2017-04-05 | Vera Shumilina
“That’s true,” confirmed Benzius, smiling for the first time and almost beaming. – We live for books. The sweetest of destinies in our disordered, degenerate world. So... maybe you will understand what happened that day... Venantius, who knows very well... who knew Greek very well, said that Aristotle deliberately dedicated a book to laughter - the second book of his Poetics, and that if such a great philosopher devotes an entire book, laughter must be a serious thing.”
U. Eco “The Name of the Rose”.
The story “Laughter” by L. N. Andreev (1871-1919) was published on January 5, 1901 in the newspaper “Courier” with the subtitle “One Page”. At this early stage of his work, the writer is already famous. This story contained themes developed in later works: the search for meaning; the search for the truly human in the face of biological, social, political oppression; the loneliness of people alienated from each other, rushing about; an attempt to fight for the right to freedom, for better life, for the attitude of love and truth towards each other; reflections on death and its pacifying role (“Once upon a time,” “Beautiful life for the resurrected,” “The Wall,” “Once upon a time,” etc.).
By 1901, L. Andreev had already experienced disappointment and betrayal in love, as well as need; managed to see Orel, St. Petersburg and Moscow; attempted suicide (there were three suicide attempts in total). His creativity, developed since the days of studying at the gymnasium, acquired extraordinary strength.
The writer’s style is a vivid reflection of the crisis mood of a turning point, an expression of worldview Silver Age: skepticism, pessimism, interest in the interaction of will and mind; irrationalism, a harsh and impartial study of true human motives, close attention to the everyday, loss of support in religion and culture, a feeling of abandonment in a world of impersonal forces; attention to soulless, no longer at all spiritualized, beauty, an intense desire to understand the meaning of history, the search for justice, the desire to destroy everything for the sake of establishing the kingdom of man...
"Laughter" is a first-person monologue. The first part is the beginning of the hero’s personal tragedy: the joy and agony of waiting for his beloved for two hours (from half past six to half past eight). Emphatically sentimental, youthful part. An “eternity” of waiting in two hours, an exaggeration of the catastrophe, an emotional swing: from fun (“desperately fun” - a paradoxical feeling) to a pitiful state. The extremes of perception of the situation - either love for everyone around, or disgust, or guilt (for the indescribable two-hour suffering!) lies with the deceived beloved, or with fate, which could have taken her life. Already in the first part, language is clearly expressed, reminiscent of cinematic, dividing event sequence to live pictures (relatively simple syntax, many paragraphs), drawing attention to objective reflections of the subjective: weather, body movements, clothing. Weather: cold wind (for all two hours! - a clear sign of an unwanted end to the date), frost. Body language: fast and fluttering steps - uncertainty and inconstancy of movements - shuffling gait, twisted back. Focus on clothing: a coat buttoned with one hook - a cap on the back of the head - a coat buttoned with two buttons - a coat buttoned with all buttons, a cap on the nose. The internal is also objectified: anxiety, joy and despair. These feelings are expressed in the perception of warmth (insensitivity to cold - hot - cold), one's own psychophysical age (from youth to old age of body and soul in two hours). The specificity of the description of time: meeting a girl is four days, waiting is two hours, but psychologically both seem to be an eternity, aging and cooling. Significant for the subsequent antithesis with the attitude of friends towards the main character is the attitude of the hero himself towards strangers - from a patronizing, affectionate attitude to disgust. Strong feeling towards strangers, an interest in their existence and an understanding that they can provoke both love and horror. From the heat of youth, fullness of energy and love to cold, loneliness. Dynamism and fullness of perception. Outward orientation.
The second part is the beginning of the “theater”, a reversal of the psychological model. The reader learns more and more about the object of the protagonist's love. An image from abstraction young mind becomes more and more “subjectified” (we learn her name - Evgenia Nikolaevna, her circle of acquaintances - the Polozovs), the hero himself consciously objectifies himself, creates a distance between himself and his beloved (mask, the situation of coming to strangers for family holiday Christmas surrounded by unfamiliar students). The game turns everything upside down: bored, lonely, sad and poor students find themselves in the atmosphere of a holiday, a masquerade; the lover is specifically looking for a sad, gloomy suit, but the sadness turns out not to be “in size” - the suit is too long (the author’s irony by shifting the emphasis - the young man’s sadness is too simple, “small”, ordinary even in the very feeling of the catastrophic nature of what is happening). An ordinary hairdressing salon becomes the epicenter of transformation, and the costume images in it look not at all sublime and tragic, but comical, right down to an openly clown outfit, holes and dirt in clothes, small sizes. The final solution is a disharmonious, multi-colored Chinese costume and an emotionless mask. A mask that correctly reflects the human face, but lacks anything human about it. A mask of calm, directness - and a source of uncontrollable laughter. The most impersonal, inhuman, and at the same time the most original mask will make even the hero himself laugh. What does this symbol mean? Misunderstanding of a foreign culture, a grin at an attempt to make a person an unemotional being, the absence of any movement of thought and feeling in the face, the concentration of the absurd, the objectification of the human, the effort to be calmer than eternal peace itself?
