But in between came a world of misty modernism that dealt in Symbols and Heavenly Ladies and was fascinated by Bergson and Scriabin and Nietzsche and the occult, all of which was blown away by the Guns of August; in Russian literature, Andrei Bely is still remembered, but the most popular prose writer of the period, Leonid Andreev, is not. That is largely, of course, because he wasn’t as great a writer as Bely, but it’s unfair to call him a purveyor of “hysterical melodrama” and a “footnote to Russian literary history” as Stephen Hutchings does; the History of Russian Literature I reviewed here is more to the point in calling him “the first fully accomplished existentialist writer in Russian literature.” He’s uneven — I’ve quit a couple of stories in the middle — but when he’s at his best, he’s well worth reading, and one novella I can recommend is the 1906 Губернатор [The governor, tr. There is essentially no plot, just a situation: a governor-general is obsessed by his memories of ordering a mob of protesting workers to be fired on during the revolutionary year of 1905, and awaits the assassination he (and everyone in the city) knows is coming.
Author: languagehat
Published at: 2025-05-10 19:50:52
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