The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev

by Korney Chukovsky

REMINISCENCES OF LEONID ANDREYEV

BY K. CHUKOVSKY

Translated from the Russian by Lawrence Hyde

HE loved enormousness. In an enormous room, on an enormous writing-table, there stood an enormous inkstand. But there was no ink in it. It would have been useless to dip the enormous pen in it. It was quite dry—"I haven't written anything now for three months," said Leonid Andreyev—"besides The Helmsman I read nothing whatever. . . ."

The Helmsman—a paper for sailors. The last number of it lies on the side of the desk; the cover has a picture of a yacht.

Andreyev paces up and down his enormous room and talks about the sea, top-sails, anchors, sails. To-day he is a sailor, a sea wolf. Even his gait has become nautical. Instead of cigarettes he smokes a pipe. He has shaved off his moustache; his throat is bare like a sailor's. His face is sunburnt. On a nail there hangs a pair of nautical binoculars.

You attempt to talk about something else. He listens only out of politeness.

To-morrow we are going aboard Savva, and meanwhile . . .

Savva is his motor yacht. He talks about "averages," submerged rocks, and sand-banks.

Night. Four o'clock. You sit on the sofa and listen, and he walks about and talks in a monologue.

He always talks in a monologue. His language is rhythmical and flowing.

Sometimes he stops, pours himself out a cup of strong, black, cold tea, drinks it at a gulp, as if it were a glass of vodka, feverishly swallows a few caramels—and again begins to talk, talk. . . . He talks about God, death, of how all sailors believe in God, of how, surrounded by abysses, they are aware of the proximity of death all their lives: how through contemplating the stars every night they become poets and sages. If they could express what they feel when they stand beneath the enormous stars somewhere in the Indian Ocean they would eclipse Shakespeare and Kant. . . .

But at last he becomes tired. The monologue is broken by long pauses. His walk becomes listless. It is half past five. He drinks another two glasses, takes a candle, and goes off to his room:

"To-morrow morning we will go aboard Savva."

Your bed is in the next room in the tower. You lie down, but you cannot get to sleep. You think: how tired he must be! Tonight in his room he has walked a distance of not less than twelve miles, and his conversation, if it were written down, would make a good sized book. What a senseless waste of energy!

In the morning in the long-boat Khamoidol we make for the sea. And where has Andreyev got that leather Norwegian fisherman's cap from? I have only seen them before in pictures, in the paper Round the World. And high, waterproof boots, exactly like a cinema pirate. Give him a harpoon in his hand and he would be one of Jack London's magnificent whalers.

Here is the yacht. And here is the gardener Stepanitch, transmogrified into a boatswain. We range about the Gulf of Finland until late in the evening and I never cease being delighted with this inspired actor, who has now played such a new and difficult part—without a public; only for himself—for twenty-four hours. How he stuffs his pipe, how he spits, how he glances at his toy compass! He feels himself to be the captain of some ocean-going vessel. His powerful legs planted widely apart, he gazes with silence and concentration into the distance; his commands ring out sharply. . . . He pays no attention to the passengers; as if the captain of an ocean-going vessel would indulge in conversation with his passengers! . . .

In this playing there was much delightful childish simplicity. Only very talented people—only poets—are able to be children to the same extent. It is easy to imagine Pushkin's Mozart, playing at horses with delight: Salière reveals his absence of talent just by his incapacity for such play. When a child makes a railway out of chairs one has to be depressingly unimaginative to be able to tell it that the chairs are not really coaches. And the chief charm of Andreyev lay in the fact that whatever game he happened to be playing—and he was always playing some game or other—he believed in it firmly and gave himself to it without reserve.

When you came to see him again after a few months, you discovered that he was a painter.

His hair was long and undulating, his beard the short one of the aesthete. He wore a black velvet jacket. His room was turned into a studio. He is as fertile as Rubens; the brush never leaves his hand the whole day. You pass from one room to another and he shows you his golden, yellow-green, pictures. Here is a scene from The Life of Man. Here is a portrait of Ivan Byelusov. Here again a large Byzantine ikon, representing Judas Iscariot and Christ with naive blasphemy. They appear to be twins and each has an ordinary nimbus around his head.

The whole night he tramps up and down his enormous room and talks about Velasquez, Dürer, Vrubel. You sit on the sofa and listen. Suddenly he half closes his eyes, steps back, regards you with a painter's eye, then calls his wife, and says:

"Anya, look, what chiaroscuro!"

