Leonid Andreev
On December 11, 1900, Doctor of Medicine Anton Ignatievich Kerzhentsev committed a murder. Both the entire set of data in which the crime was committed, and some of the circumstances that preceded it, gave reason to suspect Kerzhentsev of an abnormality in his mental abilities.
Put on probation at the Elisavetinsk psychiatric hospital, Kerzhentsev was subjected to strict and careful supervision by several experienced psychiatrists, among whom was Professor Drzhembitsky, who had recently died. Here are the written explanations that were given about what happened by Dr. Kerzhentsev himself a month after the start of the test; Together with other materials obtained by the investigation, they formed the basis of a forensic examination.
Sheet one
Until now, Messrs. experts, I hid the truth, but now circumstances force me to reveal it. And, having recognized it, you will understand that the matter is not at all as simple as it may seem to the profane: either a fever shirt or shackles. There is a third thing here - not shackles and not a shirt, but, perhaps, more terrible than both combined.
Alexei Konstantinovich Savelov, whom I killed, was my friend at the gymnasium and the university, although we differed in specialties: as you know, I am a doctor, and he graduated from the law faculty. It cannot be said that I did not love the deceased; he was always sympathetic to me, and I never had closer friends than he. But with all the sympathetic qualities, he did not belong to those people who can inspire respect in me. The amazing softness and suppleness of his nature, the strange inconsistency in the field of thought and feeling, the sharp extreme and groundlessness of his constantly changing judgments made me look at him as a child or a woman. People close to him, who often suffered from his antics and at the same time, due to the illogicality of human nature, loved him very much, tried to find an excuse for his shortcomings and their feelings and called him an "artist". And indeed, it turned out that this insignificant word completely justifies him and that which for any normal person would be bad, makes it indifferent and even good. Such was the power of the invented word that even I at one time succumbed to the general mood and willingly excused Alexei for his petty shortcomings. Small ones - because he was incapable of big things, like everything big. This is sufficiently evidenced by his literary works, in which everything is petty and insignificant, no matter what short-sighted criticism may say, greedy for the discovery of new talents. Beautiful and worthless were his works, beautiful and worthless was he himself.
When Alexei died, he was thirty-one years old, a little over a year younger than me.
Alexei was married. If you have seen his wife now, after his death, when she is in mourning, you cannot imagine how beautiful she once was: she has become so much, so much uglier. The cheeks are grey, and the skin on the face is so flabby, old, old, like a worn glove. And wrinkles. These are wrinkles now, and another year will pass - and these will be deep furrows and ditches: after all, she loved him so much! And her eyes no longer sparkle and laugh, and before they always laughed, even at the time when they needed to cry. I saw her for just one minute, accidentally bumping into her at the investigator's, and was amazed at the change. She couldn't even look at me angrily. So pathetic!
Only three - Alexei, me and Tatyana Nikolaevna - knew that five years ago, two years before Alexei's marriage, I made an offer to Tatyana Nikolaevna, and it was rejected. Of course, it is only assumed that there are three, and, probably, Tatyana Nikolaevna has a dozen more girlfriends and friends who are fully aware of how Dr. Kerzhentsev once dreamed of marriage and received a humiliating refusal. I don't know if she remembers that she laughed then; probably does not remember - she had to laugh so often. And then remind her: On the fifth of September she laughed. If she refuses - and she will refuse - then remind her how it was. I, this strong man who never cried, who was never afraid of anything - I stood before her and trembled. I was trembling and I saw her biting her lips, and I already reached out to hug her when she looked up and there was laughter in them. My hand remained in the air, she laughed, and laughed for a long time. As much as she wanted. But then she did apologize.
Excuse me, please,” she said, her eyes laughing.
And I smiled too, and if I could forgive her for her laughter, I would never forgive that smile of mine. It was the fifth of September, at six o'clock in the evening, St. Petersburg time. Petersburg, I add, because we were then on the station platform, and now I can clearly see the big white dial and the position of the black hands: up and down. Alexei Konstantinovich was also killed at exactly six o'clock. The coincidence is strange, but able to reveal a lot to a quick-witted person.
One of the reasons for putting me here was the lack of a motive for the crime. Now you see that the motive existed. Of course, it wasn't jealousy. The latter presupposes in a person an ardent temperament and weakness of mental abilities, that is, something directly opposite to me, a cold and rational person. Revenge? Yes, rather revenge, if an old word is really needed to define a new and unfamiliar feeling. The fact is that Tatyana Nikolaevna once again made me make a mistake, and this always angered me. Knowing Alexei well, I was sure that in marriage with him Tatyana Nikolaevna would be very unhappy and regret me, and therefore I insisted so much that Alexei, then just in love, should marry her. Just a month before his tragic death, he told me:
It is to you that I owe my happiness. Really, Tanya?
Yes, brother, you gave a blunder!
This inappropriate and tactless joke shortened his life by a whole week: I originally decided to kill him on the eighteenth of December.
Yes, their marriage turned out to be happy, and it was she who was happy. He did not love Tatyana Nikolaevna much, and in general he was not capable of deep love. He had his favorite thing - literature - which brought his interests beyond the bedroom. And she loved him and lived only for him. Then he was an unhealthy person: frequent headaches, insomnia, and this, of course, tormented him. And she even looked after him, the sick, and fulfill his whims was happiness. After all, when a woman falls in love, she becomes insane.
And so, day after day, I saw her smiling face, her happy face, young, beautiful, carefree. And I thought: I did it. He wanted to give her a dissolute husband and deprive her of himself, but instead of that, he gave her a husband whom she loves, and he himself remained with her. You will understand this strangeness: she is smarter than her husband and loved to talk with me, and after talking, she went to sleep with him - and was happy.
I don't remember when the idea first came to me to kill Alexei. Somehow imperceptibly she appeared, but from the first minute she became so old, as if I had been born with her. I know that I wanted to make Tatyana Nikolaevna unhappy, and that at first I came up with many other plans that were less disastrous for Alexei - I have always been an enemy of unnecessary cruelty. Using my influence with Alexei, I thought of making him fall in love with another woman or making him a drunkard (he had a propensity for this), but all these methods were not suitable. The fact is that Tatyana Nikolaevna would have managed to remain happy, even giving it to another woman, listening to his drunken chatter or accepting his drunken caresses. She needed this man to live, and she somehow served him. There are such slave natures. And, like slaves, they cannot understand and appreciate the power of others, not the power of their master. There were smart, good and talented women in the world, but the world has not yet seen and will not see a fair woman.
