Ideas on Myth, Truth, the ‘Other’, and the Inside-Outside Tension (WARNING: SPOILERS)

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS. IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW HOW THE PLAY ENDS, DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS POINT.

Here I’ll address some of the heavier, abstract concepts that formed a good deal of the last few weeks of my research.

First, a few words on myth. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, myth is “a traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology [cause], or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.” According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it is “a symbolic narrative, usually of unknown origin and at least partly traditional, that ostensibly relates actual events and that is especially associated with religious belief… Myths are specific accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience.”

Breaking that down a bit, HE has elements of a myth, but is not strictly a myth per se; one can argue that HE is a God-like figure and that his arrival at the circus is an extraordinary event indeed, given that the play itself fits under the escapist subset of Neo-Romantic plays that are set in otherworldly or exotic locations in another time. The play is set in France in a prior century, but the realism of the play is such that one can’t quite qualify it as ‘existing apart from ordinary human experience.’

WARNING: REALLY, IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW THE PLAY ENDS, STOP READING IMMEDIATELY. PLOT SPOILERS BELOW.

The critic Harold Segel finds much in HE that is mythical, pointing out the end as the play’s mythic substructure now made over-structure (that is, it dominates rather than hides) – death, last words, challenge flung, action moved to a metaphysical plane (that is, the afterlife). But, there is more just under that surface. Recall Consuela as Psyche, and HE as ‘an old god in changed garb’ come to Earth to rescue her, the goddess born of sea-foam much like Venus. While this element has been largely struck from the present adaptation, it is still important to keep it in mind; this very idea of HE as a self-made god coming from the outside into a foreign world brings to mind a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky – author of Crime & Punishment –  called “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”. (Dostoevsky, by the way, was quite an influence on Andreyev; Andreyev wrote in 1910 “Of past Russian writers Dostoevsky is closest of all to me. I consider myself his direct pupil and follower.”)

In”The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”, the protagonist describes a dream in which he infiltrates a society that lived more or less as a collective; all actions were performed for the benefit of the group, and the pronoun ‘I’ had no place among the people – all were one, and one was all. As soon as the protagonist enters the society and introduces the idea of an individual ‘I’ – he begins telling everyone that their way of life is false and only he has possession of The Truth – the society begins to break down; sin is committed, crime flourishes, and the happiness of the population is destroyed. The protagonist sees that he is responsible for this and asks the people to crucify him for his transgression, begging to be made a martyr. They refuse to kill him and instead take him to an insane asylum, at which point he wakes up from the dream.

HE echoes this story in that He, an outsider, comes into a world that operates under its own customs and laws and demands to be made part of it. In this way he is a self-made god, and a Christ-like figure whose purpose is not ascertained for some time after his arrival. Ultimately his arrival causes the disintegration of most of the world that he enters; he gets to leave it, but not as a martyr, and the reader never finds out what becomes of the rest of the characters. It is as if the reader is watching someone else’s dream of a ridiculous man, except the reader does not get to see him wake up.

Does He have the truth? The reader never finds out, because Andreyev ends the play with He taking his own life, thereby denying the reader a chance to see what happens in His wake. Raising this question is, however, a good segué into the idea of ‘the other’, because He is very much an ‘other’ who, in turn, raises questions of inside vs. outside.

Much has been written elsewhere – and on this resource guide – about Andreyev’s relationship with Gorky, which has been characterized as the relationship of a shadow to its caster; Andreyev was Gorky’s shadow, and then Gorky became Andreyev’s shadow, which the reader sees reflected in the relationship between He and the Gentlewoman. From the outset, it is clear to the reader that He is an Other; he doesn’t fit in with the circus at all, and has to ask to be made into one of them, which is a humbling and potentially humiliating experience – after all, the performers could have said ‘no’. HE immediately violates group protocol by refusing to play by its rules and learn its inner workings and dynamic, almost gleefully violating the rules before he’s even learned them, though he does submit to the self-conceived act of being slapped. Yet even when He is considered one of the group, He is still an Other – he gets special treatment and is allowed to get away with violating the group norms, which threatens people such as the Baron, who perhaps senses that this Other is indeed a dangerous being.

