n
Tchekoff, the number of people who suffer from life, either crushed
or mutilated by it, by far exceed the number of happy ones;
moreover, the best of his stories are short and sketchy like those
of Tchekoff. Andreyev is then, so to speak, his spiritual son. But
he is a sickly son, who carries the melancholy element to its
farthest limit. The grey tones of Tchekoff have, in Andreyev, become
black; his rather sad humor has been transformed into tragic irony;
his subtle impressionability into morbid sensibility. The two
writers have had the same visions of the anomalies and the horrors
of existence; but, where Tchekoff has only a disenchanted smile,
Andreyev has stopped, dismayed; the sensation of horror and
suffering which springs from his stories has become an obsession
with him; it does not penetrate merely the souls of his heroes, but,
as in Poe, it penetrates even the descriptions of nature.

Thus, the "near and terrible" disk of the moon hovers over the earth
like the "gigantic menace of an approaching but unknown evil"; the
river congeals in "mute terror," and silence is particularly
menacing. Night always comes "black and bad," and fills human hearts
with shadows. When it falls, the very branches of the trees
"contract, filled with terror." Under the influence of the
disturbing sounds of the tocsin, the high linden-trees "suddenly
begin to talk, only to become quiet again immediately and lapse into
a sullen silence." The tocsin itself is animated. "Its distinct
tones spread with rapid intensity. Like a herald of evil who has not
the time to look behind him, and whose eyes are large with fright,
the tocsin desperately calls men to the fatal mire."[9]

[9] This passage is a sort of a variation on the theme that Poe
has developed in a masterful way in his poem, "The Bells."

Most of Andreyev's characters, like those of Dostoyevsky, are
abnormal, madmen and neurasthenics in whom are distinguishable
marked traces of degeneration and psychic perversion. They are
beings who have been fatally wounded in their life-struggle, whose
minds now are completely or partially powerless. Too weak to fight
against the cruel exigencies of reality, they turn their thoughts
upon themselves and naturally arrive at the most desolate
conclusions, and commit the most senseless acts. Some, a prey to the
mania of pride, despairing because of their weakness and their
"nothingness," look--as does Serge Petrovich--for relief in suicide.