Andreev from his youth was surprised at the undemanding attitude of people to life, and he denounced this undemandingness. “The time will come,” Andreev, a schoolboy, wrote in his diary, “I will draw people an amazing picture of their life,” and I did. Thought is the object of attention and the main tool of the author, who is turned not to the flow of life, but to reflections on this flow.
Andreev is not one of the writers whose multi-color play of tones gives the impression of living life, as, for example, in A.P. Chekhov, I.A. Bunin, B.K. Zaitsev. He preferred the grotesque, the anguish, the contrast of black and white. A similar expressiveness, emotionality distinguishes the works of F. M. Dostoevsky, beloved by Andreev V. M. Garshin, E. Po. His city is not big, but "huge", his characters are oppressed not by loneliness, but by "fear of loneliness", they do not cry, but "howl". Time in his stories is "compressed" by events. The author seemed to be afraid of being misunderstood in the world of the visually and hearing impaired. It seems that Andreev is bored in the current time, he is attracted by eternity, the "eternal appearance of man", it is important for him not to depict the phenomenon, but to express his evaluative attitude towards it. It is known that the works "The Life of Basil of Thebes" (1903) and "Darkness" (1907) were written under the impression of the events told to the author, but he completely interprets these events in his own way.
There are no difficulties in the periodization of Andreev’s work: he always painted the battle between darkness and light as a battle of equivalent principles, but if in the early period of his work there was an illusory hope for the victory of light in the subtext of his works, then by the end of his work this hope was gone.
Andreev by nature had a special interest in everything inexplicable in the world, in people, in himself; desire to see beyond the boundaries of life. As a young man, he played dangerous games that allowed him to feel the breath of death. The characters of his works also look into the "kingdom of the dead", for example, Eleazar (the story "Eleazar", 1906), who received there "cursed knowledge" that kills the desire to live. Andreev's work also corresponded to the eschatological mindset that was then developing in the intellectual environment, the aggravated questions about the laws of life, the essence of man: "Who am I?", "Meaning, meaning of life, where is he?", "Man? Of course, both beautiful and proud, and impressive - but where is the end? These questions from Andreev's letters lie in the subtext of most of his works. The skeptical attitude of the writer caused all theories of progress. Suffering from his unbelief, he rejects the religious path of salvation: "To what unknown and terrible limits will my denial reach?.. I will not accept God..."
The story "The Lie" (1900) ends with a very characteristic exclamation: "Oh, what madness to be a man and seek the truth! What a pain!" Andreevsky narrator often sympathizes with a person who, figuratively speaking, falls into the abyss and tries to grab at least something. "There was no well-being in his soul," G. I. Chulkov reasoned in his recollections of a friend, "he was all in anticipation of a catastrophe." A. A. Blok also wrote about the same thing, feeling “horror at the door” while reading Andreev4. There was a lot of the author himself in this falling man. Andreev often "entered" his characters, shared with them a common, according to K. I. Chukovsky, "spiritual tone."
Paying attention to social and property inequality, Andreev had reason to call himself a student of G. I. Uspensky and C. Dickens. However, he did not understand and represent the conflicts of life in the same way as M. Gorky, A. S. Serafimovich, E. N. Chirikov, S. Skitalets, and other “knowledge writers”: he did not indicate the possibility of their solution in the context of the current time. Andreev looked at good and evil as eternal, metaphysical forces, perceived people as forced conductors of these forces. A break with the bearers of revolutionary convictions was inevitable. VV Borovsky, crediting Andreev "predominantly" in the "social" writers, pointed to his "incorrect" coverage of the vices of life. The writer was not his own either among the "right" or among the "left" and was weighed down by creative loneliness.
Andreev wanted, first of all, to show the dialectic of thoughts, feelings, the complex inner world of the characters. Almost all of them, more than hunger, cold, are oppressed by the question of why life is built this way and not otherwise. They look into themselves, trying to understand the motives of their behavior. Whoever his hero is, everyone has "his own cross", everyone suffers.
“It doesn’t matter to me who“ he ”is, the hero of my stories: non, official, good-natured or cattle. The only thing that matters to me is that he is a man and as such bears the same hardships of life.”
In these lines of Andreev's letter to Chukovsky there is a bit of exaggeration, his author's attitude to the characters is differentiated, but there is also truth. Critics rightly compared the young prose writer with F. M. Dostoevsky - both artists showed the human soul as a field of collisions of chaos and harmony. However, a significant difference between them is also obvious: Dostoevsky, in the end, provided that humanity accepted Christian humility, predicted the victory of harmony, while Andreev, by the end of the first decade of his work, almost excluded the idea of harmony from the space of his artistic coordinates.
The pathos of many of Andreev's early works is due to the characters' desire for a "different life". In this sense, the story "In the basement" (1901) about embittered people at the bottom of life is noteworthy. Here comes a deceived young woman "from society" with a newborn. She was not without reason afraid of meeting with thieves, prostitutes, but the baby relieves the tension that has arisen. The unfortunate are drawn to a pure "gentle and weak" being. They wanted to keep the boulevard woman away from the child, but she heart-rendingly demands: “Give!.. Give!.. Give!..” And this “careful, two-finger touch on the shoulder” is described as a touch on a dream: , like a light in the steppe, vaguely called them somewhere ... The young prose writer passes the romantic "somewhere" from story to story. A dream, a Christmas tree decoration, a country estate can serve as a symbol of "another", bright life, other relationships. The attraction to this "other" in Andreev's characters is shown as an unconscious, innate feeling, for example, as in the teenager Sashka from the story "Angel" (1899). This restless, half-starved, offended by the whole world “wolf cub”, who “at times ... wanted to stop doing what is called life”, accidentally got into a rich house on a holiday, saw a wax angel on the Christmas tree. A beautiful toy becomes for the child a sign of "a wonderful world where he once lived," where "they do not know about dirt and abuse." She must belong to him! .. Sashka endured a lot, defending the only thing he had - pride, for the sake of an angel, he falls on his knees in front of the "unpleasant aunt." And again passionate: "Give! .. Give! .. Give! .."
The position of the author of these stories, who inherited pain for all the unfortunate from the classics, is humane and demanding, but unlike his predecessors, Andreev is tougher. He sparingly measures offended characters a fraction of peace: their joy is fleeting, and their hope is illusory. The “dead man” Khizhiyakov from the story “In the basement” shed happy tears, it suddenly seemed to him that he “will live a long time, and his life will be beautiful,” but, the narrator concludes his word, at his head “the predatory death was already silently seated” . And Sashka, having played enough of an angel, falls asleep happy for the first time, and at that time the wax toy melts either from the breath of a hot stove, or from the action of some fatal force: Ugly and motionless shadows were carved on the wall ... "The author dashedly indicates the presence of this force almost in each of his works.The characteristic figure of evil is built on various phenomena: shadows, night darkness, natural disasters, obscure characters, mystical "something", "someone", etc. knocking on hot stoves. " A similar fall will have to endure Sasha.