But why introduce this character of the Other in the form of He? James Woodward describes Andreyev’s career in elementary school thus: “Andreyev balked from the beginning at this fetish for rules and regulations, of which he was subsequently to deliver scathing indictments in his early feuilletons… He stood out against the grey student mass as a graphic protest. ‘His gloomy, proud appearance, for which his comrades nicknamed him so aptly the duke, his love of solitude, his contemptuous attitude to his studies… and to the rules and teachers, which expressed itself in everything, beginning with his persistence in wearing his hair long, which was persecuted and punished by the authorities – all this sharply singled him out.’” Perhaps, then, there is an autobiographical element to the play deeper than that of the shadow/caster relationship between Andreyev and Gorky; here we see Andreyev in his youth as a self-made Other, much like He. But later in his career, it did not escape the notice of critics that Andreyev could not detach himself from his heroes; Woodward says that “the imprint of his own sufferings is clearly stamped on those of his protagonists… the fiction of Andreyev is not only an indictment of the world in which he lived; it is also a work of self-castigation.” One of the indictments he made of his world was the “problem of individual isolation”, which we can maybe stretch to include self-made Others, who choose to isolate themselves and, perhaps, thus elevate themselves above the rest of society. HE is a bit late in Andreyev’s body of work to be really considered part of his literary attacks on solitude, but the echo is unmistakable: an individual who has removed himself from one society and thus isolated himself is a danger not only to himself but also to any other society with which he comes into contact. (Recall that Andreyev spent the last few years of his own life in solitude in Finland, which essentially destroyed any remaining relationships he had.)

This, of course, brings up the great tension in HE of ‘inside’ versus ‘outside’, which can be extended to include the internal vs. the external as well. Harold Segel wrote that Symbolist drama of Andreyev’s time “sought to shift emphasis from the external to the internal, which was now invested with a far greater and more universal significance… This intense preoccupation of symbolism with death led to a corresponding deemphasis of man’s physical life… the drives and ambitions of the physical life become ultimately inconsequential in the face of death.” It also has to “reflect [the spiritual core of the work] by pointing up the insignificance of the mundane before the awesome infinitude of the supernatural and structurally by either eliminating or greatly minimizing external action.” The reader sees this in HE with the outside world from which He comes being painted as almost evil, and the focus of the action instead is on the inside of the circus ring, on this inner world to which so few have access (so, in a sense, it becomes a sacred space just waiting to be violated). This inner world, recall from Segel, serves on its surface as a refuge of escape for He because He initially finds solace in this new world until the wonderfully ironic moment of yet another Other from the outer world intruding (and recall Segel interpreting this as Andreyev’s indictment of the very idea of escape – ultimately, it is futile, because whatever you’re running from will eventually catch up to you). It is no coincidence that poison is involved in the death of both Consuela and He, because the outer world itself is poison to both the play’s characters and Andreyev himself.

This idea of an inner and outer world could be related to Andreyev’s preoccupation with two planes of existence, an idea that he cultivated early on in his writing and that was time and again expressed throughout his career. Woodward notes that his works from the start “show a dualistic conception of reality… [this preoccupation] with this distinction between two realities, two levels of life, is confirmed not only by his fiction, but also by numerous passing remarks in his correspondence.” One of these remarks refers to a “first reality” which Woodward classifies as “employed by Andreyev to denote the ephemeral, the world of man’s empirical existence… On this plane man is a prisoner within the walls of his individuality, and his intellect is the instrument by means of which he endeavors to pierce them. But its struggles are eternally frustrated; its powers do not extend beyond the ‘first reality’. The whole impetus of Andreyev’s thought is towards the establishment of contact with the ‘other plane’, the transcendence of the empirical ego.” One can translate these two planes of existence into inner and outer; the inner world, the sacred space, is the ‘other plane’ towards which the reader – and his protagonists – must strive, and the outer world, the ‘first reality’, is the poisoned space from which the reader – and his protagonists – must escape.

Considering Andreyev’s background with depression, this idea of a dual life – inner and outer – makes perfect sense. Mental illness was a large part of the writer’s life; in the diaries he kept through 1909, Andreyev projected both an internal and external ‘I’, as the critic Frederick White notes. This could well have translated later into Andreyev’s keen desire to keep his depression a secret; recall that he very much wanted no one outside of his family and close friends to know that he was depressed (and even that is debatable, since he would let them know he wasn’t feeling well but would tell them that it was physical, and not mental!), and that he did not take kindly to anyone saying he – or any of his characters, many of whom critics pegged as autobiographical – had gone insane. As he gained popularity, he found himself increasingly the subject of scrutiny and criticism, which he did not appreciate; he struggled greatly to control how he was portrayed in the public eye – that is, how his outer self was perceived by others. The Russian writer Georgy Chulkov notes this ‘double life’ of Andreyev, in which “on one side was a large family, many acquaintances, publishers, critics, reporters, actors, and an endless procession of chance visitors: which means a lot of concern and fuss. On the other side, there was his internal excruciating anxiety, blind and grim, which tormented him: here, in solitude, his soul consumed itself.”

