MIKHAIL ARTSYBASHEV
During my high school years, living in a dismal town with no adequate public library, I had the fortune to meet Frederick Houghton Penney, a retired architect and teacher, who had worked at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. It had been his custom, in his half-century or more of working, to stop at a used bookstore every day, to buy at least three more books for his library. Like a ball of string his collection grew, and probably all the stray books and library discards from several towns around found their way to his rambling Victorian house. I had the run of at least five thousand volumes on the ground floor, and I could see that the stairs and hallways above were lined with even more books, more than ten thousand by his estimate.
An atheist and freethinker, Penney was happy to share with me all the books one was not supposed to read, but since the library was an accumulation of many periods, encompassing not only serious ideas, but also intellectual fads, I was as likely to find a volume of the immortal Voltaire as some pseudo-scientific tome of the 1920s espousing eugenics. I took out about ten books a day from this uncataloged treasure house, consumed them with a speed-reading frenzy, and returned them the next day to get ten more. It was not all science, philosophy, and politics: I had my fill of Everyman's Library editions of classic fiction, and many other translations of French, German, and Russian literature. History I devoured, from The Anglo Saxon Chronicle to H. G. Wells' Outline of History, that era's attempt to swallow history whole. I read more books from the World War I era than any boy of the 1960s should ever endure, and I was more steeped in the horrors of invaded Belgium and trenched-over France than I was in the second war that my parents' generation had fought in.
And thus came to me, as I was about to head off to Vietnam-era college, an anti-war play, in an early Borzoi edition, titled simply War, authored by the unfamiliar Russian name Mikhail Artsybashev. In a blunt and brutal way it seemed to me to say everything that one needed to say about war and its ghastly allure. Then I found fiction by Artsybashev, all of it jarring, brutal, and in opposition to the gagging patriotism that was preached in school. I did not know that he was a forgotten author; it had not even occurred to me that good books could vanish from the landscape. Nor did I know that his writing was banned in the Soviet Union, and would not be read again in his native country until after 1990.
A lurid Art Deco edition of his scandalous novel, Sanine, also passed before me. This novel, an account of a willful hedonist with the freedom to indulge his pleasures and a philosophy to justify them, had been condemned around the world as a work of near-pornography. I also vaguely understood that Artsybashev was an anarchist, but even coming of age in the Vietnam War era did not make it evident to me what an anarchist was, or that there were several flavors of that creed. I only knew that there was an "outsider" quality that attracted me.
While I read Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and other Russian writers throughout my adult years, and studied the Russian language and poetry, I seldom heard Artsybashev's name mentioned again. His fame outside Russia had faded with the 1920s. The casual and serial seductions in his novel, Sanine, didn't flap the flappers much, I assume, and it was tame stuff compared to what would follow. In any case, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover had broken the censorship barrier on Eros and was available in paperback the same year I stumbled upon Sanine.
Anarchism remained a far more distasteful or even dangerous topic everywhere. The Bolsheviks had not liked Artsybashev one bit, and dismissed his writing as a symptom of bourgeois decadence, a convenient cover for their objection to his politics. Lenin's government banned his works in Russia and they stayed banned — not until 1993 would Russians once again read Artsybashev in his native tongue.
I also came to a better appreciation of this Russian and his stark exposés of Russia's social, political, and sexual corruption once I examined Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own, one of the foundational documents of anarchism. It came out in 1844, a prelude to that coming year of almost universal revolution and rebellion of 1848, a rival manifesto to that of Karl Marx. Stirner and Marx were sworn enemies, each striving toward a very different rebellion against authority. Stirner preached a world-view of the individual against all, and placed the solitary man or woman at the center of all politics. Without need for bombs or utopian colonies, the Stirner anarchist was already free. What could be a worse threat to an authoritarian regime than a sovereign individual?
Artsybashev was called a Nietzschean, but he himself insisted that Stirner was his inspiration. In a biographical note written and published in 1915 (before his exile), here is how Artsybashev described himself and his influences:
I was born in the year 1878 in a small town in Southern Russia. By name and extraction I am Tartar, but not of pure descent, since there is Russian, French, Georgian, and Polish blood in my veins. There is one of my ancestors of whom I am proud, and that is the well-known Polish rebel-leader Kosciusko, my great grandfather on the maternal side. My father was a small landowner, a retired officer; my mother died of consumption when I was three years old, bequeathing me a legacy of tuberculosis. I did not become seriously ill until 1907, but even before that the tuberculosis never left me in peace, as it manifested itself in various forms of illness.