The errand boy from the city barbershop will also survive the fall in the story "Petka in the Country" (1899). The "aged dwarf", who knew only labor, beatings, hunger, also strove with all his heart to the unknown "somewhere", "to another place about which he could not say anything." Having accidentally found himself in the master's country estate, "entering into complete harmony with nature," Petka is externally and internally transformed, but soon a fatal force in the person of the mysterious owner of the barbershop pulls him out of the "other" life. The inhabitants of the barbershop are puppets, but they are described in sufficient detail, and only the owner-puppeteer is depicted in the outline. Over the years, the role of the invisible black force in the vicissitudes of the plots becomes more and more noticeable.
Andreev has no or almost no happy endings, but the darkness of life in the early stories was dispelled by glimpses of light: the awakening of Man in man was revealed. The motive of awakening is organically connected with the motive of Andreev's characters striving for "another life". In "Bargamot and Garaska" the awakening is experienced by antipodal characters, in whom, it seemed, everything human had died forever. But outside the plot, the idyll of a drunkard and a policeman (a "relative" of the guard Mymretsov G. I. Uspensky, a classic of "collar propaganda") is doomed. In other typologically similar works, Andreev shows how difficult and how late a person wakes up in a person ("Once Upon a Time", 1901; "Spring", 1902). With the awakening, Andreev's characters often come to realize their callousness ("The First Fee", 1899; "No Forgiveness", 1904).
Very in this sense, the story "Hoste" (1901). The young apprentice Senista is waiting for the master Sazonka in the hospital. He promised not to leave the boy "a victim of loneliness, illness and fear." But Easter came, Sazonka went on a spree and forgot his promise, and when he arrived, Senista was already in the dead room. Only the death of a child, "like a puppy thrown into the garbage," revealed to the master the truth about the darkness of his own soul: "Lord! - Sazonka cried<...>raising your hands to the sky<...>"Aren't we humans?"
The difficult awakening of Man is also mentioned in the story "Theft was Coming" (1902). The man who was about to "maybe kill" is stopped by pity for the freezing puppy. The high price of pity, "light<...>in the midst of deep darkness ... "- this is what it is important to convey to the reader to the humanist narrator.
Many of Andreev's characters are tormented by their isolation, their existential worldview. In vain are their often extreme attempts to free themselves from this disease ("Valya", 1899; "Silence" and "The Story of Sergei Petrovich", 1900; "Original Man", 1902). The story "The City" (1902) speaks of a petty official, depressed by both life and life, flowing in the stone bag of the city. Surrounded by hundreds of people, he suffocates from the loneliness of a meaningless existence, against which he protests in a pathetic, comical way. Here Andreev continues the theme of the "little man" and his desecrated dignity, set by the author of "The Overcoat". The narration is filled with participation to the person who has the disease "influenza" - the event of the year. Andreev borrows from Gogol the situation of a suffering man defending his dignity: "We are all people! All brothers!" - drunken Petrov cries in a state of passion. However, the writer changes the interpretation of a well-known theme. Among the classics of the golden age of Russian literature, the "little man" is overwhelmed by the character and wealth of the "big man." For Andreev, the material and social hierarchy does not play a decisive role: loneliness crushes. In the "City" the gentlemen are virtuous, and they themselves are the same Petrovs, but at a higher rung of the social ladder. Andreev sees tragedy in the fact that individuals do not constitute a community. A noteworthy episode: a lady from the "institution" meets with laughter Petrov's proposal to marry, but "squeals" understandingly and in fear when he spoke to her about loneliness.
Andreev's misunderstanding is equally dramatic, both inter-class, intra-class, and intra-family. The divisive force in his artistic world has a wicked sense of humor, as presented in the short story "The Grand Slam" (1899). For many years "summer and winter, spring and autumn" four people played vint, but when one of them died, it turned out that the others did not know if the deceased was married, where he lived ... Most of all, the company was struck by the fact that the deceased will never know about his luck in the last game: "he had the right grand slam."
This power overwhelms any well-being. Six-year-old Yura Pushkarev, the protagonist of the story "The Flower Under the Foot" (1911), was born into a wealthy family, loved, but, depressed by the mutual misunderstanding of his parents, is lonely, and only "pretends that life in the world is very fun." The child "leaves people", escaping in a fictional world. To an adult hero named Yuri Pushkarev, outwardly a happy family man, a talented pilot, the writer returns in the story "Flight" (1914). These works constitute a small tragic dilogy. Pushkarev experienced the joy of being only in the sky, where in his subconscious a dream was born to remain forever in the blue expanse. A fatal force threw the car down, but the pilot himself "on the ground ... never returned."
"Andreev, - wrote E. V. Anichkov, - made us feel the terrible, chilling consciousness of the impenetrable abyss that lies between man and man."
Disunity breeds militant selfishness. Dr. Kerzhentsev from the story "Thought" (1902) is capable of strong feelings, but he used all his mind to plan the insidious murder of a more successful friend - the husband of his beloved woman, and then to play with the investigation. He is convinced that he owns the thought, like a swordsman, but at some point the thought betrays and plays tricks on its bearer. She was tired of satisfying "outside" interests. Kerzhentsev lives out his life in a lunatic asylum. The pathos of this Andreevsky story is opposite to the pathos of M. Gorky's lyrical-philosophical poem "Man" (1903), this hymn to the creative power of human thought. Already after the death of Andreev, Gorky recalled that the writer perceived thought as "a cruel joke of the devil on man." About V. M. Garshin, A. P. Chekhov they said that they awaken the conscience. Andreev awakened the mind, or rather, anxiety for its destructive potentialities. The writer surprised his contemporaries with unpredictability, predilection for antinomies.
“Leonid Nikolaevich,” M. Gorky wrote with a table of reproach, “strangely and painfully sharply for himself, he dug himself in two: in the same week he could sing “Hosanna!” to the world and proclaim to him “Anathema!”.
That is how Andreev revealed the dual essence of man, "divine and insignificant", according to the definition of V. S. Solovyov. The artist again and again returns to the question that disturbs him: which of the "abysses" prevails in man? Regarding the relatively light story "On the River" (1900) about how a "stranger" man overcame hatred for the people who offended him and, risking his life, saved them in the spring flood, M. Gorky enthusiastically wrote to Andreev:
"You love the sun. And this is great, this love is the source of true art, real, the very poetry that enlivens life."
However, soon Andreev creates one of the most terrible stories in Russian literature - "The Abyss" (1901). This is a psychologically convincing, artistically expressive study of the fall of the human in man.