From this it is clear that at play is a conflict of inner and outer lives and selves; in his own world, Andreyev had an internal self, one that he would not show to the outside world for fear of having it poisoned somehow by that world. (This also brings to mind his reaction to the first performance of HE in Moscow, when he complained that they – the director and actors – had ruined his play; the outside world had intruded on his inside world, which existed only on the page until that point, and corrupted it irreparably!) He thus had to fashion an outer self – a shell – to present to the outside world in order to protect his inner self from this poison. This outer self became more solidly formed after Gorky’s constant rebuffs of his desire for deep friendship; having offered Gorky his inner self, and having had it rejected, he had to work harder at cultivating an outer self for both Gorky and the public at large. Ultimately, when he found himself no longer able to live in the outer world – the ‘first reality’ – Andreyev retreated into an inner world of isolation in Finland, training his gaze inward when an outward look would no longer fulfill him.

The reader sees what happens in HE when inside and outside meet – to understate, Very Bad Things. But can one argue that there is some good that comes out of this conflict? HE – and He – does force the reader to confront questions of loss, love, betrayal, life, death, and so forth, and none of these questions would even exist without the simple introduction of an Other – an Outsider – to an inside space whose inhabitants by definition are the Norm (you can’t have an Other without having a starting point with which to compare it!). But what does that do to the readers, performers, and audience members? When those people enter this inside world, they bring some of their own outside experience to it, which can either poison it or enrich it. By performing this play an inside world is created that is both inside and outside of the performers, but that becomes an inside world that the audience must enter from the outside in order to experience, bringing themselves their own outside world of experiences – again, possible poison, or not. And yet the world created becomes Inside for the audience as well; when they leave, they go back Outside – literally! – to re-join the world outside of the building, a world which knows nothing of the levels of inside and outside that have been created here. It is no coincidence that this play takes place inside of a circle, broken, which encloses the performers whose own individual circles have to overlap and crash into one another and attempt to remain whole. It is that tension – and the breaking of that tension and all of those circles – that forms the backbone of this play.

In lieu of closing commentary on these issues, I offer the following anecdote from a memoir that Gorky wrote about Andreyev for that volume; Gorky is “I”, and Andreyev is “he”. Emphasis in italics is mine.

“And suddenly he started, as though burned by an inner fire. ‘One should write a story about a man, who all his life, suffering madly, searched for truth. And, truth appeared to him, but he closed his eyes, stopped his ears, and said, ‘I do not want you even if you are marvelous, because my life, my torments have ignited in my soul a hatred for you.’ What do you think?’ I did not care for this subject. He said with a sigh: ‘Yes, first one must answer, where is the truth – in man or outside of him? According to you, it is in man?’ He laughed. ‘Then this is very bad…”

Critics’ Notes on Myth, Christ, and Other Concepts. (WARNING: SPOILERS)

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS. IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW HOW THE PLAY ENDS, DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS POINT.

Behind the scenes of the play, the critic James Woodward says, there are “two levels of meaning: the social polemic of the work, and the metaphysical in which the action is presented in the form of myth.” The ‘here’ and ‘there’ distinctions are obvious; Woodward relates ‘here’ to talent and ‘there’ to culture, separating the two – talent is associated with innocence (beauty), and culture with corruption (intellect). Culture vulgarizes talent – we see this in the way HE approaches his craft – but “the mere existence of talent is a source of profound embarrassment to the purveyors of culture”.

On the symbolic meaning of HE, the Russian writer Fyodor Sologub likens HE to Christ, saying they both take on themselves the sins of the world; Woodward suggests that Andreyev had in mind Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man – the nihilistic, egotistic protagonist of Dostoevsky’s story “Notes From the Underground” – and the pleasure the Underground Man derives from being humiliated.  The following is quoted from “Notes From the Underground”:

“It is so subtle, so inaccessible sometimes to rational understanding that slightly limited people or even simply people with strong nerves will find it totally incomprehensible. ‘Perhaps those who have never received slaps will also fail to understand’, you add with a smirk, and thereby you politely hint to me that during my life perhaps I have also experienced a slap and therefore speak as an expert.”

