symbolism on the stage, and suddenly … misery, starvation … what has become of drama? Ah, how good it is to breathe the pure air of realistic drama … But what has become of drama? Where have the dramatists disappeared to? At all events, I’m starving—and bored to tears!
But what then was this dear departed symbolism of ours whose death has cleared the air but left us nothing to eat?
It’s name was compromise. Only in a few cases has symbolism on stage been dictated by the absolute laws of individual creation; for the most part it has been no more than a means for living thought to reach the stage, performing the function of the Jewish smuggler who gets Brussels lace through the customs in the guise of a ram. Limited by the demands of “action and spectacle,” the dramatist was unable to give theatrical incarnation to the manifold aspects of the subtle and complex modern soul, a soul suffused by the radiance of thought, creating precious new emotions and discovering wellsprings, unknown to the Ancients, of a new and profound tragedy. The dramatist was unable to give incarnation to these aspects because the new emotions of the soul are without flesh, and so the smugglers with their heavy load of contraband stretched across the stage in a neverending file—stylized figures, barefoot dancers, nameless enigmatic personages, galvanized (but not resuscitated) Pierrots and Harlequins, symbolic blind men, symbolic deaf and dumb, symbolic devils, gnomes, fairies and frogs. The blind men tripped over the sets, the devils sank without trace, Harlequin groaned like a living being, the barefoot dancers looked lugubrious, a very fat person tried unsuccessfully to turn into a shadow … And the whole naive masquerade meant only one thing: thought is suffocating in your theatre!—the soul is dying on those boards of yours!
Like all compromises, this self-conscious, Janus-faced contraband symbolism failed to satisfy either side and had to perish. Both author and public were squashed flat by the cumbersome, all too corporeal three-dimensional figure of the actor, clean-shaven and energetic. The actor was wrenched about like an india rubber doll, made to assume poses encountered only in geometry and plied with potions of bile and vinegar to make him sound like a real live corpse instead of a human being; he accepted this new yoke submissively, but in spite of all his efforts he was unable to transform himself into vapor, or air or into a real frog. The public sensed a sham, whistled and left, while the author sensed that the stronghold of the modern theatre would not be captured by trying to evade its laws: he had either to destroy the Bastille or perish in the Bastille!
For a time the theatre was spiritually enriched; it acquired inner significance, even importance, but outwardly its form became of such glaring absurdity, so disjointed, so creaky that its continued existence became impossible. And with a smile at once unctuous and malicious, that old bag, the realistic drama, arrived to reset the actor’s bones and tighten the nuts and bolts. To drive out the unclean Maeterlinckian spirit she fumigated the theatre with Ostrovsky. The result: the impoverishment of dramatic literature—a Renaissance of a peculiarly Russian kind.
1912
LEONID ANDREYEV
CHEKHOV AS PANPSYCHOLOGIST
(FROM “LETTERS ABOUT THE THEATRE—
LETTER TWO”)
I return to Chekhov and the Art Theatre.
The special quality of Chekhov lies in the fact that he was the most consistent of panpsychologists. If Tolstoi could breathe life only into man’s body, if Dostoevsky is devoted exclusively to the spirit, Chekhov brought to life everything he touched: his landscape is no less psychological than his people; his people are no more psychological than his clouds, his stones, his chairs, his tumblers and his apartments. All objects of the visible and invisible world make their appearance simply as component parts of one great soul; and if his stories are only chapters of a single vast novel, his things are simply thoughts and sensations scattered in space—action and spectacle is informed by a single spirit. He brushes in his hero’s life with a landscape, recounts his past with clouds, depicts his tears with rain, demonstrates by means of an apartment that the immortality of the soul does not exist. Such is Chekhov in his fiction—and such he is in his drama too.
On the stage Chekhov must be performed not only by people—he must be performed by tumblers and chairs and crickets and military greatcoats and wedding rings. In The Cherry Orchard Chekhov suddenly introduces the mysterious sound of a bucket falling in a distant mineshaft, a sound which it is impossible to reproduce but which is essential because it is an essential part of the soul of the characters in the play—without it they are not the same, without it there can be no Chekhov. If we bear this in mind we will understand why theatres where people perform, and things do not, to this day cannot play Chekhov and do not love and understand him. (In the provinces his plays are hardly ever given). We will also understand not only why the Art Theatre is able to perform Chekhov, but where its strength, its originality and its distinction lie: at the Art Theatre things perform as well as people. It is a psychological theatre. More than that—it is a theatre of that very panpsychology of which Anton Chekhov was the perfect example in literature.
Returning now to the beginning of the Art Theatre and of my article, we will understand what was attractive and touchingly novel in the fur-trimmed caftans worn by the boyars in Fiodor Ivanovich was psychologism: not historical accuracy, not faithfulness to an era of which we have no more than an approximate notion, but a vital spirit that brought them close to the profoundest truth of life. The apartment of the Prozorov sisters, Ivanov’s study, the half-eaten cucumber that Shabelsky-Stanislavsky carries off with such pain and resentment, the cricket, the rings and the military greatcoats which the actors practiced wearing at home all had one thing in common: psyche. Things are not things, but the scattered thoughts and sensations of a single soul.
Not only things, but time itself Chekhov, and the Art Theatre after him, has shaped not as a clockmaker does, but as a psychologist: time is simply the thought and sensation of the characters. And when there are no miraculous pause-thoughts, pause-sensations, when merely talented people, and not time itself, are performing—there can and will be no Chekhov. Recall how Germans without any knowledge of Russian wept when from the stage of the Art Theatre the living time of Chekhov’s plays spoke to them in its international language of pauses! The feat of compelling subtle time to submit to the force of its artistry is enough in itself to win for the Art Theatre eternal glory!