It's scary: a pure girl was crucified by "subhumans". But it is even more terrible when, after a short internal struggle, an intellectual, a lover of romantic poetry, a young man tremblingly in love behaves like an animal. A little more "before" he did not even suspect that the beast-abyss lurked in him. "And the black abyss swallowed him" - this is the final phrase of the story. Some critics praised Andreev for his bold drawing, while others urged readers to boycott the author. At meetings with readers, Andreev insisted that no one was immune from such a fall.
In the last decade of creativity, Andreev spoke much more often about the awakening of the beast in man than about the awakening of Man in man. Very expressive in this series is the psychological story "In the Fog" (1902) about how a prosperous student's hatred of himself and the world found an outlet in the murder of a prostitute. Many publications mention the words about Andreev, the authorship of which is attributed to Leo Tolstoy: "He scares, but we are not afraid." But it is unlikely that all readers who are familiar with the named works of Andreev, as well as with his story "Lie", written a year before "Abyss", or with the stories "Curse of the Beast" (1908) and "Rules of Good" (1911) will hardly agree with this. , telling about the loneliness of a person doomed to fight for survival in the irrational stream of being.
The relationship between M. Gorky and L. N. Andreev is an interesting page in the history of Russian literature. Gorky helped Andreev enter the literary field, contributed to the appearance of his works in the almanacs of the "Knowledge" partnership, introduced "Wednesday" to the circle. In 1901, at the expense of Gorky, the first book of Andreev's stories was published, which brought fame and approval to the author of L. N. Tolstoy, A. P. Chekhov. "The only friend" called Andreev senior comrade. However, all this did not straighten their relationship, which Gorky characterized as "friendship-enmity" (an oxymoron could be born when he read Andreev's letter1).
Indeed, there was a friendship of great writers, according to Andreev, who beat "on one petty-bourgeois snout" of complacency. The allegorical story "Ben-Tobit" (1903) is an example of St. Andrew's blow. The plot of the story moves like a dispassionate narration about outwardly unrelated events: a “kind and good” inhabitant of a village near Golgotha has a toothache, and at the same time, on the mountain itself, the decision of the trial of “some Jesus” is being carried out. The unfortunate Ben-Tobit is outraged by the noise outside the walls of the house, it gets on his nerves. "How they scream!" - this man is indignant, "who did not like injustice", offended by the fact that no one cares about his suffering.
It was a friendship of writers who sang the heroic, rebellious beginnings of personality. The author of "The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men" (1908), which tells about a sacrificial feat, but more about the feat of overcoming the fear of death, wrote to V.V. Veresaev: "A beautiful person is when he is bold and mad and tramples death with death."
Many of Andreev's characters are united by the spirit of opposition, rebellion is an attribute of their essence. They rebel against the power of gray life, fate, loneliness, against the Creator, even if the doom of protest is revealed to them. Resistance to circumstances makes a person a Human - this idea underlies Andreev's philosophical drama "The Life of a Human" (1906). Mortally wounded by the blows of an incomprehensible evil force, the Man curses her at the edge of the grave, calling for a fight. But the pathos of resistance to the "walls" in Andreev's writings weakens over the years, the author's critical attitude to the "eternal image" of man intensifies.
First, a misunderstanding arose between the writers, then, especially after the events of 1905-1906, something really resembling enmity. Gorky did not idealize a person, but at the same time he often expressed the conviction that the shortcomings of human nature are, in principle, correctable. One criticized the "balance of the abyss", the other - "peppy fiction". Their paths diverged, but even during the years of alienation, Gorky called his contemporary "the most interesting writer ... of all European literature." And one can hardly agree with Gorky's opinion that their controversy interfered with the cause of literature.
To a certain extent, the essence of their differences is revealed by a comparison of Gorky's novel "Mother" (1907) and Andreev's novel "Sashka Zhegulev" (1911). In both works, we are talking about young people who have gone into the revolution. Gorky begins with naturalistic figurativeness, ends with romantic. Andreev's pen goes in the opposite direction: he shows how the seeds of the bright ideas of the revolution germinate in darkness, rebellion, "senseless and merciless."
The artist considers phenomena in the perspective of development, predicts, provokes, warns. In 1908, Andreev completed work on the philosophical and psychological story-pamphlet My Notes. The main character is a demonic character, a criminal convicted of a triple murder, and at the same time a seeker of truth. "Where is the truth? Where is the truth in this world of ghosts and lies?" - the prisoner asks himself, but in the end, the newly-minted inquisitor sees the evil of life in people's desire for freedom, and feels "tender gratitude, almost love" to the iron bars on the prison window, which revealed to him the beauty of limitation. He alters the well-known formula and states: "Lack of freedom is a conscious necessity." This "masterpiece of controversy" confused even the writer's friends, since the narrator hides his attitude to the beliefs of the "iron lattice" poet. It is now clear that in "Notes" Andreev approached the popular in the 20th century. genre of dystopia, predicted the danger of totalitarianism. The builder of the "Integral" from the novel "We" by E. I. Zamyatin, in his notes, in fact, continues the reasoning of this character Andreev:
"Freedom and crime are as inextricably linked as ... well, like the movement of an aero and its speed: the speed of an aero is 0, and it does not move, the freedom of a person is 0, and it does not commit crimes."
Is there one truth "or there are at least two of them," Andreev joked sadly and examined the phenomena from one side, then the other. In "The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men" he reveals the truth on one side of the barricades, in the story "The Governor" - on the other. The problems of these works are indirectly connected with revolutionary affairs. In The Governor (1905), a representative of the authorities doomedly awaits the execution of a death sentence pronounced on him by a people's court. A crowd of strikers "of several thousand people" came to his residence. First, impracticable demands were put forward, and then the pogrom began. The governor was forced to order the firing. Children were also among those killed. The narrator realizes both the justice of the people's anger and the fact that the governor was forced to resort to violence; he sympathizes with both sides. The general, tormented by pangs of conscience, finally condemns himself to death: he refuses to leave the city, travels without guards, and the "Law-Avenger" overtakes him. In both works, the writer points out the absurdity of life in which a person kills a person, the unnaturalness of a person's knowledge of the hour of his death.
The critics were right, they saw in Andreev a supporter of universal values, a non-party artist. In a number of works on the subject of revolution, such as Into the Dark Distance (1900), Marseillaise (1903), the most important thing for the author is to show something inexplicable in a person, the paradox of an act. However, the "Black Hundred" considered him a revolutionary writer, and, fearing its threats, the Andreev family lived abroad for some time.