You attempt to talk about something else. He listens only out of politeness. To-morrow is varnishing day at the Academy of Arts, yesterday he was visited by Ryepin, the day after to-morrow he is going to Gallen. You feel inclined to ask, "What about the yacht?"—but the members of the family sign to you, "Don't ask." Having become interested in something, Andreyev can talk about nothing else; all his previous enthusiasms become repulsive to him. . . . He does not like to be reminded of them.

When he plays at being an artist he forgets his previous part as a sailor; in general, he never returns to his past rôles, however brilliantly they may have been played.

And now colour photography.

It seems that not one man, but a gigantic factory, working in shifts, has produced these numberless heaps of large and small photographs, which have been piled up in his room stored in special boxes and chests, which hang in the windows and are stacked up on chairs. There is no corner of his villa which he has not taken several times. With some he has been extraordinarily successful; for instance, spring landscapes. It is difficult to believe that they are photographs, so full are they of elegiac music.

In the course of a month he has taken thousands of photographs—as if executing some colossal order—and when you went to see him he compelled you to examine them all, naïvely convinced that for you they were a source of nothing less than bliss. He could not imagine that there existed people for whom these pieces of glass were uninteresting. He touchingly begs everyone to buy a coloured photograph.

That night, walking up and down his immense room, he indulges in a monologue on the great Lumire, the discoverer of colour photography, and on sulphuric acid and potash. You sit and listen.

Every one of his passions turns at times into a mania, devouring him completely.

A whole period of his life was enriched by a love of gramophones—not love, but insane passion. He became ill, as it were, with gramophones, and several months were needed for his recovery.

Whatever trifle he grew interested in he distended to enormous proportions. I remember once in Kuokallo he became absorbed in playing gorodki.

"We can't play any more," said his exhausted companions, "it's dark, you can't see anything!"

"Light lanterns," he cried, "we'll play by lantern light."

"But we shall break them."

"What does it matter?"

At the first go he hit a lantern and smashed it to atoms, but he only cried:

"Light another at once!"

This lack of sense for limits was his outstanding characteristic. He was attracted to everything that was gigantic.

The mantelpiece in his room was as large as a door, and the room itself like a square. His house in the village of Bammelsu towered above all the surrounding ones: every beam weighed about three hundredweight: the foundation was of cyclopean blocks.

I remember his showing me, not long before the war, the plan of some grandiose edifice. "What sort of house is that?" I asked. "It is not a house, it's a table,” answered Leonid Andreyev. It appeared that he had given the architect a design for a storied table: the ordinary writing-desk was too small for him and constrained him.

A similar attraction to the enormous, magnificent, and pompous was apparent in him at every step. The hyperbolical style of his books reflected the hyperbolical style of his life. There was some justice in Ryepin's title for him—Lorenzo. He should have lived in a gilded castle, and have trodden on luxurious carpets, attended by a splendid suite. This would have suited him: he was born for the part. With what stateliness he awaited his guests at the top of the wide, festal staircase leading from his room to the dining-room! If some music had suddenly struck up, one would not have felt surprised.

He wrote his letters on expensive paper in a broad, masterful hand, as if they were manifestos and not letters, and in what an elevated, triumphant, richly decorated style, in which every phrase was adorned with a garland of magnificent periods!

His house was always full of people: guests, relations, a large staff of servants, and children—crowds of children, his own and others'—his temperament demanded a broad and full life.

There are people who seem to have been created for oppression and poverty: it is difficult to conceive Dostoevsky as degenerate. To do so would be unnaturally perverse. Similarly, Leonid Andreyev was meant to be a magnate: every one of his movements suggested the grandee. His beautiful, chiselled, decorative face; his graceful, slightly stout figure; his dignified, light, step all fitted in with the part of a magnificent duke which he later played so superbly. This was his greatest rôle and he organically grew into it. He was one of those talented, ambitious, pompous people, who thirst to be the captain on every ship, the archbishop in every cathedral. He would not consent to play second fiddle in anything; even at gorodki he wished to be the first and only one. He was born to march at the head of some splendid procession, by the light of torches and to the sound of bells.

His enormous fireplace consumed incredible quantities of wood, but the room remained in such icy cold that it was terrible to go into it.

The great stone blocks bore so heavily on the three hundred-weight beams that the ceiling collapsed and it was impossible to eat in the dining-room.

The huge hydraulic pump, used for bringing water from the Black River, went wrong in the first month apparently, and remained like a rusty skeleton, as if rejoicing in its uselessness, until it was sold for scrap iron.

Winter life in a Finnish village is mean, uncomfortable, and dead. Snow and stillness—even the wolves do not howl. A Finnish village is not for dukes.

Anyway this magnificent life seemed at times theatrical. Behind the coulisses there seemed to be hiding something else.