What is the reason for such a terrifying comic image? The answer is in the third part - the climax, the meeting of the hero and heroine. The beginning of the third part again contains a contrast between the world of strangers and the protagonist. But in the original mask, now he himself is a victim of other people’s emotions, someone else’s attention (a position contrasting with the first part). The atmosphere of the Christmas masquerade, thanks to the mask of a noble Chinese, becomes increasingly crazy (a shift from the ordered world of Christian celebration to the world of an alien culture). The hero captures the turmoil, constant disorderly movement, his own fear and the laughter of others, the disappearance of faces in the crowd, the feeling of loneliness in the middle of the crowd, distance from the world. Having escaped from the crowd, the hero finally achieves his love. This meeting is also full of contradictory signals (on three levels - emotional, verbal, conversation with movements), and is a symbol of fundamental disunity, discord in the world of people.
On the one hand, the beloved girl is the embodiment of light (as well as a source of beautiful shadows, reflections), radiance, a sweet smile, warmth, trustfulness and attention. Its appearance is given by strokes that intensify from paragraph to paragraph. She seems now to be the personified sun, now the dawn, now the sky, full of stars. A goddess in black lace with a lace scarf, beautiful black eyelashes, beautiful, “like a forgotten dream of distant childhood.” Beauty, endowed with a sacred character of both solar (character traits) and chthonic (this is already a guarantee of danger; external - black - traits in the image) cults.
On the other hand, it is obvious that the beauty of the beloved girl is not endowed Christian love, the girl cannot overcome herself and listen to the words of her lover. Her natural beauty is cruel and exposes the ridiculousness and pitiability of her beloved (she identifies the beloved with the mask and calls him funny, not the mask) as part of the objective state of affairs. She demonstrates that the hero is funny in himself: he is funny to everyone, and to himself in the mirror. She is indifferent to grief, melancholy, jealousy, despair, suffering, and the painful confession of her beloved. The brilliance of her beauty, all the movements of love turn into nothing before the destructive power of laughter. Laughter took possession of her like a demon. And from light it became embodied materiality for the protagonist - a rock. The indifference of the mask gripped the beloved girl. The madness of the situation took possession of the hero. But in the desperate impossibility of getting through, bound by the word not to take off the mask given to friends in the second part, the hero finds his best words to express feelings...
The fourth part is told "at the end." The performance is over - and the “actors” are on the street at night. Speech from a friend who equates success with originality and ridiculousness. The main character breaks with the conventions of costume and mask, tearing off his multi-colored costume and mask in despair. Thus, the entire action that took place took only a few hours in the space of the work (from evening to night of one day).
In the tradition of criticism of the works of L. Andreev, much attention is paid to such works as “Bargamot and Garaska” (1898, the first literary success), “The Wall” (1901), “The Life of Vasily Fiveysky” (1903), “Red Laughter” (1904) , “Judas Iscariot” (1907), “The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men” (1908). About “Laughter” there are statements like “a slightly hysterical story, but marked with the stamp of great psychological talent” Mich. Bessonova. In general, the work did not receive due appreciation, perhaps due to the fact that contemporary to the writer interpreters saw in the work an expression of the personal drama of a law student. They used the biographical method, which, however, cannot be the only one in interpretation. Identification of the hero and the author in in this case is not entirely appropriate, rather it is the objectification of some experience as material, but without the goals of autobiographical consolidation. At the same time, the symbolism characteristic of L. Andreev, noted by many authors, was not taken into account.
And yet, it is in “Laughter” (and this reveals the extraordinary cultural and aesthetic value of the work), in addition to the descriptions of people’s existential and philosophical experiences that are so characteristic of L. Andreev, one can also find the aesthetic program of the second half of the twentieth century, the project of postmodernism. It is worth noting that symbolism at this level, assumed by the author, is, of course, an assessment of the crisis of culture turn of XIX-XX centuries, and not the providence of the future cultural project, but this is where the strength comes in creative genius, guessing in the gap the program of his time - the program of the future.
First of all, this is close attention to individuality - appearance, psychological state. The problematic nature of identifying a person (an external manifestation of personality, a “mask”) with the personality as a whole, and accordingly, there are special criteria for assessing a personality based on success, the ability to be original, different, albeit ugly. Reducing a person to the level of a face, mask, physiognomy. In connection with this, there is the problem of reflecting oneself outside, mixing personal feelings with what is happening around (first part, metaphor of projection), losing oneself behind a mask and in numerous mirrors. The disappearance of deep personal relationships, which means the destruction of friendship and love. The emergence of a mass society seeking only entertainment, always moving and young (the cult of youth). Internal bondage: being bound by a mask.
Secondly, these are the motives of the game, transformations, frivolity, theatricality, masquerade, when a person cannot afford to go beyond the game in order to tell the truth, he is forced to destroy his identity. Adults playing dress up children's party(of course, this also contains an appeal to the cultural and historical tradition of balls and evenings in Russia; to literature dedicated to autobiographical descriptions childhood and adolescence). A frivolous attitude towards serious experiences, the inability and unwillingness to understand another. The vow not to tear off the masks in the second part is also quite a postmodernist move. Even the most sincere speech must be delivered from behind a mask without emotion and not even from a superhuman, but an inhuman position.