The depth of many of Andreev's works was not immediately revealed. So it happened with "Red Laughter" (1904). The author was prompted to write this story by newspaper news from the fields of the Russo-Japanese War. He showed war as madness that breeds madness. Andreev stylizes his narrative as fragmentary recollections of a front-line officer who has gone mad:
"This is red laughter. When the earth goes crazy, it starts laughing like that. There are no flowers or songs on it, it has become round, smooth and red, like a head that has been torn off the skin."
V. Veresaev, a participant in the Russo-Japanese War, the author of the realistic notes "At War", criticized Andreev's story for not being true. He spoke about the property of human nature to "get used" to all sorts of circumstances. According to Andreev's work, it is precisely directed against the human habit of elevating to the norm what should not be the norm. Gorky urged the author to "improve" the story, to reduce the element of subjectivity, to introduce more concrete, realistic depictions of the war. Andreev answered sharply: “To heal means to destroy the story, its main idea ... My topic: madness and horror." It is clear that the author valued the philosophical generalization contained in the "Red Laughter" and its projection into the coming decades.
Both the already mentioned story "Darkness" and the story "Judas Iscariot" (1907) were not understood by contemporaries who correlated their content with the social situation in Russia after the events of 1905 and condemned the author for "an apology for betrayal." They ignored the most important - philosophical - paradigm of these works.
In the story "Darkness", a selfless and bright young revolutionary hiding from the gendarmes is struck by the "truth of a brothel", revealed to him in the question of the prostitute Lyubka: what right does he have to be good if she is bad? He suddenly realized that his and his comrades' rise had been bought at the price of the fall of many unfortunates, and concluded that "if we cannot illuminate all the darkness with lanterns, then let's put out the fires and climb into the darkness." Yes, the author highlighted the position of an anarchist-maximalist, to which the bomber switched, but he also highlighted the "new Lyubka", who dreamed of joining the ranks of "good" fighters for another life. This plot twist was dismissed by critics, who condemned the author for what they felt was a sympathetic portrayal of a renegade. But the image of Lyubka, which later researchers ignored, plays an important role in the content of the story.
The story "Judas Iscariot" is tougher, in it the author draws the "eternal image" of mankind, who did not accept the Word of God and killed the one who brought it. "Behind her," A. A. Blok wrote about the story, "the author's soul is a living wound." In the story, the genre of which can be defined as "The Gospel of Judas", Andreev does not change much in the storyline outlined by the evangelists. He attributes episodes that could take place in the relationship between the Teacher and the students. All the canonical gospels also differ in episodes. At the same time, Andreev's, so to speak, legal approach to characterizing the behavior of participants in biblical events reveals the dramatic inner world of the "traitor." This approach reveals the predestination of tragedy: without blood, without the miracle of the resurrection, people do not recognize the Son of Man, the Savior. The duality of Judas, which was reflected in his appearance, his tossings, mirrors the duality of Christ's behavior: they both foresaw the course of events and both had reason to love and hate each other. "And who will help poor Iscariot?" - Christ meaningfully answers Peter to the request to help him in power games with Judas. Christ bows his head sadly and understandingly when he hears the words of Judas that in another life he will be the first to be next to the Savior. Judas knows the price of evil and good in this world, painfully experiences his rightness. Judas executes himself for betrayal, without which the Coming would not have taken place: the Word would not have reached mankind. The act of Judas, who, until the very tragic end, hoped that the people on Golgotha were about to see the light, see and realize who they were executing, is "the last stake of faith in people." The author condemns all mankind, including the apostles, for being impervious to goodness3. Andreev has an interesting allegory on this subject, created simultaneously with the story - "The snake's story about how it got poisonous teeth." The ideas of these works will germinate in the final work of the prose writer - the novel Satan's Diary (1919), published after the author's death.
Andreev was always attracted by an artistic experiment in which he could bring together the inhabitants of the real world and the inhabitants of the manifest world. Quite originally, he brought both of them together in the philosophical fairy tale "Earth" (1913). The Creator sends angels to the earth, wishing to know the needs of people, but, having learned the "truth" of the earth, the messengers "give", they cannot keep their clothes spotless and do not return to heaven. They are ashamed to be "clean" among people. A loving God understands them, forgives them, and reproachfully looks at the messenger who visited the earth, but kept his white clothes clean. He himself cannot descend to earth, for then people will not need heaven. There is no such condescending attitude towards humanity in the latest novel, which brings together the inhabitants of opposite worlds.
Andreev for a long time tried on the "wandering" plot associated with the earthly adventures of the incarnated devil. The implementation of the long-standing idea to create "the devil's notes" was preceded by the creation of a colorful picture: Satan-Mephistopheles is sitting over the manuscript, dipping his pen in the ink pot1. At the end of his life, Andreev enthusiastically worked on a work about the stay on earth of the leader of all the unclean with a very non-trivial ending. In the novel "Satan's Diary" the fiend is a suffering person. The idea of the novel can already be seen in the story "My Notes", in the image of the protagonist, in his reflections that the devil himself with all his "reserve of hellish lies, cunning and cunning" can be "led by the nose". The idea for the composition could have originated with Andreev while reading The Brothers Karamazov by F. M. Dostoevsky, in the chapter about the devil who dreams of becoming a naive merchant's wife: my suffering." But where Dostoevsky's devil wanted to find peace, an end to "suffering." The Prince of Darkness Andreeva is just beginning his suffering. An important originality of the work is the multidimensionality of the content: on one side the novel is turned to the time of its creation, on the other - to "eternity". The author trusts Satan to express his most disturbing thoughts about the essence of man, in fact, casts doubt on many ideas of his earlier works. "Satan's Diary", as Yu. Babicheva, a long-time researcher of L. N. Andreeva's work, noted, is also "the personal diary of the author himself."
Satan, in the guise of a merchant he killed and using his own money, decided to play with humanity. But a certain Thomas Magnus decided to take possession of the alien's funds. He plays on the alien's feelings for a certain Mary, in whom the devil saw the Madonna. Love has transformed Satan, he is ashamed of his involvement in evil, the decision has come to become just a man. To atone for past sins, he gives the money to Magnus, who promised to become a benefactor of people. But Satan is deceived and ridiculed: the "earthly Madonna" turns out to be a figurehead, a prostitute. Thomas ridiculed diabolical altruism, took possession of money in order to blow up the planet of people. In the end, in the scientific chemist, Satan sees the illegitimate son of his own father: "It is hard and insulting to be this little thing, which is called a man on earth, a cunning and greedy worm ..." - reflects Satan1.