I went to a grammar-school in the provinces; but as I had taken the keenest interest in painting from my childhood, I left it at the age of sixteen and went to a school of art. I was very poor; I had to live in dirty garrets without enough to eat, and the worst of it all was that I had not enough money for my principal needs — paints and canvas. So it was not given to me to become an artist; to earn anything at all I was obliged to do caricatures and write short essays and humorous tales for all kinds of cheap papers.
Quite by chance in the year 1901 I wrote my first story, "Pasha Tumanoff." An actual occurrence and my own hatred for the superannuated schools suggested the subject. People have no idea of what a Russian grammar-school is like. The innumerable suicides of the pupils, which still continue, are a testimony of its educational value for Russian youth. "Pasha Tumanoff" had been accepted for publication by one of the most distinguished Russian reviews, but it was not allowed to appear because the censorship at that time categorically forbade any statements to be made which did not show life in the schools in a pleasing light. Thus it was impossible for the story to achieve publicity at the right time, and it did not appear until some years later in book form. That has been the fate moreover of many of my things. In spite of this the story was not without favorable results for me; it attracted the attention of the editorial staff and stimulated me to further work. I renounced my dream of becoming an artist and transferred my allegiance to literature. This was very hard; even to-day I cannot see paintings without emotion. I love colors more than words.
"Pasha Tumanoff" was followed by two or three stories which interested the editor of a small review, a man named Mirolyubov. My first introduction to literary circles I owe to him. Up till then I had never been in editorial offices, but had always sent my tales by post. This was because I imagined them as temples consecrated to literature, which I revered. Nowadays we live in other times and have other customs in Russia; advertisement and influence dominate the literary world. However, Mirolyubov's name will leave its mark on the history of Russian literature, although he himself did not write. He was the last Mohican of the old idealistic, self-sacrificing school of literature, which has now been supplanted by commercial interests here, as it has in Western Europe. His energy, his intelligence, his touching love for his work, and the wonderful gift of a fascinating personality made his small review, which only cost a ruble a year, one of the most distinguished publications, while from a literary point of view it excelled all the other large and expensive ones. The greatest exponents of our modern literature — Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, Kuprin, and others — contributed to it. It has now been abandoned, for Mirolyubov did not wish to lower its standard, as all the others did, even in the darkest days of the Revolution. Mirolyubov himself was obliged to seek refuge abroad from Government proceedings.
My acquaintance with him was of the greatest importance to me personally. I owe to him much of my development as a writer; and he made matters easier for me by appointing me sub-editor of his paper, although at that time I was absolutely unknown and very young. Mirolyubov was a born editor and taught me also to like the occupation, which I continued to follow even after his review had been given up, editing now one journal, now another. I look upon it as one of my merits that I have helped so many young writers, who are now becoming known.
At this time, that is to say in the year 1903, I wrote Sanine; this fact is wilfully suppressed by Russian critics; moreover they try to persuade the public that Sanine is an outcome of the reaction of the year 1907, and that I have followed the fashionable tendency of contemporary Russian literature. In reality, however, the novel had been read by the editors of two reviews and by many celebrated authors as early as 1903. Again I owe it to the censorship and the timidity of publishers that it was not brought out at the time. It is an interesting fact that the novel was refused on account of its ideas by the editorial staff of the same monthly review, The Contemporary World (Sovremennyi Mir) which some years later begged me to give it to them for publication. In this way Sanine made its appearance five years too late. This was very much against it, at the time of its appearance literature had been flooded by streams of pornographic and even homosexual works, and my novel was liable to be judged with these.
The book was received with the greatest interest by young people, but many critics protested against it. This may be partially explained by the trend of thought of the novel; but no doubt they were greatly influenced by the circumstance that I patronized our literary after-growth, and at the same time stood aloof from the "commanding generals of literature," so that I gradually found myself opposed to all the influential literary circles. I am an inveterate realist, a disciple of the school of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, whereas at the present day the so-called Decadents, who are extremely unfamiliar, not to say antipathetic to me, have gained the upper hand in Russia.
Later than Sanine, but before its publication, that is to say in the year 1904, I wrote a series of stories, such as "Ensign Gololoboff," "The Madman," "The Woman," "The Death of Ivan Lande." The last-named tale brought me what is known as fame.
In the year 1905 the bloody Revolution began and long distracted me from what I consider "mine" — the preaching of anarchical individuality. I wrote a series of tales dealing with the psychology and types of the Revolution. My favorites among them are "Morning Shadows" and "The Stain of Blood."