Thirdly, this is the problem of confronting the terrifying emptiness of subjectivity, which is only a synthesis of the biological, social and political, in which there may be nothing of true religiosity and ethics. A collision with soulless beauty, which is indifferent to everything and cannot transform or save anyone. A challenge to art, which behind such a thick veil should speak about possible emptiness as beautifully as it has never spoken before.
Fourthly, this is the problem of laughter, which is essentially just an uncontrolled reaction, an affect outside the zone of intellectual and moral. Changing the function of laughter: not purification, not paying attention to the comic, absurd, not meeting high standards, but understatement, destruction of sacred things, ridicule - mockery.
Fifthly, this is a change in the criterion of beauty: not only someone kind, embodying the bright beginning in human nature, but a person playing with dark side person (black strokes to the portrait of Evgenia Nikolaevna). At the same time, the previously unacceptable vocabulary of the sacred (comparing Eugenia with a goddess) is still preserved.
Sixthly, this is a loss of identity at the level of consciousness and culture. Mixed contradictory feelings of the characters (at the formal level, frequent use of antithesis, some anticipation of schizophrenic discourse), mixing of traditions - but only at the level of play, masquerade, external copying (literal and symbolic fitting of clothes), without understanding the principles of the development of other cultures. In this regard, it is worth paying attention to the dressing passage in the second part, where the plot of choice is brilliantly shown, when some cultural paradigms are presented as inappropriate, outlandish (colorful, wonderful clothes), and some as outdated (holes, dust on the figurative level) . The space for the hero’s choice is Spanish culture (rather, not a culture, but a certain image in the mind, a forerunner popular culture and its labels) with increased emotionality, Chinese culture, hiding feelings; cultural paradigm the feudal era (the page is a symbol of subordinate relationships and the monk is a symbol of religious service) and even the romantic paradigm (the image of a bandit). The salvation of culture (at least at this stage) is soullessness, a mask, an inhuman form, too calm and detached contemplation, which is not at all creative, but terribly comical and inherently destructive and ugly.
Seventh, this is a specific attitude to the problem of understanding. In the work, none of the characters understand each other or strive to understand. Communication is broken, everyone is alone, but only main character realizes the horror of such separation. A desperate but perfectly worded declaration of love hits the rock of indifferent laughter. Friends and beloved do not understand the hero, he does not understand his comrades. No one understands the reason for the effect produced by an ordinary mask.
Eighth, this is the disenchantment of the world. Everything strange, unreal (where did the hairdresser get a set of suits that the keepers of antiques from Balzac’s novels would envy? How did the students end up spending the evening with strangers? Why does the correct face-mask of a noble Chinese make everyone laugh so much?) is repressed. But the people around, in their incomprehensibility, acquire certain magical traits: the students are devils, the beloved is a goddess. But this is nothing more than a play on words. There is no place left for the demonic in the world either. And all darkness comes from man. And if we look for metaphysics behind the story of “Laughter,” then this is a reflection of lack of freedom, of living according to the cliches of feelings, which causes only the reaction that is possible when watching a merciless comedy: laughter at the absurdity, baseness, misunderstanding; laughter of nihilism.
To form a holistic idea of the work, let’s return to the composition and title. The composition is built around the peak experiences of the characters: delight of anticipation - despair - anxiety - joy - doom. The plot, constructed as a series of impressions from one evening, is cemented only by the subject of the story. Parts like changing the shooting location, without smooth transitions (reflections on the essence of love and jealousy, for example). But there is a lot of action and emotions (the dynamics of the plot are built either on the opposition of contrasting emotions in time, or on the opposition of the states of the hero and the environment, as in the fourth part). The plot also turns inward: the main character constructs frames and games in own life(the dating game, the unexpected meeting game, the dress-up game), which ultimately results in a complete refusal not only from the games themselves, but even from conducting a first-person narrative (completion of the story with a friend’s remark).
The title - “Laughter” - has become iconic for the work of L. Andreev (his work, dedicated to understanding the consequences of the Russian-Japanese War, is called “Red Laughter”; terrible laughter as an important element is present in the works “Human Life”, “It Was So”, “ The life of Vasily of Fiveysky") and for culture as a whole. Problems of humor, irony, revealing the ugliness in the comic, mockery of sacred objects became extremely significant in the culture of the second half of the twentieth century. One of storylines U. Eco's novel "The Name of the Rose" (published in 1980) is connected with the mysterious second, lost volume of Aristotle's "Poetics", dedicated to the problem of laughter. David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest (published in 1996) also plays on the joke motif in postmodernism; the title contains an allusion to Hamlet.
It is interesting to note that in general the work of L. Andreev in recent years addressed quite often in cinema8 due to its attention to detail and very accurately depicted psychological dynamism. And “Laughter” as an example of a clip compositional gluing of material, saturation colorful images could be represented in this synthetic art form. Of course, this feature of the writer’s work is explained by his commitment to the short story genre, to the aesthetics of expressionism. Andreev is close to such features of expressionism as an emphasis on the expression of emotions, work with the comprehension and expression of pain, fear, loss, a sense of cultural crisis, attention to gestures, and a tragic attitude. The specificity of the story genre helps to reveal dynamism in a form close to the natural psychological perception of time. A certain kind of innovation of L. Andreev is manifested precisely in the intermittent model of presentation, presentation in the story in parts with an abundance of emotional details.