Magnus is also a tragic figure, a product of human evolution, a character who suffered his misanthropy. The narrator equally understands both Satan and Thomas. It is noteworthy that the writer endows Magnus with an appearance reminiscent of his own (this can be seen by comparing the portrait of the character with the portrait of Andreev, written by I. E. Repin). Satan gives a person an assessment from the outside, Magnus - from the inside, but in the main their assessments coincide. The culmination of the story is parodic: the events of the night are described, "when Satan was tempted by man." Satan is crying, having seen his reflection in people, the earthly ones are laughing "at all ready devils."
Crying - the leitmotifs of Andreev's works. Many and many of his characters shed tears, offended by the powerful and evil darkness. God's light cried - darkness cried, the circle closes, there is no way out for anyone. In "The Diary of Satan" Andreev came close to what L. I. Shestov called "the apotheosis of groundlessness."
At the beginning of the 20th century in Russia, as well as throughout Europe, theatrical life was in its heyday. People of creativity argued about the ways of development of performing arts. In a number of publications, primarily in two "Letters on the Theater" (1911 - 1913), Andreev presented his "theory of the new drama", his vision of the "theater of pure psychism" and created a number of plays that corresponded to the tasks put forward2. He proclaimed "the end of everyday life and ethnography" on the stage, and opposed the "obsolete" A. II. Ostrovsky to the "modern" A.P. Chekhov. It is not the moment that is dramatic, Andreev argues, when the soldiers shoot the rebellious workers, but the one when the factory owner struggles "with two truths" on a sleepless night. He leaves the spectacle for the cafeteria and the cinema; the theater stage, in his opinion, should belong to the invisible - the soul. In the old theatre, the critic concludes, the soul was "contraband". Andreev the prose writer is recognizable in the innovator-playwright.
Andreev's first work for the theater was the romantic-realistic play "To the Stars" (1905) about the place of the intelligentsia in the revolution. Gorky was also interested in this topic, and for some time they worked together on the play, but co-authorship did not take place. The reasons for the gap become clear when comparing the problems of two plays: "To the Stars" by L. N. Andreev and "Children of the Sun" by M. Gorky. In one of Gorky's best plays, born in connection with their common idea, one can detect something "Andreev", for example, in contrasting "children of the sun" with "children of the earth", but not much. It is important for Gorky to imagine the social moment of the intelligentsia's entry into the revolution; for Andreev, the main thing is to correlate the purposefulness of scientists with the purposefulness of revolutionaries. It is noteworthy that Gorky's characters are engaged in biology, their main tool is a microscope, Andreev's characters are astronomers, their tool is a telescope. Andreev gives the floor to the revolutionaries who believe in the possibility of destroying all "walls", to the petty-bourgeois skeptics, to the neutrals who are "above the fray", and all of them have "their own truth". The movement of life forward - an obvious and important idea of the play - is determined by the creative obsession of individuals, and it does not matter whether they give themselves to the revolution or science. But only people who live with their souls and thoughts turned to the "triumphant immensity" of the Universe are happy with him. The harmony of the eternal Cosmos is opposed to the insane fluidity of the life of the earth. The cosmos is in harmony with the truth, the earth is wounded by the collision of "truths".
Andreev has a number of plays, the presence of which allowed contemporaries to talk about "the theater of Leonid Andreev." This series opens with the philosophical drama The Life of a Man (1907). Other most successful works of this series are Black Masks (1908); "Tsar-Hunger" (1908); "Anatema" (1909); "Ocean" (1911). Andreev's psychological works are close to the named plays, for example, such as "Dog Waltz", "Samson in Chains" (both - 1913-1915), "Requiem" (1917). The playwright called his compositions for the theater "representations", thereby emphasizing that this is not a reflection of life, but a play of the imagination, a spectacle. He argued that on the stage the general is more important than the particular, that the type speaks more than the photograph, and the symbol is more eloquent than the type. Critics noted the language of modern theater found by Andreev - the language of philosophical drama.
In the drama "Life of Man" the formula of life is presented; the author "frees himself from everyday life", goes in the direction of maximum generalization1. There are two central characters in the play: Human, in whose person the author proposes to see humanity, and Someone in gray, called He, - something that combines human ideas about the supreme third-party force: God, fate, fate, the devil. Between them - guests, neighbors, relatives, good people, villains, thoughts, emotions, masks. Someone in gray acts as a messenger of the "circle of iron destiny": birth, poverty, work, love, wealth, fame, misfortune, poverty, oblivion, death. The transience of human stay in the "iron circle" is reminiscent of a candle burning in the hands of a mysterious Someone. The performance involves characters familiar from ancient tragedy - a messenger, moira, a choir. When staging the play, the author demanded that the director avoid halftones: "If kind, then like an angel; if stupid, then like a minister; if ugly, then so that the children are afraid. Sharp contrasts."
Andreev strove for unambiguity, allegorism, for symbols of life. It has no symbols in the symbolist sense. This is the manner of lubok painters, expressionist painters, icon painters, who depicted the earthly path of Christ in squares bordered by a single salary. The play is tragic and heroic at the same time: despite all the blows of outside forces, the Man does not give up, and at the edge of the grave he throws down the glove to the mysterious Someone. The finale of the play is similar to the finale of the story "The Life of Basil of Thebes": the character is broken, but not defeated. A. A. Blok, who watched the play staged by V. E. Meyerhold, in his review noted the non-randomness of the hero’s profession - he, in spite of everything, is a creator, an architect.
"Human Life" is a vivid proof that Man is a man, not a puppet, not a miserable creature doomed to decay, but a wonderful phoenix that overcomes the "icy wind of boundless spaces". Wax melts, but life does not decrease.
A peculiar continuation of the play "The Life of a Man" is the play "Anatema". In this philosophical tragedy reappears Someone blocking the entrances - impassive and powerful guardian of the gates beyond which stretches the Beginning of the beginnings, the Great Mind. He is the guardian and servant of eternity-truth. He is opposed Anatema, the devil cursed for rebellious intentions to know the truth
Universe and equal with the Great Mind. The evil spirit, cowardly and vainly curling around the feet of the guardian, is a tragic figure in its own way. "Everything in the world wants good," the damned one thinks, "and does not know where to find it, everything in the world wants life - and meets only death ..." He comes to doubts about the existence of Mind in the Universe: is the name of this rationality a Lie? ? From despair and anger that it is not possible to know the truth on the other side of the gate, Anatema tries to know the truth on this side of the gate. He puts cruel experiments on the world and suffers from unjustified expectations.