But Woodward then goes on to claim that Andreyev “seems to interpret the role of his hero as a form of vengeance”, and says that HE’s willingness to be slapped by the other clowns “is a parody of his fate in the external world, a parody of the profanation of his ideas… he is presenting his audience with the spectacle of their profanation of their own lives.”

WARNING: REALLY, IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW THE PLAY ENDS, STOP READING IMMEDIATELY. PLOT SPOILERS BELOW.

Woodward also notes that Andreyev himself – in a letter to the actress E.A. Polevitskaya (for whom he wrote the role of Consuela) – insisted that Consuela, and not HE, is the center of the drama. Woodward says that Consuela is the Gentle(wo)man’s antithesis, and “these two figures mark the two poles between which the other characters are grouped, and we might say that the path followed by ‘He’ runs from ‘The Man’ to Consuela.” When HE comes to Consuela’s defense, the play enters into the realm of myth, which more or less is absent in this adaptation – the idea of gods and goddesses rising from sea foam is touched upon, but not explored to the depth that it is in the original. Woodward likens Consuela to Psyche, and HE to ‘an old god in changed garb’ who descends to Earth to rescue her. He says: “The mystical relationship between them is intensified as the play progresses… [E]ven so, there is an absence of true harmony between them… The ornate, passionate rhetoric of ‘He’ leaves her breathless, but she is already yielding to temptation. Unable to elevate her above the evil which is about to take possession of her, ‘He’ poisons her.”

Woodward reads the final death scene as HE taking Consuela’s soul, and using the rest of the poison to speed himself along to heaven, where he can truly be one with her in the afterlife. But he ascribes the Baron’s suicide to the Baron having quickly ascertained all of this, and deciding to take his own life in order to get himself into the afterlife even faster so that he can ‘beat’ HE to Consuela and assume eternal possession of her first. Thus, when HE cries out ‘I am coming!’, he is actually saying it to the Baron, and not to Consuela. (!)

Gorky and Andreyev: A Troubled Friendship

Maksim Gorky was one of Andreyev’s contemporaries, and arguably the best-known Russian prose writer of the early 20^th century. His full name was Aleksei Maksimovich Gorky, but he was known as Maksim, though I’ll refer to him on a last-name basis from now on. He was one of the founders of the Socialist Realist movement, which by 1934 had evolved to a form composed of four parts: 1) Proletarian: art relevant to the workers and understandable to them; 2) Typical: scenes of everyday life of the people; 3) Realistic: in the representational sense; 4) Partisan: supportive of the aims of the State and the Party. (I confess: that was paraphrased from Wikipedia.)  He was a well-known revolutionary, more liberal in his leanings and generally more politically active than Andreyev, and he wrote frequently about the poor, concentrating on the great inherent worth and liveliness of the individual human being. He lived in exile from 1906 to 1913 due to health reasons and increasing government oppression of writers, but was allowed to return thanks to a grant of amnesty. His 1936 death is a contentious subject; those ‘in the know’ claim that he was killed by Stalin’s secret police, but Stalin himself denied this, even making sure that he was one of the pallbearers at Gorky’s funeral.

A photograph of Gorky:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

James Woodward opens Leonid Andreyev: A Study with the sentence “With the exception of Gorky, Russian prose writers of the early twentieth century have received scant attention in the West.  When Gorky, with his usual modesty, acknowledged the inferiority of his own artistic gifts to those of his friend, he was simply reiterating an opinion long held by most contemporary critics and literati, symbolists and ‘realists’ alike. Moreover, the general prevalence of this view, indicating that both camps found something to applaud in Andreyev’s works, suggests that in certain important respects he may be considered a more widely representative figure than Gorky of Russian literary and intellectual life of the two decades before 1917.” Thus, even though it seems that everyone up to and including Gorky and Andreyev themselves knew that Andreyev was the better writer, Andreyev still ended up in Gorky’s shadow.

