Savva and The Life of Man | Page 3

were, in some
figure or symbol. As such it appears either as the leading theme of an
entire story or drama, or as an important subordinate theme. Thus we
have seen that the idea of death finds concrete expression in the
character of Lazarus. The idea of loneliness, of the isolation of the
individual from all other human beings, even though he be physically
surrounded by large numbers, is embodied in the story of "The City."
Similarly the conception of the mystery and the indifference by which
man finds himself confronted is definitely set forth in the figure of
Someone in Gray in "The Life of Man."
The riddle, the indifference--these are the two characteristics of human

destiny that loom large in Andreyev's conception of it as set forth in
that figure. Someone in Gray--who is he? No one knows. No definite
name can be given him, for no one knows. He is mysterious in "The
Life of Man," where he is Man's constant companion; he is mysterious
in "Anathema," where he guards the gate leading from this finite world
to eternity. And as Man's companion he looks on indifferently,
apparently unconcerned whether Man meets with good or bad fortune.
Man's prayers do not move him. Man's curses leave him calm.
It is Andreyev's gloomy philosophy, no doubt, that so often causes him
to make his heroes lonely, so that loneliness is developed into a
principle of human existence, in some cases, as in "The City,"
becoming the dominant influence over a man's life. Particularly the
men whom life has treated senselessly and cruelly, whom it has dealt
blow after blow until their spirits are crushed out--it is such men in
particular who become lonely, seek isolation and retirement, and slink
away into some hole to die alone. This is the significance of the saloon
scene in "The Life of Man." The environment of the drunkards who are
withdrawn from life, and therefore lonely themselves, accentuates the
loneliness of Man in the last scene. It is his loneliness that Andreyev
desired to bring into relief. His frequenting the saloon is but an
immaterial detail, one of the means of emphasizing this idea. To
remove all possible misunderstanding on this point, Andreyev wrote a
variant of the last scene, "The Death of Man," in which, instead of
dying in a saloon surrounded by drunkards, Man dies in his own house
surrounded by his heirs. "The loneliness of the dying and unhappy
man," Andreyev wrote in a prefatory note to this variant, "may just as
fully be characterized by the presence of the Heirs."
However, for all the gloom of his works, Andreyev is not a pessimist.
Under one of his pictures he has written: "Though it destroys
individuals, the truth saves mankind." The misery in the world may be
ever so great; the problems that force themselves upon man's mind may
seem unanswerable; the happenings in the external world may fill his
soul with utter darkness, so that he despairs of finding any meaning,
any justification in life. And yet, though his reason deny it, his soul
tells him: "The truth saves mankind." After all, Man is not a failure. For

though misfortunes crowd upon him, he remains intact in soul,
unbroken in spirit. He carries off the victory because he does not
surrender. He dies as a superman, big in his defiance of destiny. This
must be the meaning Andreyev attached to Man's life. We find an
interpretation of it, as it were, in "Anathema," in which Someone sums
up the fate of David--who lived an even sadder life than Man and died
a more horrible death--in these words: "David has achieved immortality,
and he lives immortal in the deathlessness of fire. David has achieved
immortality, and he lives immortal in the deathlessness of light which is
life."
Andreyev was born at Orel in 1871 and was graduated from the
gymnasium there. According to his own testimony, he never seems to
have been a promising student. "In the seventh form," he tells us, "I
was always at the bottom of my class." He lost his father early, and
often went hungry while studying law at the University of St.
Petersburg. In the University of Moscow, to which he went next, he
fared better. One of the means that he used to eke out a livelihood was
portrait painting to order, and in this work he finally attained such
proficiency that his price rose from $1.50 apiece to $6.00.
In 1897 he began to practise law, but he gave most of his time to
reporting court cases for the "Courier," a Moscow newspaper, and later
to writing feuilletons and stories. He tried only one civil case, and that
one he lost. His work in the "Courier" attracted Gorky's attention, and
the older writer