The main part of the drama, which tells about the feat and death of David Leizer, "the beloved son of God", has an associative connection with the biblical legend of the humble Job, with the gospel story of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Anatema decided to test the truth of love and justice. He endows David with enormous wealth, pushes him to create a "miracle of love" for his neighbor, and contributes to the formation of David's magical power over people. But the diabolical millions are not enough for all those who suffer, and David, as a traitor and deceiver, is stoned to death by his beloved people. Love and justice turned into deception, good - evil. The experiment was set, but Anatema did not get a "clean" result. Before his death, David does not curse people, but regrets that he did not give them the last penny. The epilogue of the play repeats its prologue: the gate, the silent guardian Someone and the truth-seeker Anathema. With the circular composition of the play, the author speaks of life as an endless struggle of opposite principles. Soon after the writing of the play, staged by V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, it was a success at the Moscow Art Theater.
In the work of Andreev, artistic and philosophical beginnings merged together. His books feed an aesthetic need and awaken thought, disturb conscience, awaken sympathy for a person and fear for his human component. Andreev sets up a demanding approach to life. Critics have spoken of his "cosmic pessimism," but his tragedy is not directly related to pessimism. Probably, foreseeing a misunderstanding of his works, the writer has repeatedly argued that if a person cries, this does not mean that he is a pessimist and does not want to live, and vice versa, not everyone who laughs is an optimist and has fun. He belonged to the category of people with a heightened sense of death due to an equally heightened sense of life. People who knew him closely wrote about Andreev's passionate love for life.
This book is like a headshot! This book will make you brainstorm.
A very powerful thing, reading this work, you delve deep into yourself.
If you are not deprived of the mind and can reflect, this work is for you.
Read, understand, absorb, transform.
Grade 5 out of 5 stars from Extra Man 16.04.2017 14:23
What a great psychologist Andreev! How subtly he describes all the facets of the human soul! He fascinates with his speech, the formulation of states, experiences, sensations. It is hard to believe that such a story as "Thought" could be written by a person who is not personally familiar with madness. Something similar to Kafka, he opens up a new world for readers, allows you to delve into not only the soul of Dr. Krezhentsev, but also your own.
As it turned out, the most terrible thing for a person is not worldly troubles and misfortunes, but the destruction of the castle of the soul. Imagine that what you so believed in, what you lived for, what was your support - dissolves in the fog, disappears like dew on the grass on a summer morning, and even worse - you realize that this fortress did not exist, that it was all just a mirage. Probably not in vain Krezhentsev so wanted to be recognized as sane and sent to hard labor. After all, he wanted to escape from himself, from what used to be his world - from his thoughts.
“My castle has become my prison. Enemies attacked me in my castle. Where is the salvation? In the impregnability of the castle, in the thickness of its walls - my death. The voice does not come out. And who's strong will save me? Nobody. For there is no one stronger than me, and I - I am the only enemy of my "I."
If you only knew how this phrase affected me. How it turned everything upside down in my soul. And I realized that there is nothing more important than confidence in one's own thought, the knowledge that she will not betray, as our hero.
“The vile thought betrayed me, the one who so believed in her and loved her. She has not become worse: the same light, sharp, elastic, like a rapier, but her hilt is no longer in my hand. And she kills me, her creator, her master, with the same stupid indifference, as I killed others with her.
Leonid Andreev allowed us to pass judgment on the doctor ourselves. And it gave us space to think. And I am sure that each reader will interpret the state of mind of the hero in his own way. But, nevertheless, I tend to believe that he was initially sick.
“Night falls, and I am seized with mad horror. I was firm on the ground, and my feet stood firmly on it - and now I am thrown into the emptiness of infinite space.
Every phrase, every word in the story climbs into the very depths of the soul, wanders through its dark corridors and rooms, closing windows and doors more tightly so that it does not leave me. She is Thought.
How I want to parse the entire book into quotes, and throw out the emotions that reading it gave me. How she inspired me, gave me wings. And I want to write about it, write, write. And there are still so many ideas in her head that she formed ...
When asked if I would read any more of Andreev's works, I would answer "Yes!" without hesitation.
On December 11, 1900, Doctor of Medicine Anton Ignatievich Kerzhentsev committed a murder. Both the entire set of data in which the crime was committed, and some of the circumstances that preceded it, gave reason to suspect Kerzhentsev of an abnormality in his mental abilities.
Put on probation at the Elisavetinsk psychiatric hospital, Kerzhentsev was subjected to strict and careful supervision by several experienced psychiatrists, among whom was Professor Drzhembitsky, who had recently died. Here are the written explanations that were given about what happened by Dr. Kerzhentsev himself a month after the start of the test; Together with other materials obtained by the investigation, they formed the basis of a forensic examination.
Sheet one
Until now, Messrs. experts, I hid the truth, but now circumstances force me to reveal it. And, having recognized it, you will understand that the matter is not at all as simple as it may seem to the profane: either a fever shirt or shackles. There is a third thing here - not shackles and not a shirt, but, perhaps, more terrible than both combined.
Alexei Konstantinovich Savelov, whom I killed, was my friend at the gymnasium and the university, although we differed in specialties: as you know, I am a doctor, and he graduated from the law faculty. It cannot be said that I did not love the deceased; he was always sympathetic to me, and I never had closer friends than he. But with all the sympathetic qualities, he did not belong to those people who can inspire respect in me. The amazing softness and suppleness of his nature, the strange inconsistency in the field of thought and feeling, the sharp extreme and groundlessness of his constantly changing judgments made me look at him as a child or a woman. People close to him, who often suffered from his antics and at the same time, due to the illogicality of human nature, loved him very much, tried to find an excuse for his shortcomings and their feelings and called him an "artist". And indeed, it turned out that this insignificant word completely justifies him and that which for any normal person would be bad, makes it indifferent and even good. Such was the power of the invented word that even I at one time succumbed to the general mood and willingly excused Alexei for his petty shortcomings. Small ones - because he was incapable of big things, like everything big. This is sufficiently evidenced by his literary works, in which everything is petty and insignificant, no matter what short-sighted criticism may say, greedy for the discovery of new talents. Beautiful and worthless were his works, beautiful and worthless was he himself.
When Alexei died, he was thirty-one years old, a little over a year younger than me.
Alexei was married. If you have seen his wife, now, after his death, when she is in mourning, you cannot imagine how beautiful she once was: she has become so much, so much ugly. The cheeks are grey, and the skin on the face is so flabby, old, old, like a worn glove. And wrinkles. These are wrinkles now, and another year will pass - and these will be deep furrows and ditches: after all, she loved him so much! And her eyes no longer sparkle and laugh, and before they always laughed, even at the time when they needed to cry. I saw her for just one minute, accidentally bumping into her at the investigator's, and was amazed at the change. She couldn't even look at me angrily. So pathetic!