As early as 1902,  Andreyev was quite aware of and thankful for Gorky’s assistance with his craft; he noted that Gorky helped him become more critical of himself as well as realize his own gifts and talents. Their relationship was not always smooth; as in any professional collaboration that also happens to be personal, they had their share of disagreements, no matter how indebted Andreyev remained to Gorky. When Gorky left Russia in 1906, he went to the Isle of Capri, inviting Andreyev to join him. Andreyev finally did so in 1907, but he described the experience of sharing a dark, humid villa with Gorky as one of the most trying of his life. He was dogged by thoughts of suicide, and wrote to Gorky later (in 1912) that during their stay together he wondered if he should perhaps sever all ties with Gorky then and there. Andreyev did eventually emerge from his funk and begin writing anew with a fresh onslaught of ideas.

Before he left Capri, Andreyev began work on the story “Darkness”, with which Gorky took great issue. The story is based on an incident in which one of Andreyev’s revolutionary acquaintances lectures a prostitute on morality; offended, she slaps him, and contrite, he kisses her hand in apology. According to Gorky, Andreyev distorts this incident into an implausible tale, perverting it beyond all hope. Andreyev defended his right as an artist to spin the incident as he saw fit, but Gorky (as stated in his memoir about Andreyev) felt keenly that “from that time on… something snapped between Andreyev and myself.”

Part of the writers’ relationship was collaboration on various literary journals. In 1916, the newspaper Russian Will was started, and its principal organizer announced that, among others, he planned to have both Gorky and Andreyev write for it. Gorky refused to participate, and Andreyev agreed to edit the literary, critical, and theater sections of the paper. He mostly agreed for financial reasons, though he did sincerely believe that it was a progressive paper and that he would be allowed decent freedom in his editorial decisions; neither of those turned out to be true, and he was quickly exhausted by constantly defending himself from criticism. He fled to Finland within two years of the paper’s birth, seeking refuge from an increasingly oppressive government in which he received no support – financial or otherwise – from Gorky.

While in Finland, Andreyev read with horror the reports of other writers going bankrupt and selling all of their possessions, and then begging Gorky for work, which Gorky gave to them. Reading this, Andreyev was disgusted, seeing Gorky not as a champion of the writer’s cause but as “a friend who has gone over to the enemy” – someone to whom he referred with “passionate indignation”. Gorky sent an emissary to Finland to offer Andreyev work – two million rubles’ worth, which is not by any means a small sum – which Andreyev immediately declined.

Andreyev died in 1919 of a heart attack, and before his burial, his coffin was stored in a chapel on the grounds of a house that Gorky had stayed in five years prior. Upon hearing the news, Gorky “remarked with tears in his eyes: ‘However strange it may seem, he was my only friend. Yes, the only one…’”.

The critic Frederick White in Memoirs and Madness, however, offers a different take.

White claims that the very thing James Woodward was doing above – that is, concentrating on the literary and political differences between Gorky and Andreyev that he says led Andreyev to be blamed for the failure of their relationship – is the wrong approach, and that much more important is Gorky’s own inability to “deal with people who could not play the role he assigned to them” combined with Andreyev’s great emotional neediness.

White outlines Gorky and Andreyev’s relationship as writers as Woodward has traced, adding that in 1911 Andreyev tried to reconcile with Gorky, but Gorky responded negatively, and though the two tried time and again to patch things up in the following years, they never succeeded. Andreyev’s agreement to edit Russian Will was the nail in the coffin of their friendship, as its ideas directly opposed those of the journal Gorky was editing – The Chronicle – and Andreyev at that point considered Gorky a literary enemy. (It’s here that Andreyev moves to Finland, where Woodward picks back up.)

White then goes on to discuss Gorky as an emotional entity – he grew up with a great degree of self-reliance, so he was often emotionally distant and “did not deal well with weakness or pessimism in other people”, which Andreyev immediately sensed and was often shocked by. Andreyev grew up “craving praise and acceptance” from others, which Gorky sensed and looked upon with disdain – but not at first, when he took Andreyev under his wing and helped him develop as a writer. Gorky was thrilled to have ‘discovered’ Andreyev, and Andreyev was ecstatic at having the help and praise of his new friend. “Gorky’s belief in Andreyev’s talent”, writes White, “was the one constant in their relationship”, but Gorky later came to regret that Andreyev never reached his full potential – most likely because Gorky himself thought he lacked talent such as Andreyev’s, and his protégé’s failure was doubly so his own failure. Andreyev was constantly thankful to Gorky for his patronage, but Gorky’s emotional distance caused Andreyev to wonder if Gorky was interested in him for his talent alone, or for something closer to friendship. As early as 1902, Andreyev was writing letters to Gorky claiming that he didn’t feel they were friends, begging him to accept him as more than just a pupil, pleading for emotional support; Gorky pulled away, stating a desire to only relate to Andreyev in literary terms, thereby setting the stage for an emotional coldness that would ultimately lead to the demise of their relationship.