"You think that's granite?" said a drunken writer to me once, standing in front of the façade of Andreyev's house. "It's not granite, but cardboard. Blow on it and it will tumble down."

But however hard the writer blew, it did not collapse; yet there was truth in his drunken words; in actuality there was something theatrical and decorative in everything that surrounded or reflected Andreyev. The whole interior of his house had this character, and the house itself—in the Norwegian style, with a tower—looked like the creation of a talented scenic artist. Andreyev's costumes suited him as they suit an operatic tenor—costumes of a sportsman, artist, sailor.

He wore them as costumes are worn on the stage.

I don't know why, but every time I left him I experienced a feeling, not of exaltation, but of depression. It seemed to me that someone had offended him. Why was he struggling in the Gulf of Finland when he was great enough to wade through the ocean? How could such an exceptional soul be wasted on gramophones? Yesterday he spent the whole night talking about war; for eight hours he paced up and down the room declaiming a wonderful monologue on Zeppelins, landings, bloody Austrian fields. Why doesn't he go there himself? Why does he stick in the desert, seeing nothing, knowing nothing, and unburdening himself only to a passing friend? If he could only use the energy which he spends in his nightly pacing up and down his room—or even half of it—for other purposes, he would be a remarkable traveller; he would wander round the whole world, eclipsing Livingstone and Stanley. His brain thirsted for uninterrupted work—it was a ceaseless mill which ever needed more and more corn. But there was hardly any corn to be had—no living impressions—and the great millstones continued with demoniacal energy to grind not corn, but dust.

And where was he to get corn from? He lived in Finland as in a desert. You travelled to distant countries, flew in aeroplanes, took part in battles, and returned to find with astonishment that Andreyev was still walking up and down his room, and continuing the monologue of nearly a year ago. And his enormous room this evening appeared suddenly very small—and his talk lonely. Was it not sad that an artist with such attentive, sharp, and eager eyes should see nothing besides snow, should sit within four walls and listen to the howling of the wind? At the time when his beloved Kipling, London, and Wells were wandering over four continents he was living in a wilderness, without any external material for creation. One was amazed at the power of the poetic streams in him, which even in this desert had not run dry.

Leonid Andreyev gave himself up to writing with the same recklessness as to everything else—until his strength was utterly exhausted. Often he wrote nothing for months at a time and then suddenly he would produce with incredible speed in the course of a few nights an enormous tragedy or story. He would walk up and down the room, declaim aloud, and drink black tea; his typewriter would clatter as if possessed, yet still be hardly able to keep pace with him. His periods were subordinated to the musical rhythm which was carrying him along like a wave. Without this almost poetical rhythm he could not write even a letter.

He did not simply write his works; he was devoured by them as by a fire. He became for the time being a maniac and was aware of nothing but the particular piece of writing he had in hand; however small it was he extended it to grandiose dimensions, loaded it with gigantic images, for in his artistic creation as in his life he went to extremes; it was not for nothing that his favourite words in his books were "huge," "extraordinary," "monstrous." Every theme he touched became colossal, much larger than he himself, and shut him off from everything else in the universe.

And it was a remarkable fact: when he was creating his Leizer, the Jew from the play Anathema, he even in his private conversation, over tea, fell into a biblical style of speech. He himself had become for a time a Jew. But when he was writing Sachka Zhegulev his voice took on the bold tones of a Volga boatman. He involuntarily echoed the voices and gestures of his characters, the quality of their souls, entering into them like an actor. I remember, one evening, how he astonished me by his reckless gaiety. It appeared that he had just drawn the character of Tsyganek, the audacious character from The Seven That Were Hanged. In creating Tsyganek he turned into him himself, and out of inertia remained Tsyganek until the morning—the same words, intonations, gestures.

He became Count Lorenzo when he was writing his Black Masks; a sailor when he was writing The Ocean.

It is for this reason that opinions about him differed so much. Some said that he was a boaster, others that he was a wild, ungovernable spirit. One person visiting him found him in the part of Savva, another would encounter a student from The Days of Our Life, another the pirate Khorre. And each one thought that this was Andreyev. They forgot that they were confronted with an artist who contained within himself hundreds of parts and who sincerely and with complete conviction thought that each part was a real individual.

There were very many Andreyevs and all of them were genuine.

Many of these Andreyevs I disliked, but the one which was a Moscow student I was very fond of. He would suddenly become childishly mischievous and playful, scatter round him jeux d'esprit, frequently poor, but homely and affectionate in tone, and string together nonsensical verses. Once, in a malicious moment, wishing to make fun of the Moscow writer T———, who was extraordinarly polite, he rang him up at dawn on the telephone.

