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, while sitting in Georgians, to give psychology real war. However, Andreev did not know war, and therefore, despite his extraordinary intuition, he could not give the correct psychology of war. Hence the nervous excitement in the story, sometimes reaching hysterical reflections on the fate of the writer, hence the fragmentation of the narrative. "Red Laughter" is a typical example of expressionism, to which Andreev gravitated more and more.
The story has two parts, consisting of chapters called fragments. In part I, a description of the horrors of war is given, in part II - the madness and horror that gripped the rear. The form of “fragments from a found manuscript” allowed the author, naturally, without any apparent violation of the logical sequence (the manuscript could be “found” in scraps), to highlight only the horrors of the war, which engulfed people in madness. 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 an 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 characters 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 the murders than to agree that this is temporary, surmountable. If the participant Russo-Japanese War V. Veresaev spoke about a saving habit that does not allow a person to run wild among murders, but for Andreev, the habit of war is a nightmare and can only lead to madness.
Criticism emphasized the one-sidedness of Andreev's view of the war, a painful psychological strain in her description. "Red laughter" - wrote Veresaev, - work a great neurasthenic artist who painfully and passionately experienced the war through newspaper correspondence about it. But with all the one-sidedness and the heap of nightmarish images that reduce humanistic pathos works, the story played a certain positive role. Written from the positions of pacifism, it condemned any war, but in those conditions it was perceived as a condemnation of a specific war - the Russo-Japanese one, and this coincided with the attitude of all democratic Russia towards it.
Gorky highly praised "Red Laughter", considering it "extremely important, timely, strong." However great writer reproached Andreev for opposing the facts with his subjective attitude towards the war. L. Andreev, objecting to Gorky, emphasized that he was trying first of all to express 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 of both writers: Gorky spoke about the objective meaning of facts, Andreev defended the subjective attitude of the artist to the facts, which, however, easily led to the loss public criterion in the evaluation of phenomena, which Andreev observed quite often.
There is no doubt that horrors are exaggerated in Andreev's story. However, this is only special reception images of war as an unnatural phenomenon. Russian literature knew a similar image of the 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 terrifying naturalistic details and presented as something meaningless. It is hardly possible to talk about the direct impact 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 - Mayakovsky’s “War and Peace” (“four legs in a rotting carriage for forty people”), military stories Ukrainian writer S. Vasilchenko "On the Golden Losh", "Chorsh Maki", "Otruyna Kvitka" and especially "Holy Gomsh", in which there is some dependence on Andreev's expressionist method of depicting the war.
Diary of a Dead Man
I will declare our fatherland crazy house;
our enemies and crazy - all those
who hasn't gone crazy yet; and when the great
Invincible, joyful, I will reign over the world,
its only lord and master,
what merry laughter will resound the universe!
Leonid Andreev
"Andreev keeps scaring me, but I'm not scared" - this phrase is attributed to Leo Tolstoy. I do not agree with the great classic: I read (more precisely, re-read) "Red Laughter" at night, everyone was sleeping, the final pages made my heart beat faster. I was scared.
I wonder if Leonid Andreev (1871-1919) saw the picture Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (1893)? These associations made me recall the famous canvas: “Here, the horse’s head rose above the crowd with crazy red eyes and a wide-grinding mouth, only hinting at some kind of terrible and unusual cry, rose, fell, and in this place the people crowded for a minute, paused, heard hoarse, muffled voices, a short shot, and then again silent, endless movement. “The sixth verst was approaching, and the groans became more definite, sharper, and the twisted mouths emitting these voices were already felt.”
In 11th grade, I tell students about modernist currents in art . For 17 years I have also been mentioning expressionism and its representatives: Yevgeny Zamyatin, Leonid Andreev, Boris Yampolsky, Franz Kafka, Gustav Meyrink, Alfred Döblin. The world of their heroes is “a chaotic conglomeration of things, events, ideas. In the midst of this chaos, a lonely person who is in constant fear for his fate ”(I.F. Volkov). Fragmentation, deformation, fragmentation, terrible emotional experiences, feelings of the end of the world - character traits expressionism. Yes, "Red Laughter" is in this series.
The subtitle of the story is "Excerpts from a Found Manuscript". Who is the author of the manuscript? Why only excerpts? Where and when was it found? The writer does not answer these questions. And “every entry into the sphere of meanings takes place only through the gates of space and time, that is, the chronotope” (M. Bakhtin).