In conclusion, it is worth saying that, consciously or not, “Laughter”, along with such works as “Thought”, “Wall”, “Abyss”, “Darkness”, builds a cycle that is not even a social picture of types (like “The Human Comedy "Balzac), but an illustration of human vices, weaknesses and the struggle against them by reason and the spirit of freedom. This is the embodied philosophical task of answering the question “What is a person”, giving his image, in the eternity of metaphysical searches and in time - in the crisis era of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.
Review of Leonid Andreev's story “Red Laughter” (1904)
Diary of a Dead Man
I will declare a madhouse our fatherland;
our enemies and madmen - all those
who hasn't gone crazy yet; and when great
invincible, joyful, I will reign over the world,
his only ruler and master, -
what cheerful laughter will ring through the universe!
Leonid Andreev
I wonder if Leonid Andreev (1871-1919) saw the painting Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (1893)? Made me remember famous painting these associations: “Here the head of a horse with red crazy eyes and a wide grinning mouth rose above the crowd, only hinting at some terrible and unusual cry, rose, fell, and in this place the people condensed for a minute, paused, hoarse, muffled voices were heard , a short shot, and then again silent, endless movement.” “The sixth mile was approaching, and the groans became more definite, sharper, and you could already feel the twisted mouths emitting these voices.”
In 11th grade I tell my students about modernist movements in art . For about 17 years I have also been mentioning expressionism and its representatives: Evgeny Zamyatin, Leonid Andreev, Boris Yampolsky, Franz Kafka, Gustav Meyrink, Alfred Döblin. The world of their heroes is “a chaotic jumble of things, events, ideas. In the midst of this chaos there is a lonely person, in constant fear for his fate” (Volkov I.F.). Fragmentation, deformation, fragmentation, terrible emotional experiences, feelings of the end of the world - characteristic features expressionism. Yes, “Red Laughter” is in this category.
The subtitle of the story is “Passages from a Found Manuscript.” Who is the author of the manuscript? Why only excerpts? Where and when was she found? The writer does not answer these questions. And “any entry into the sphere of meaning occurs only through the gates of space and time, that is, the chronotope” (M. Bakhtin).
In what world do Andreev’s heroes live?
Space: Ensk road (apparently the road of death), battery (“Where are we? ... At war”), foreign fields, black gorges, distant hills, ambulance train, city, apartment, office, theater, crowd.
Time: summer (heat), day, night, day, evening, morning, “...the battle has been going on for the eighth day. It started last Friday, and Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday passed, and Friday came and went again, and it still goes on.” The world of the story is an apocalyptic world in which insane people live (do they live?) and fight (die). The earth itself refuses them, pushes their corpses out of its womb. The Red Laughter, a metaphor for death, becomes the master of the world.
“Red Laughter” consists of 19 passages (the 19th is called “the last”), included in 2 parts. The first part (9 excerpts) - images of a crazy crippled man who returned from the war, which were restored on paper by the younger brother after the death of the elder. The second part (10 excerpts) is the personal recordings of a younger brother heading towards madness. The first sentences of each passage are broken fragments of the whole. The form of the work, torn and fragmentary, corresponds to the same deathly content.
An important role in any literary text dreams and memories play heroes. I will compare just such episodes. In excerpt 1 there is a waking dream (memory) of a deceased brother: “And then - and then suddenly I remembered the house: a corner of the room, a piece of blue wallpaper and a dusty, untouched decanter of water on my table - on my table, which has one leg shorter than the other two and a folded piece of paper is placed under it. And in the next room, and I don’t see them, it’s as if my wife and son are there. If I could scream, I would scream - this simple and peaceful image, this piece of blue wallpaper and the dusty, untouched decanter was so extraordinary.” The hero dreams of the same thing in excerpt 2. In excerpt 15, the second brother dreams of murderous children: “Their mouths looked like the mouths of toads or frogs and opened convulsively and widely; red blood ran sullenly behind the transparent skin of their naked bodies - and they killed each other while playing. They were scarier than anything I had seen because they were small and could get into anything.” It is obvious how the peaceful image of a child turns into a crazy image of a “hungry rat”: “He broke off and squeaked, and flashed along the wall so quickly that I could not follow his impetuous, sudden movements.” In a dying world, even children are devilish creatures.