By 1904, many had viewed Gorky and Andreyev as tutor and pupil, but when Andreyev published the story “Red Laugh” that year, White writes that “he… stepped out of Gorky’s shadow [emphasis mine] and established himself as a literary figure… This shifted the balance of power between the two writers”. Andreyev still sought Gorky’s opinion on his work, but was more willing to publish things against which Gorky protested for one reason or another.

White somewhat agrees that the time Gorky and Andreyev spent on Capri together led to the end of their friendship, but he argues that no single event led to a distinct fissure between them. Andreyev sensed that his emotional neediness was to blame for the separation, and that Gorky wouldn’t or couldn’t give him support, even though he constantly wrote to Gorky asking him for it.

Andreyev, then, sensed that they were both “ ‘too different’ in what each wanted from their relationship”, but Gorky couldn’t take any responsibility for this himself, casting Andreyev as the sole contributor to their separation. In his memoirs of Andreyev (published in 1922, three years after Andreyev’s death), Gorky likens Andreyev to a child when speaking of his depression and suicidal tendencies, and calls him a lazy and uneducated writer who got by on his talent alone. (Andreyev had a law degree from Moscow University and a very different – that is, much less regimented and much more sporadically manic – work ethic than Gorky.) Gorky goes on to paint a rather unflattering picture of Andreyev, calling him cruel for inflicting his emotional problems on others and accusing him of pretending to be suicidal so that others would reassure him that he was a worthy person. Thus, White says, was Gorky completely unable to grasp Andreyev’s deep depression and emotional issues; Andreyev laid himself bare, and Gorky never understood him – or even admitted to never having understood him.

Recall the quotation above from Gorky about Andreyev being his only friend. White says that “Gorky felt justified in making the argument that he had been Andreyev’s good friend. He had recognized Andreev’s talent and tried to encourage the use of this natural gift. It was Andreyev’s laziness, pessimism, and disrespect for the literary trade that had brought their friendship to an end. Gorky never seems willing to accept that Andreyev may have needed the emotional support and kindness of a friend, rather than the grimace of a disapproving older brother. For Gorky, Andreyev’s literary concerns represented the limits of his friendship.” Indeed, Gorky notes at the end of his memoirs about Andreyev that when they met in 1916, they could “only speak of the past; the present erected between us a high wall of irreconcilable differences. I shall not be violating the truth if I say that to me that wall was transparent and permeable. I saw behind it a prominent original man who for ten years had been very near to me, my sole friend in literary circles. Differences of outlook ought not to affect sympathies; I never gave theories and opinions a decisive role in my relations with people. Leonid Nikolaevich Andreyev felt otherwise. But I do not blame him for this; for he was what he wished to be and what he was capable of being – a man of rare originality, rare talent, and quiet courageous in his quest for truth.” Nonetheless, White notes, it was his overall tone of damnation that led Gorky’s memoir to be the text by which critics remembered Andreyev, which unfortunately explains the scorned obscurity in which he laid for decades.

Notes on Symbolism and Neo-Romanticism (WARNING: SPOILERS)

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS. IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW HOW THE PLAY ENDS, DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS POINT.

The critic Harold Segel in his book Twentieth-Century Russian Drama refers to the play as Romantic Escapism. He calls Andreyev a Neo-Romanticist, though he notes that Neo-Romanticists “disdained subjects drawn from contemporary life”; Andreyev broke from this with “HE”, which is very much set in the time in which Andreyev was writing.

Neo-Romantic plays can, for the sake of convenience, be typologically divided into several categories: allegorical with occult/supernatural themes, medieval with legendary themes; classical with mythical themes, plays woven from fairy tale and folklore; escapist with exotic settings in other times and/or spaces and/or societies; plays about art and artists and their places within the divisions of art in the cultural world at the time.

Segel says that the use of the clown isn’t accidental and is in fact a “tool of the antirepresentational concept of theater and drama”, which has its roots in the commedia dell’arte tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries. The setting of the circus isn’t accidental either; “to the Neo-Romantic mind, the circus was a sort of contemporary refuge from the ugly reality of the bourgeois world. The circus performers were artists in their own right and they had succeeded in creating a special world of their own, within the borders of society, yet at the same time distinctly apart from it and openly contemptuous of it.” Neo-Romanticists liked the circus because it offered an escape to the Middle Ages and even to the Middle and Far East. But, Segel notes, Andreyev’s circus in HE isn’t idealized or offered as a means of escape, but instead reflects the state of Andreyev’s mind at the time he wrote it.