Only three - Alexei, me and Tatyana Nikolaevna - knew that five years ago, two years before Alexei's marriage, I made an offer to Tatyana Nikolaevna and it was rejected. Of course, it is only assumed that there are three, and, probably, Tatyana Nikolaevna has a dozen more girlfriends and friends who are fully aware of how Dr. Kerzhentsev once dreamed of marriage and received a humiliating refusal. I don't know if she remembers that she laughed then; she probably doesn't remember - she had to laugh so often. And then remind her: On the fifth of September she laughed. If she refuses - and she will refuse - then remind her how it was. I, this strong man who never cried, who was never afraid of anything - I stood before her and trembled. I was trembling and I saw her biting her lips, and I already reached out to hug her when she looked up and there was laughter in them. My hand remained in the air, she laughed and laughed for a long time. As much as she wanted. But then she did apologize.
“Excuse me, please,” she said, her eyes laughing.
And I smiled too, and if I could forgive her for her laughter, I would never forgive that smile of mine. It was the fifth of September, at six o'clock in the evening, St. Petersburg time. In Petersburg, I add, because we were then on the station platform, and now I can clearly see the big white dial and the position of the black hands: up and down. Alexei Konstantinovich was also killed at exactly six o'clock. The coincidence is strange, but able to reveal a lot to a quick-witted person.
One of the reasons for putting me here was the lack of a motive for the crime. Now do you see that the motive existed? Of course, it wasn't jealousy. The latter presupposes in a person an ardent temperament and weakness of mental abilities, that is, something directly opposite to me, a cold and rational person. Revenge? Yes, rather revenge, if an old word is really needed to define a new and unfamiliar feeling. The fact is that Tatyana Nikolaevna once again made me make a mistake, and this always angered me. Knowing Alexei well, I was sure that in marriage with him Tatyana Nikolaevna would be very unhappy and regret me, and therefore I insisted so much that Alexei, then just in love, should marry her. Just a month before his tragic death, he told me:
“I owe my happiness to you. Really, Tanya?
- Yes, brother, you gave a blunder!
This inappropriate and tactless joke shortened his life by a whole week: I originally decided to kill him on the eighteenth of December.
Yes, their marriage turned out to be happy, and it was she who was happy. He did not love Tatyana Nikolaevna much, and in general he was not capable of deep love. He had his favorite thing - literature, which brought his interests beyond the bedroom. And she loved only him and lived only for him. Then, he was an unhealthy person: frequent headaches, insomnia, and this, of course, tormented him. And she even looked after him, the sick, and fulfill his whims was happiness. After all, when a woman falls in love, she becomes insane.
And so, day after day, I saw her smiling face, her happy face, young, beautiful, carefree. And I thought: I did it. He wanted to give her a dissolute husband and deprive her of himself, but instead of that, he gave her a husband whom she loves, and he himself remained with her. You will understand this strangeness: she is smarter than her husband and loved to talk with me, and after talking, she went to sleep with him and was happy.
I don't remember when the idea first came to me to kill Alexei. Somehow imperceptibly she appeared, but from the first minute she became so old, as if I had been born with her. I know that I wanted to make Tatyana Nikolaevna unhappy and that at first I came up with many other plans that were less disastrous for Alexei - I have always been an enemy of unnecessary cruelty. Using my influence with Alexei, I thought of making him fall in love with another woman or making him a drunkard (he had a propensity for this), but all these methods were not suitable. The fact is that Tatyana Nikolaevna would have managed to remain happy, even giving it to another woman, listening to his drunken chatter or accepting his drunken caresses. She needed this man to live, and she somehow served him. There are such slave natures. And, like slaves, they cannot understand and appreciate the power of others, not the power of their master. There were smart, good and talented women in the world, but the world has not yet seen and will not see a fair woman.
Thought is energy, a force that has no boundaries.
Most of the people on our blue globe are capable of thinking or once could. It was only at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that they were able to figure out what thought is, when the avant-garde of scientists began to storm the human brain, but writers are not scientists, they interpret the question in a completely different way, and as a result, a masterpiece can turn out. The "Silver Age" began to advance, and changes swept over the coastal islands like a tsunami. In 1914, the story "Thought" was published.
Andreev was able to write a story about psychology and the human psyche, being without any education in this area. "Thought" - that same story - was unique in its kind at that time. Some people saw it as a treatise on the human psyche, others as a philosophical novel in the style of Dostoevsky, which Andreev admired, but there are those who argued that "thought" is nothing more than some kind of scientific work and was written off from the real prototype. Andreev, in turn, said that he had nothing to do with the field of psychology.
The story begins with the lines:
“On December 11, 1900, Doctor of Medicine Anton Ignatievich Kerzhentsev committed a murder. Both the whole set of data in which the crime was committed, and some of the circumstances that preceded it, gave reason to suspect Kerzhantsev of the abnormality of his mental abilities.
Next, we follow how Kerzhantsev describes in his diary the purpose of the murder, why he did it, and most importantly, what thought overcame him and is still spinning in his head. We read a full analysis of his actions in a few days, we observe that Anton Ignatievich intended to kill his best friend, since he married a girl whom he himself wanted to be married to, but she refused him. Surprisingly, Kerzhantsev himself was loved, he found the same one after an unsuccessful relationship with the wife of Alexei, the best friend of the protagonist.
An incomprehensible motive, strange thoughts - all this makes Kerzhantsev remember his childhood. His father did not love and did not believe in his child, so Anton Ignatievich proved all his life that he was capable of much. And he proved - becoming a respected and wealthy doctor.
The thought of killing Alexei absorbed him more and more, Kerzhantsev began to feign seizures, so that in which case he would not end up in hard labor. He learned that his inheritance is completely suitable: his father was an alcoholic, and his only sister Anna suffered from epilepsy. And in the end, in complete surprise to himself, he commits crimes when he convinced everyone of his bad condition (surprises because he intended to kill in a completely different way than he did). Kerzhantsev kills Alexei and hides from the place of his misdeed.
He makes his notes for experts who must decide whether the offender is healthy. Experts are the reader, and this mission is put on us. Finding out the adequacy of the hero. He doubts his goals, but he is sure that he is not crazy. Although he asks a very strange question, which is more for himself than for others: “Did I pretend to be crazy in order to kill, or did I kill because I was crazy?”.
And he concludes that the most amazing and incomprehensible thing in the world is human thought. At the end of the story, no verdict is issued about the future fate of Anton Ignatievich, as he predicted - opinions on his adequacy were divided, and as a result, we only get resources for reasoning and arguing over this difficult issue.
Thought is an engine, it turns the piston in the minds of many, and as one of the attempts to understand the operation of this engine, Andreev made in his brilliant and rather difficult story - “Thought”. Did he succeed in this attempt? Only those who read the work will answer, even after more than a hundred years from the moment of writing.