What world do Andreev's characters live in? Space: Enskaya road (apparently, the death road), 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 began last Friday, and Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday passed, and Friday came again and passed - and it still continues. The world of the story is an apocalyptic world in which crazy 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 passages) - 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) - own recordings of the younger brother, going to madness. The first sentences of each passage are broken fragments of the whole. The form of the work, torn, fragmentary, corresponds to the same dead content.
important role in any artistic text play dreams, memories heroes. Let me compare these episodes. In excerpt 1 there is a waking dream (remembrance) of a dead 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. If I could scream, I would scream - so unusual was this simple and peaceful image, this piece of blue wallpaper and the dusty, untouched decanter. The hero also dreams of this in the 2nd passage. In excerpt 15, the second brother dreams of murderous children: “Their mouths were like the mouths of toads or frogs and opened convulsively and wide; behind the transparent skin of their naked bodies, red blood ran sullenly - and they killed each other, playing. They were the scariest thing I've ever seen because they were small and could go anywhere." 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 so quickly along the wall that I could not follow his impetuous, sudden movements.” In a dying world, even children are devilish bastards.
Thus, the main motives of the story are madness and death, war and violence, 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 are walking somewhere under the merciless sun. Fragment 2. A battle lasting many days. Red laugh. Excerpt 3. Many mentally ill people appeared in the armies. Excerpt 4. Conversations with a wounded comrade in the infirmary, with survivors at a kind of picnic. Excerpt 5. They go by train for the wounded, the student talks about crazy people, a wild groan of many wounded is heard, the student shot himself. Excerpt 6. Their own shoot at their own, a conversation with the doctor about red laughter, madness. Excerpt 7. The Red Cross train is blown up. Passage 8. At home in wheelchair, with the family, the suffering of the mother and wife. Excerpt 9. Younger brother about madness, the wounded brother tries to write, forgets everything. Excerpt 10. Brother, legless crazy cripple, died. A story about his last days, 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 the same stupid escorts. Excerpt 14. In the theater I scared a neighbor, there were huge losses at the front. Fragment 15. Dream about murderous children, conversation with brother about red laughter. Fragment 16. The battle lasts for many days, a crazy school friend, a friend's sister is going to the front. Fragment 17. There is a massacre in the city. Excerpt 18. A letter from a murdered fiance to a sister about the pleasure of killing people The last passage. Rally "Down with the war", the crowd, running, waiting for the house of death, the earth throws up corpses. Outside the window, in the purple and still light, stood Red Laughter himself.
Word rows keywords inevitably lead to the same apocalyptic idea of the story.
Madness. “Horror, a tormented brain, heavy delirium, a distraught earth, insane people, a horse with red insane eyes, an abyss of horror and madness, for three days a satanic roar and screech enveloped us in a cloud of madness, separated us from the earth, from heaven, from our own; alone, trembling with terror, insane. Lots of crazy people. More than the wounded."
Heat. "Heat, sun, fiery, merciless fire, bloody light, parched lips, hot air, terrible sun, withering heat, burned necks, hot bayonets, sunstroke."
People. “The army of the mute, 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 gray people, as in smoked meat, like sleepwalkers, he took out a revolver and shot himself in the temple. God, I don't have legs. Who said that you can not 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 moment something incomprehensible, monstrous, supernatural happened. A warm wind blew on my right cheek, swayed me violently, and that was all, and in front of my eyes, in place of a pale face, there was something short, dull, red, and blood was pouring from there, as if from an uncorked bottle, as they are painted on bad signs. And in this short, red, flowing smile, some kind of smile continued, toothless laughter - red laughter. I recognized it, that red laugh. I searched and found it, this red laugh. Now I understand what was in all these mutilated, torn, strange bodies. It was red laughter. He is in the sky, he is in the sun, and soon he will spill over the whole earth, this red laughter! Ethat huge shapeless shadow that has risen above the world. And with each of our steps, this wild, unheard-of moan, which had no visible source, grew ominously, as if the red air was moaning, as if the earth and sky were moaning. But the groan did not subside. It slithered along 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.