Living time, living things, living people—herein lies the secret charm of Chekhov’s plays, plays which remain in the Art Theatre’s repertoire to this day. Whether a servant plays his balalaika at the gates, bringing to the stage the sound—barely audible, almost guessed at—of the “Siskin” (Ivanov) or a cricket starts chirping, as in Uncle Vanya, or dogs bark, as in The Cherry Orchard, or sleighbells jingle or shouts carry from a fire or Natasha walks through the darkened rooms with a candle in her hand or Yepikhodov eats an apple, it all comes to one thing: the panpsyche. These are not the objects, the sounds and voices of the real world, but the thoughts and sensations of Chekhov’s characters scattered in space. How curious, for example, that at the end of The Three Sisters all the characters in the play think and feel by means of the military march that the soldiers play, as if by chance, as they march past; and the discord in their souls is expressed, again, not by the direct, naked word, but by the apparently incidental figure of the girl with the harp, by her absurd and out-of-place ditty: I have loved, I have suffered.49
Turn your attention to the dialogue in Chekhov’s plays: it is improbable, people do not speak that way in life; it is full things half-spoken, it seems the continuation of something already said, it lacks the clearly marked inception with which any speaker in a play by another writer would make an entrance: Chekhov’s characters never begin and never end their speeches, they only continue them. For this reason Chekhov’s plays seem difficult, not very interesting and even lacking in life when read: from this point of view, Tolstoi was right when he roundly condemned a play by Chekhov which he was too bored even to finish reading. But he was wrong because he had not seen Chekhov, had not seen Chekhov’s performing things and pauses—all that the Art Theatre has brought to life with such profound understanding. After all, if Chekhov’s dialogue always continues something, must there not be someone or something that it continues? This enigmatic being who is always absent when the play is read is composed of living things and living time. The dialogue never, in a manner of speaking, stops: it jumps from people to things, from things back to people, and from people to time, to silence or noise, to a cricket or to shouts carried from a fire. Everything is alive, everything has a soul and a voice: oh how far the Art Theatre was then from the intolerable naturalism which has been foisted on it and which knows only things. Who needs things?
But here is a very interesting and important question: who led the way, Chekhov or the Art Theatre? Who brought whom into being: Chekhov the Art Theatre or the Art Theatre Chekhov? Who was the psychologist (or rather panpsychologist) first? To this I will venture to reply: neither one nor the other, but both together and at the same time; but Chekhov was so always and in everything, while the Art Theatre became a psychologist gradually—the moment of meeting only confirmed the fate of both. It is possible that without the Art Theatre Chekhov would have given up writing plays—vain is the writing of laws if they be not observed; and without Chekhov the Art Theatre might easily have lost its way among all the naturalisms, realisms and symbolisms, and perhaps would never have found its true path.
1914
LEONID ANDREYEV
THE THEATRE OF THE FUTURE
(FROM “LETTERS ABOUT THE THEATRE—
LETTER TWO”)
In the theatre of the future there will be no audience: that is the first and fundamental requirement of the new theatre; it is essential, as it is essential to society to eliminate the situation whereby some dine while others look on—let everyone come to the feast! The abolition of the audience will, it seems to me, be brought about in two ways, ways that are at once logical and inevitable.
The audience at the performing theatre will disappear because the performing theatre itself will gradually fade away, becoming absorbed by life itself; it will no longer be a special building with policemen at the main entrance, but will become a joyful element in the individual’s everyday life. People will perform for themselves, without an audience and without actors. All these eurythmics and dances, these mock trials, these funny Futurists50 on Tverskaya Street with their painted faces and fancy dress—all this and much else that the reader will be pleased to call to mind tells us one thing: life has been plundered, it has been divested of play as the cream is skimmed from a pitcher of milk, leaving people a thin, insipid potation to drink; life demands that play should return to the ancestral house of life like a prodigal son from his reluctant wanderings. How this will be brought about in practice I don’t, of course, know, and I don’t even give it very much thought—life is developing and growing at such a rate that all kinds of miracles become thinkable. And is it really such a miracle?—to become ourselves in some degree creators and artists, writers and musicians; not only to look and listen but to create with our own hands something for our own joy! The trouble, after all, is not that there is any lack of talented people, but that there is too little soil for them—vital seed is going to rot in damp warehouses. Who would have said before the aeroplane that the world had so many men of extraordinary courage and determination, of such physical and spiritual perfection? We complained of degeneracy—and then this! Consider this miracle: yesterday man was jolted about like a peasant on a carriage seat, sleepy, jelly-like, utterly passive, while today he drives an automobile, that fast and furious machine with its demand for superhuman concentration and for the utmost sharpness of eye and wit.
Of course, there will always be people with no capacity for play and there will always be people with a special capacity for and love of play—and the first will look on, if they wish, while the second perform with particular skill. But it won’t be theatre, with its obligatory division into actors and audience: it is not, after all, theatre when old men look on, laughing and sighing, as children play! The development of social life gives promise of new ground for this non-theatrical play: there will be processions in which the masses will take part; perhaps the mystery play will be revived on a somewhat altered basis, but with the indispensable condition that everyone will participate in the performance. From this point of view, the future promises so much that is new that it would be a vain labor to look to the old and outworn for answers. For example, we are still quite unacquainted with the social drama: it was impossible under the conditions of the old life, the old theatre. We do not yet have plays in which the people, the masses would be the protagonist, and not an individual personality against the background of a couple of dozen extras. The entry of the masses into the arena of history—for which the present century will be remembered in centuries to come—will lead the performing theatre out of its dark alleyway into the open freedom of streets and squares; and, who knows, perhaps scenarios, if that is the right name, will be written for productions in which the entire many-millioned city will participate … What can we know of this, we who are subject to the law of “assembly” and cannot even gather in groups of four without someone immediately dispersing us?
1914