Thus, the main motives of the story are madness and death, war and violence, and the approaching end of the world. Let's pay attention to the micro-themes of the passages. Excerpt 1. A crowd of crazy military people goes somewhere under the merciless sun. Excerpt 2. A battle lasting many days. Red laughter. Excerpt 3. Many mentally ill people appeared in the armies. Excerpt 4. Conversations with a wounded comrade in the infirmary, with surviving people at a kind of picnic. Excerpt 5. They are traveling on a train to pick up the wounded, the student talks about crazy people, the wild groans of many wounded are heard, the student shot himself. Excerpt 6. Friendly people shooting at their own people, a conversation with the doctor about red laughter and madness. Excerpt 7. The Red Cross train is blown up. Excerpt 8. At home in a wheelchair, with my family, the suffering of my mother and wife. Excerpt 9. The younger brother talks about madness, the wounded brother tries to write, forgets everything. Excerpt 10. The brother, a legless, crazy cripple, died. The story about last days him, about his future madness. Excerpt 11. They brought prisoners, among them a crazy officer. Excerpt 12. Madness begins: he sees his dead brother in a chair. Excerpt 13. Six stupid peasants are led to war by equally stupid guards. Excerpt 14. I scared my neighbor at the theater; there were huge losses at the front. Excerpt 15. Dream about killer children, conversation with brother about red laughter. Excerpt 16. The battle lasts for many days, a crazy school friend, the friend’s sister is going to the front. Excerpt 17. There is a massacre in the city. Excerpt 18. Letter from the murdered fiancé of his sister about the pleasure of killing people. Last excerpt. “Down with War” rally, crowd, running, waiting for the death house, the earth is throwing up corpses. Outside the window, in the crimson and motionless light, stood the Red Laughter himself.
Word series keywords inevitably lead to the same apocalyptic idea of the story.
Madness . “Horror, a tormented brain, heavy delirium, a maddened earth, crazy people, a horse with red crazy eyes, an abyss of horror and madness, for three days a satanic roar and screech enveloped us in a cloud of madness, separating us from the earth, from the sky, from our own; lonely, trembling with horror, insane. Lots of crazy people. More than wounded."
Heat. “Heat, sun, fiery, merciless fire, bloody light, parched lips, hot air, terrible sun, searing heat, burnt heads, hot bayonets, sunstroke.”
People . “An army of mutes, deaf, blind, as if it were not living people who were walking, but an army of disembodied shadows; not a head, but some strange and unusual ball; endless silent rows, a bunch of gray people, like smoked meat, like sleepwalkers, he took out a revolver and shot himself in the temple. Lord, I have no legs. Who said you can’t kill, burn and rob?”
Death. “Red laughter (the phrase is repeated many times).His lips twitched, trying to utter a word, and at the same instant something incomprehensible, monstrous, supernatural happened. A warm wind blew on my right cheek, shook me strongly - and that’s all, and before my eyes, in place of the pale face, there was something short, dull, red, and blood poured from there, as if from an uncorked bottle, as they are depicted on bad signs. And in this short, red, current, some kind of smile continued, a toothless laugh - a red laugh. I recognized it, that red laugh. I searched and found it, this red laugh. Now I understood what was in all these mutilated, torn, strange bodies. It was a red laugh. It is in the sky, it is in the sun, and soon it will spread throughout the entire earth, this red laughter! Ethat huge shapeless shadow rising above the world. And with every step we took, this wild, unheard groan, which had no visible source, ominously grew in intensity—as if the red air was groaning, as if the earth and sky were groaning. But the groan did not subside. It lay on the ground - thin, hopeless, like a child's cry or the squeal of a thousand abandoned and freezing puppies. Like a sharp, endless ice needle, it entered the brain and slowly moved back and forth, back and forth.”
War. " Both armies, hundreds of thousands of people, stand against each other, without retreating, continuously sending explosive thundering shells; and every minute living people turn into corpses. People fought with stones, with their hands, and squabbled like dogs. When will this crazy carnage end! Thirty thousand killed. An endless list of those killed."
This was the world as imagined by Leonid Andreev in 1904. Even the first world war only in 10 more years. What would he have written after World War II? Indeed, he would declare a madhouse to be his fatherland.
Sources
1.
In 1904, the story “Red Laughter” was written - a sharply emotional response to the Russo-Japanese War. This, according to the author, is “a daring attempt, sitting in the Georgians, to give the psychology of a real war. However, Andreev did not know war and therefore, despite his extraordinary intuition, was unable to give the correct psychology of war. Hence the nervous excitement in the story, sometimes reaching the point of hysterical thinking about the fate of the writer, hence the fragmentation of the narrative. “Red Laughter” is a typical example of expressionism, to which Andreev increasingly gravitated.
The story has two parts, consisting of chapters called fragments. Part I describes the horrors of war, and Part II describes the madness and horror that gripped the rear. The form of “scraps from a found manuscript” allowed the author to naturally, without any visible violation of the logical sequence (the manuscript could be “found” in shreds) highlight only the horrors of war and the madness that gripped people. The story opens with these words: “...madness and horror.” And everything in it is painted in the red color of blood, horror, death.
The writer portrays the war as absolute senselessness. At the front they go crazy because they see horrors, in the rear because they think about them. If they kill there, the heroes of the story think, then it can come here too. War becomes a habit. It is easier for Andreev’s hero to get used to murders than to agree that it is temporary and surmountable. If V. Veresaev, a participant in the Russian-Japanese War, spoke about a saving habit that prevents a person from going wild among murders, then for Andreev the habit of war is nightmarish and can only lead to madness.
Criticism emphasized the one-sidedness of Andreev’s view of the war and the painful psychological breakdown in its description. “Red Laughter,” wrote Veresaev, “is the work of a great neurasthenic artist, who painfully and passionately experienced the war through newspaper correspondence about it.” But despite all the one-sidedness and heap of nightmarish images that reduce the humanistic pathos of the work, the story played a certain positive role. Written from the position of pacifism, it condemned any war, but in those conditions it was perceived as a condemnation of a specific war - the Russian-Japanese one, and this coincided with the attitude of the entire democratic Russia towards it.