Leonid Andreev wrote his story "Red Laughter" very quickly, about 9 days, because he was afraid to go crazy himself. It was written based on the Russo-Japanese War. And although Andreev was not at the war itself, he was a witness to an accident that happened in Yalta with two Turks. The disfigured face of one of them, his bloody smile made a strong impression on the writer.
Also, "Red Laughter" has a wide intertextual base. In it you can see the motifs of Garshin's short stories "Coward", "Four Days", of course, "Red Flower", and indeed his entire military cycle. However, Andreev masterfully concentrates these motives, exaggerates, intensifies, and brings them to the limit. His images-symbols are more complex and dynamic compared to Garshin's more static ones, which, in fact, did not threaten the hero. As a result, we see a complex, bright and capacious image of the Red Laughter, which cannot be hidden from, because it is omnipresent.
Andreev perfectly mastered the technique of "stream of consciousness". He recreated the whole process of thoughts and feelings of a person, and not individual particles of the thoughts of the characters.
In his neo-mythological story, Andreev masterfully synthesized the principles of symbolism and expressionism, and depicted the art of screaming. It has a broken composition, a fragmented narrative, reflecting the disorder of thoughts in the stream of consciousness, and consists of 2 parts.
Part 1 is more sensual. The elder brother passes through himself those "madness and horror" that surround him. He is immersed in them, he feels that boundless red fog that envelops the carnage, not wanting to let go of his victims. And, it would seem, the hero was able to escape at the cost of his health from this terrible meat grinder, they envy him, because he is going home! But the war cannot pass without a trace in the mind of man. She overtakes him and in a quiet harbor home, where the hero so longed, where he hoped to find the long-awaited rest for both body and soul. The older brother does not find quiet domestic happiness, but is swallowed up by the abyss of hopeless madness. There is no hope for salvation! Only death lies ahead...
Part 2 is more rational. The younger one knows about the war through the prism of the elder's experiences and at first even tries to evaluate and analyze the horrors of the war and its consequences. However, seeing the echoes of the war, which gradually appear in those places where fighting has not yet begun, watching the gradual degradation of his brother’s consciousness, listening and writing down his stories, passing through himself nightmarish pictures of hopeless darkness and despair, he gradually plunges into the abyss, he is also covered with a wave of madness.
The conflict between man and fate, the problem of life and death as ontological categories, is shown powerfully and succinctly in Andreev's work. The writer was not interested in a specific historical situation, specific dates. War is shown as a phenomenon without time, outside of time. It could be, in principle, any war. And him new poetics, based on the aesthetics of moral shock, helped to reveal the universal idea. You can't kill your own kind! War is bad! War is scary!
Andreev clearly shows the contrast between war and home. The red sun, sky, earth, eyes of a horse, pouring blood are contrasted with the blue wallpaper of the room. It was the dream of a home that created the illusion of temporary salvation and helped to escape from the world of “madness and horror” at least for a while, to be transported to the native abode. However, even there the hero did not leave anxiety. The image that connects home and war is a crazy picnic: that last island, for which, as for the only salvation, people exhausted by the war grabbed. But at home, as it turned out, salvation is also not to be expected. For gradually the red sky and the sun cover even this calm corner. The image of a blood-stained planet with a scalp removed, rushing to nowhere, is a symbol of a subhuman. Yes, if there is a war going on somewhere, then there is no need to look for full value.
The image of the sun, which could warm, delight, give hope, is negative. It burns, incinerates, withers.
A negative assessment of Nietzsche's concept of the "superman", which appears three times in the text, is also given:
- a doctor who wants to turn the whole planet into a madhouse and become a master in it,
- an older brother who, like Zarathustra, wants to write about flowers and songs,
- powers of the world of this, unleashing wars and imagining themselves as the rulers of other people's lives.
Red laughter is a symbolic and mythological image of the devil. However, it does not develop immediately. Little by little, gradually it increases, concretizes, absorbing and concentrating in itself everything that a person is able to feel, and is embodied in an unimaginable cocktail of visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile sensations of the older brother, which are complemented by the younger brother’s impressions from the heard stories of the deceased, and from seen by him on the streets.
However, even after its incarnation, the image of the Red Laughter continues to develop until it captures the entire planet, until it inevitably enslaves the consciousness of people. By the end of the work, the tension reaches its highest limit. An atmosphere of general madness reigns around. The finale is the apocalypse (the myth of the end of the world). The whole planet is filled with Red laughter. There is no salvation!