"Who's speaking?" asks the polite writer, half asleep

"Boborykin,"^[1] answers Andreyev.

"Is that you, Peter Dmitrievitch?"

"Yes," says Andreyev, in Boborykin's senile voice.

"How can I oblige you?" asks the polite writer.

"I've a favour to ask of you; the fact is that this Sunday going to be married . . . and I hope that you will do me the honour of being my best man."

"Delighted," exclaims the polite writer, not daring, out of good manners, to express any surprise at the marriage of an old man of eighty, already, incidentally, possessed of one wife.

Others of his jokes were more happy. Thus he christened his country villa Villa Advance, as it was erected with funds loaned to him by a publisher.

But often his good spirits were—as with everything concerning Andreyev—excessive and had the character of an attack: they made one uncomfortable and one was glad when they were over.

After them he always became sombre and more often than not would begin one of his monologues on death. It was his favourite theme. He pronounced the word death in a special manner—with feeling and emphasis, as some voluptuaries pronounce the word woman. In this respect Andreyev possessed a great talent—he knew how to fear death as no one else could. To fear death is no easy matter: many attempt it, but without success. Andreyev succeeded magnicently: here was his real calling—to experience a deathly and terrible horror. This horror is to be discerned in all his books, and I think that his grasping at colour photography, gramophones, painting, constituted attempts to save himself from it. Somehow he had to protect himself from these sickening attacks of despair. In the terrible years after the revolution, when an epidemic of suicide was raging in Russia, Andreyev involuntarily became the leader and apostle of these abandoners of life. They felt him to be one of themselves. I remember his showing me a whole collection of letters addressed to him by suicides before their death. It had evidently become a custom before doing away with oneself to send a letter to Leonid Andreyev.

Sometimes it appeared strange. Sometimes, watching him as he strolled about the yard, among his stables and outhouses, followed by his magnificent hound, Tyucha, or posed, dressed in a velvet coat, in front of some visiting photographer, one could not believe that this man could be carrying within him a tragic consciousness of eternity, non-existence, chaos, worldly desolation. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the whole of Andreyev’s life was soaked in this feeling of worldly desolation. It was this feeling which gave to his work a special philosophical colouring, since it is impossible to spend one's whole life meditating on such desolation and not to become in the end a metaphysician. The same thing gave a key also to his personality as a writer: in his books he always handled—well or badly—eternal, metaphysical, and transcendental questions. Other themes failed to move him. The group of writers among which he found himself at the beginning of his literary career; Gorki, Chirikov, Skitalets, Kuprin—was in reality strange to him. They were describers of life, excited by the problems of life, but not by existence itself; and he was the only one among them who was exercized by the eternal and tragic. He was tragic in his very essence and all his ecstatic, affected, theatrical talent, leading as it did to pompousness in style and to traditional and exaggerated forms, was admirably adapted to metaphysically tragic subjects.

What is one to say about the chief thing of all—his creation? We know very little about it. He almost always worked at night: I cannot recall a single one of his works which was written by day. Having written and printed anything, he became extraordinarily indifferent about it and, as if sick of it, thought no more of the matter. He was only really carried away by what was as yet unwritten. While he was writing any story or piece he could talk about nothing else: it appeared to him that it would be his best, greatest, unsurpassed work. He jealously compared it with all his previous efforts: he was annoyed if you liked anything which he had written ten years before. He was never able to modify anything: his taste was much smaller than his talent. His writings, by their very nature, were extempore. When he was possessed by a theme every tiny circumstance became connected with it. I remember how once, having arrived at Kuokallo at night, he hired a droshky and paid the driver a rouble. The Finn was offended and said laconically:

"I don't want a rouble."

Andreyev added another half rouble and in a few days in The Seven Who Were Hanged appeared the dim-eyed Janson, obstinately repeating to the judges:

"I don't want to be hanged . . . I don't want to be hanged."

The insignificant episode with the driver had become the central effect in a theatrically pathetic story. This capacity for giving an unexpected artistic value to what was apparently trifling and superficial was always one of Andreyev's strong points.

One day he came across in The Odessa News the remark of the famous aviator Utochkin in describing his flight:

"At sunset our prison is extraordinarily beautiful."

This affection for "our prison" pleased Andreyev very much and in a few days he had written his well-known story, My Diary, about a man who had grown to love his prison. It concluded with the very same words:

"At sunset our prison is extraordinarily beautiful."

But he gave to the words an unexpectedly grandiose, metaphysical, sense.

1. A well-known Russian writer.