“Red Laughter” was highly appreciated by Gorky, who considered it “extremely important, timely, strong.” However great writer reproached Andreev for contrasting his subjective attitude to the war with the facts. L. Andreev, objecting to Gorky, emphasized that he sought to express, first of all, his attitude and that the theme of the story was not war, but the madness and horror of war. “Finally, my attitude is also a fact, and a very important one,” he wrote2. This dispute reflects not just creative, but ideological positions both writers: Gorky spoke about the objective meaning of facts, Andreev defended the artist’s subjective attitude to facts, which, however, easily led to the loss of social criteria in assessing phenomena, which Andreev observed quite often.
It is undeniable that in Andreev’s story the horrors are exaggerated. However, this is only special welcome depictions of war as an unnatural phenomenon. Russian literature knew a similar depiction of war even before Andreev: “ Sevastopol stories"L. Tolstoy, V. Garshin's story "Four Days", which also focuses on the horrors of war, the death of a person is shown with horrifying naturalistic detail and is presented as something meaningless. It is hardly possible to talk about the direct influence of these writers on Andreev, if only because they had a clearer humanistic and social position. However, “Red Laughter” was written largely in this tradition, just like - later - “War and Peace” by Mayakovsky (“there are four legs in a rotting carriage for forty people”), and the war stories of the Ukrainian writer S. Vasilchenko “On the Golden Horse” ", "Chorsh Maki", "Otruyna Kvitka" and especially "Holy Gomsh", in which some dependence on Andreev's expressionist method of depicting war is felt.
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Composition
In 1904, the story “Red Laughter” was written - a sharply emotional response to the Russo-Japanese War. This, according to the author, is “a daring attempt, sitting in the Georgians, to give the psychology of a real war. However, Andreev did not know war and therefore, despite his extraordinary intuition, was unable to give the correct psychology of war. Hence the nervous excitement in the story, sometimes reaching the point of hysterical thinking about the fate of the writer, hence the fragmentation of the narrative. “Red Laughter” is a typical example of expressionism, to which Andreev increasingly gravitated.
The story has two parts, consisting of chapters called fragments. Part I describes the horrors of war, and Part II describes the madness and horror that gripped the rear. The form of “scraps from a found manuscript” allowed the author to naturally, without any visible violation of the logical sequence (the manuscript could be “found” in shreds) highlight only the horrors of war and the madness that gripped people. The story opens with these words: “...madness and horror.” And everything in it is painted in the red color of blood, horror, death.
The writer portrays the war as absolute senselessness. At the front they go crazy because they see horrors, in the rear because they think about them. If they kill there, the heroes of the story think, then it can come here too. War becomes a habit. It is easier for Andreev’s hero to get used to murders than to agree that it is temporary and surmountable. If V. Veresaev, a participant in the Russian-Japanese War, spoke about a saving habit that prevents a person from going wild among murders, then for Andreev the habit of war is nightmarish and can only lead to madness.
Criticism emphasized the one-sidedness of Andreev’s view of the war and the painful psychological breakdown in its description. “Red Laughter,” wrote Veresaev, “is the work of a great neurasthenic artist, who painfully and passionately experienced the war through newspaper correspondence about it.” But despite all the one-sidedness and heap of nightmarish images that reduce the humanistic pathos of the work, the story played a certain positive role. Written from the position of pacifism, it condemned any war, but in those conditions it was perceived as a condemnation of a specific war - the Russian-Japanese one, and this coincided with the attitude of the entire democratic Russia towards it.
“Red Laughter” was highly appreciated by Gorky, who considered it “extremely important, timely, strong.” However, the great writer reproached Andreev for contrasting his subjective attitude to the war with the facts. L. Andreev, objecting to Gorky, emphasized that he sought to express, first of all, his attitude and that the theme of the story was not war, but the madness and horror of war. “Finally, my attitude is also a fact, and a very important one,” he wrote2. This dispute reflects not just the creative, but the ideological positions of both writers: Gorky spoke about the objective meaning of facts, Andreev defended the artist’s subjective attitude to facts, which, however, easily led to the loss of social criteria in assessing phenomena, which Andreev observed quite often.
It is undeniable that in Andreev’s story the horrors are exaggerated. However, this is only a special technique for depicting war as an unnatural phenomenon. Russian literature knew a similar depiction of war even before Andreev: “Sevastopol Stories” by L. Tolstoy, V. Garshin’s story “Four Days,” which also emphasized the horrors of war, the death of a person is shown with horrifying naturalistic detail and is presented as something meaningless. It is hardly possible to talk about the direct influence of these writers on Andreev, if only because they had a clearer humanistic and social position. However, “Red Laughter” was written largely in this tradition, just like - later - “War and Peace” by Mayakovsky (“there are four legs in a rotting carriage for forty people”), and the war stories of the Ukrainian writer S. Vasilchenko “On the Golden Horse” ", "Chorsh Maki", "Otruyna Kvitka" and especially "Holy Gomsh", in which some dependence on Andreev's expressionist method of depicting war is felt.