WARNING: REALLY, IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW THE PLAY ENDS, STOP READING IMMEDIATELY. PLOT SPOILERS BELOW.

One of the Neo-Romantic ideas at play in our play is that of HE as a sensitive person “who is infringed upon and finally overwhelmed by a less sensitive and scrupulous person, someone, in short, whom the author uses to represent the hypocrisy and venality of the bourgeois society.” Andreyev denies HE a successful escape from his persecution; HE finds temporary refuge in the circus, where through his slaps he can strike back at the bourgeois society that has marginalized him; “the slaps he receives represent a grotesque reenactment of the real plunder of his personal dignity”, but HE gets to return some humiliation to the audience based on their reaction to his slaps. But the refuge is only temporary, and HE ends up taking his own life.

Andreyev’s pessimism is “inescapable” here; in this world there’s no escape from vulgarity, crassness, or hypocrisy. The circus here is just a microcosm of the outside world, which none of the characters seem to realize – or, if they do, they willfully ignore this fact – with the exception of Consuela, with whom HE falls in love “as an ideal of beauty”, although “HE is still aware of the impossibility of any real communication between them”. That said, losing Consuela is for HE just as bad as being dispossessed by The Gentle(wo)man – he gets ‘robbed’ both ‘there’ and ‘here’ – and Segel casts his poisoning of Consuela as a selfish act since he can’t allow himself to stand by while “the object of his idealization” is “prostituted by being sold to a person from the other world”. Segel also casts the Baron’s suicide as an act of remorse, with HE being surprised that the Baron’s love for Consuela was so strong. Defiantly, HE declares his intent to fight the Baron for possession of Consuela’s soul in the afterlife.

Segel notes elsewhere in the book that Andreyev actually had very little to do with the Symbolists and that he “succeeded where the Symbolists failed at devising a theatrically plausible and at times even effective type of allegorical rather than symbolistic ‘cosmic’ drama that demonstrates perhaps better than the plays of any of his contemporaries the impact on Russian drama of Maeterlinck’s ideas on static drama and metaphysical tragedy (which Andreyev later repudiated).”

To the Soviets, Andreyev was totally unacceptable because he repudiated the revolutionary cause of the 1910s, to the point where he crusaded “venomous[ly]” against the Bolsheviks after the 1905 revolution. He fell out of fashion eventually and was regarded as a “once-popular but basically shallow writer of philosophic pretensions”, whose pessimism and taste for the macabre didn’t endear him to anyone much beyond the 1920s.

In general, Segel notes, “the ferment of Neo-Romantic drama spanned nearly two decades of the twentieth century and far outweighed the more purely Symbolist playwriting inspired by the early Maeterlinck”. Russian Neo-Romantic playwrights also had a predilection for legend, which may be where the mythical bits of HE originate.

Some more words from Segel on Symbolist drama:

He characterizes it as a revolt against Naturalism, and differentiates it from Neo-Romanticism and Theatricalism, and suggests instead that those three comprise what’s commonly known as “Symbolism”- each has subtle differences from one another, though. Symbolists-proper thought that “true drama… consisted not of the mirrorlike reflection of the world of the senses or in the theatrical working out of an intrigue assembled by the playwright in an often contrived, artificial manner calculated to achieve audience interest, but in the dramatization of an inner, spiritual existence. With respect to conflict, symbolism sought to shift emphasis from the external to the internal, which was now invested with a far greater and more universal significance… This intense preoccupation of symbolism with death led to a corresponding deemphasis of man’s physical life… the drives and ambitions of the physical life become ultimately inconsequential in the face of death.”

“Not only is everything earthly finally destroyed by death, reducing man’s physical life to an irrelevance absurd for its grotesque self-concern, but man appears no more than a helpless marionette manipulated arbitrarily by mysterious forces collectively represented often simply as Fate which his finite intellect is incapable of knowing.”

“A Symbolist drama had to reflect [the spiritual core of the work] by pointing up the insignificance of the mundane before the awesome infinitude of the supernatural and structurally by either eliminating or greatly minimizing external action.”