“I am real in my works” Leonid Andreev
Biography certainly influences inner world, worldview and moral principles of any author. But it is much more important to reveal the ideas and views of the writer through his work. The works will tell more than any, albeit curious, scandalous spot from life. Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev knew a lot about human psychology. Even in little story you can discover a cunningly woven web, where the threads are human passions.
All of Andreev’s works have enormous cleansing power. It is a rare author who can bring the reader to catharsis. In Leonid Nikolaevich’s creative arsenal there will definitely be something that will touch you.
The main characters in his works are usually ordinary people. For example, one of famous stories“Bargamot and Garaska” is dedicated to the idea of higher humanism. A story about humanity and mutual assistance. About how important it is to see a person in every person, regardless of his vices. We are captives of stereotypes; for us, a drunkard is not a person at all, but “a hole in the human body.” We rarely show interest in the problems of others, we live according to the general principle of reasonable egoism and only worry about “our own shirt.” And Leonid Andreev, with the help of this text, is trying to shout and convey one of the main commandments of God: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
The heroes of the story “Bargamot and Garaska” had real prototypes. The author also uses the technique “ speaking names" The surname of the policeman Bargamotov characterizes him appearance, like the nickname (bergamot is one of the most common varieties of pears in Russia).
The genesis of this work arose from the proposal of the editorial secretary M. D. Novikov to write an Easter story for the newspaper “Courier”. “Bargamot and Garaska” touched and delighted M. Gorky, who, immediately after reading the story, wrote to V. S. Mirolyubov, the publisher of the “magazine for everyone”:
“...you should have had this Leonid in mind! He has a good soul, damn it! Unfortunately, I don’t know him, otherwise I would have sent him to you too.”
Andreev masterfully mastered the realist technique - detailing.
“The small, rickety shack in which Bargamot lived...and which could hardly contain his heavy body, shaking with decrepitness and fear for its existence when Bargamot tossed and turned.”
Andreev pays special attention to portraits in his works. They most often take the form of short sketches, characterized by causticity and accuracy. So, for example, Garaska is depicted very vividly, with particular precision: “his physiognomy contained material signs of material relationships to alcohol and his neighbor’s fist”; “These calloused fingers with large dirty nails tremble unbearably.”
The poetic language of Leonid Nikolaevich is inimitable and has its own unique distinctive features. The epithet is an infrequent guest in the author’s texts, but comparison is Andreev’s favorite technique: “not a person, but an ulcer”; “He fell face down on the ground and howled like women howl for a dead man.” There is also a metaphor: “A tempting thought flashed in Garaska’s head - to sharpen his skis from Bargamot, but although his head cleared from the unusual situation, his skis were in the worst condition.”
Leonid Andreev can surprisingly easily describe both the psychology of an adult confused person and a small child. He easily manages to put himself in his place little man and describe the whole whirlwind of his already “childish experiences.” The writer has several stories written from the perspective of a child.
Analysis of Andreev’s story “Valya”
The story “Valya” (originally the title was “Mother. From the World of Children”) tells about the complex psychology of children, about growing up, about mutual understanding. “A mother is not the one who gave birth, but the one who raised” is a deep thought that the author conveys through character little boy. And also the idea of the inevitability of fate and the need for humility in the face of hopelessness. Of particular interest is the image of a child. A curious fact is that when Andreev created the character and description of Valya, he used his childhood photographs as a prototype. The author willingly tried on the image of a boy and managed to penetrate into the thoughts that may have been hidden in his own soul when he was a child.
Valya had a “general appearance of strict seriousness,” a sensible child who does not play with other children, his best friend is a book. He is sensitive to changes in the atmosphere within the family.
The story depicted by L.N. Andreev is painfully familiar to many. An ordinary plot, passed through the author’s unusually sensitive psyche, acquires unusual features and characteristic details.
Andreev’s works are “tenacious.” He grabs the reader by the soul with his originality, his ability to turn a simple plot into something deep, even philosophical. Particular attention should be paid to his language and figures of speech. Comparisons dominate the text: “the woman looked at him with a look that seemed to be photographing a person”; “she immediately retreated into herself and darkened, like a secret lantern in which the lid was suddenly pushed back”; “sharp, knife-like laughter”; “The boy’s face was as white as the pillows on which he slept.” Moreover, throughout the entire story the boy compares his mother with the “poor little mermaid” from the fairy tales of H. C. Andersen.
It is impossible not to pay attention to the bright colors in Andreev’s texts: “crimson dance in the light of torches”; “tongues of fire in red clouds of smoke”; “human blood and dead white heads with black beards”, “pink bald head”.
Analysis of Andreev’s story “Flower underfoot”
In another story, “a flower under your foot,” the author writes on behalf of the 6th Yura. A work about the mistakes and inattention of adults. Yura cannot help but love her mother, for whom guests are more important than her son, who is in a hurry to meet her lover secretly from her father. The boy witnesses her recklessness, but remains silent. The child still does not understand much, but he already instinctively feels what is the right thing to do. Children always feel the tension between their parents. Yurochka is like a flower that no one notices on her name day. He is under his mother's foot. And everything under your feet often gets in the way. With childlike attentiveness, he pays attention to every speck of dust of this huge mysterious world, while he himself is barely noticeable against the background of parental problems.
IN this work Andreev uses such a trope as personification: “one became afraid for the fate of the holiday”; “the day ran as fast as a cat from a dog” (also a comparison); “Night fell everywhere, creeping into the bushes.”
There is also a sound recording:
“the sounds all hit him at once, growled, thundered, crawled like goosebumps on his legs.”
Analysis of Andreev’s story “The Abyss”
Andreev’s story “The Abyss” is a completely different kind of story. Internal conflict the main character Nemoviecki led to external conflict among writers. This story is rightfully considered the most scandalous and shocking in the author’s entire work. “They read it passionately,” Andreev wrote to M. Gorky, “they pass the issue from hand to hand, but they scold it!” Oh, how they scold me." Many compared Andreev with Maupassant: “in the pursuit of originality he created “exemplary vileness”, fired a shot at human nature.”
The author's main task was to depict the scoundrel-noble human nature. Leonid Nikolaevich explained the idea of the story as follows: “You can be an idealist, believe in man and the ultimate triumph of good, and be in complete denial about that modern spiritual being without feathers, who has mastered only the external forms of culture, but in essence a significant share of his instincts and motives remained an animal... let your love be as pure as your speech about it, stop poisoning a person and mercilessly poison the beast.”
L.N. Tolstoy spoke negatively about almost all of Leonid Andreev’s prose, but read every new work of his. Lev Nikolaevich and his wife were horrified when they read “The Abyss,” and therefore another wave of criticism followed. Here is what Andreev wrote about this to the critic A. A. Izmailov:
“Have you read, of course, how Tolstoy scolded me for The Abyss? It’s in vain that this is him - “The Abyss” is the natural daughter of his “Kreutzer Sonata”, even if it’s a by-product... In general, I get it for “The Abyss” - but I like it.”
Move by move, thought by thought, the author leads us to a shocking ending. The situation is escalated throughout the entire work through detailed descriptions nature (if the author describes nature, then he most likely strives to draw a parallel connection with human soul). And also thanks to clear characteristics, for example, a description of the eyes of one of the rapists: “near the face I met terrible eyes. They were so close, as if he was looking at them through a magnifying glass and could clearly distinguish the red veins on the white and the yellowish pus on the eyelashes.”
In this story, color painting plays an important role: “the sun burned like a red hot coal”; “the red sunset grabbed the tall pine trunk”; “the road ahead was covered with a crimson coating”; “the girl’s hair glowed with a golden-red halo”; “they remembered girls as pure as white lilies” (since ancient times, the lily flower has been considered a symbol of purity and innocence).
Korney Chukovsky in his journalistic works dedicated to the work of Leonid Andreev, special attention turned to the screaming figurative headings and color painting. Andreev’s work is dominated by black, red and white shades. We often don’t even pay attention to this in the text, but the subconscious works for us. For example, black is almost always associated with something dark and even mournful. Red also usually causes a panicky mood, because the image of blood immediately appears. White, on the contrary, evokes positive emotions because it is associated with something light and pure. Color painting helps Leonid Andreev press the right strings the reader's soul, squeezing out melancholy, sorrow and melancholy. And also thanks to playing with color, the author manages to fully implement the antithesis technique in the text.
“And, most importantly, how amazing! - at every given minute the world is painted with one color, only one, and when he writes about milk, his whole world is milky, and when he writes about chocolate, the whole world is chocolate, - and the chocolate sun from the chocolate sky illuminates chocolate people, - oh, give him any theme, and it will become his air, his element, his space.”
Leonid Nikolaevich wrote a good part of his works at night, for which he was nicknamed “the singer of the twilight of the night.” Many critics, due to some similarity of themes and decadent mood, compare Andreev with Edgar Allan Poe, with this “planet without orbits,” but today it is clearly clear that this is too superficial a comparison.
Subjects of Andreev's works very diverse. It seems that he can handle any topic: war, hunger, thought, death, faith, goodness, power and freedom. “Such is the psychology of the poster genius: he changes his themes, like Don Juan changes women, but he gives himself to each one to the end.”
Shakespeare said: “the whole world is a stage...”, Andreev will write: “the whole world is a prison” (“My Notes”), “the whole world is a madhouse” (“Ghosts”). For Leonid Nikolaevich, each work is a separate world.
Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev is one of the most interesting and unusual authors. He was well versed in human psychology and knew first-hand what “dialectics of the soul” was. His contemporaries treated him differently: some simply did not understand, others did not like him. A. A. Blok wrote on October 29, 1919 in “In Memory of Leonid Andreev”:
“I know one thing about him well, that the main Leonid Andreev, who lived in the writer Leonid Nikolaevich, was infinitely lonely, not recognized and always turned into the hole of a black window that looks out towards the islands and Finland, on a damp night, in an autumn shower, which He and I loved with the same love. Through such a window the last guest in a black mask came to him - death.”
Trotsky will write:
“Andreev is a realist. But his truth is not the truth of concrete protocolism, but a psychological truth. Andreev, to use the expression of old criticism, is a “historiographer of the soul” and, moreover, of the soul mainly in moments acute crises when the ordinary becomes miraculous, and the miraculous appears as ordinary...”
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