I must observe that in these Tales of the Revolution I said what I believe, and was attacked therefore on all sides. Whereas the Black Gangs reckoned me among the spiritual originators of the Revolution and one even condemned me to death, the Radical press attacked me because I recognized none of the party-barriers and made no idols of the revolutionary politicians. Subsequent events proved that I was right in many cases, when, in spite of my enthusiasm for the cause of liberty, I did not think the time had come to see a saint in every ringleader of the movement and to believe in the revolutionary readiness of the people.
At this time much that I had written for purposes of agitation was confiscated, I myself was indicted, but the temporary success of the Revolution at the end of 1905 saved me from punishment.
When the Revolution [of 1905] came to an end, Society rushed to literature, which in quantity, if not in quality, had received a new impetus. The editors of the monthly review who had refused my Sanine remembered it and were the first to publish it. It evoked almost unprecedented discussions, like those at the time of Turgenyev's Fathers and Children. Some praised the novel far more than it deserves, others complained bitterly that it was a defamation of youth. I may, however, without exaggeration assert that no one in Russia took the trouble really to fathom the ideas of the novel. The eulogies and the condemnations are equally one-sided.
In case it might interest you to know what I myself think of Sanine, I will tell you that I consider it neither a novel of ethics nor a libel on the younger generation. Sanine is the apology for individualism; the hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form this type is still new and rare, but its spirit is in every frank, bold, and strong representative of the new Russia. A number of imitators who have never grasped my ideas hastened to turn the success of Sanine to their own advantage; they injured me greatly by flooding the literary world with pornographic, wantonly obscene writings, thus degrading in the readers' eyes what I wished to express in Sanine.
The critics persisted in ranking me with the number of second-rate imitators of Sanine who displayed their "marketable wares" full of all sorts of offensiveness. Not until recently, when Sanine had crossed the frontiers, and translations had appeared in Germany, France, Italy, Bohemia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Denmark, and also, in part, in Japan, were other voices to be heard among the critics.
Russia always does grovel before foreign opinion.
What else is there?
My development was very strongly influenced by Tolstoy although I never shared his views on "non-resistance to evil." As an artist he overpowered me, and I found it difficult not to model my work on his. Dostoyevsky, and to a certain extent Chekhov, played almost as great a part, and Victor Hugo and Goethe were constantly before my eyes. These five names are those of my teachers and literary masters.
It is often thought here that Nietzsche exercised a great influence over me, This surprises me, for the simple reason that I have never read Nietzsche. This brilliant thinker is out of sympathy with me, both in his ideas and in the bombastic form of his works, and I have never got beyond the beginnings of his books. Max Stirner is to me much nearer and more comprehensible.
That is all I can tell you about myself. Forgive me if it is too little. But a genuine autobiography is a confession, and this is not the right time. And I have neither leisure nor inclination to recount private incidents in my life in greater detail.
The author's protestations about Sanine may seem excessive, but in fact the reputation of that one book had reduced him almost to a caricature, that of a pornographer posing as a literary man. Even as late as 1990, we see one critic mentioning Artsybashev in passing as a representation of "low art": "[T]he example of Artsybashev, whose semi-pornographic novels also contain sequences of pseudo-philosophical discourse."(1) Indeed, the scant academic writing about Artsybashev in English seems to toe that line. Otto Boehle's Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia: The Case of Mikhail Artsybashev's Sanine (2009) examines the exaggerated contemporaneous claims that young men were being lured into serial seduction of innocent girls, and other immoral behavior, by exposure to the book, and the largely imaginary phenomenon was even called "Saninism." Boehle seems to have found that Saninism was a critical-polemic witch-hunt and not a real thing. It was not like "Byronism," for example, which actually provoked imitative dress, speech, and action, and it was certainly not a cult. It only took the slip of a letter of the alphabet to associate Saninists with Satanism as well. Saninists were the imaginary hippies of pre-Revolutionary Russia. It should be no surprise that Artsybashev was personally reviled and assumed to be a practitioner of serial sex crimes.
Artsybashev did not always seem to mind the decadent label. He was happy to be the lead author for, and to write the introduction to, a lavish illustrated anthology titled Images of Satanism (Obrazy Satanizm).(2)
The author's personal history is not notable for crimes. He married at age 20, while still an art student, and separated from his wife in less than year. The son produced by this marriage would become the famous émigré artist Boris Artsybashev. His second wife, Elena Ivanovna, accompanied him into exile in 1923. Artsybashev's feverish schedule as writer and editor, as well as his tuberculosis, which required frequent stays in the healthier climate of South Russia, seemed to preclude a Casanova lifestyle. He did get himself expelled from Yalta in 1908, but it is not certain if that was for political or social reasons. His anti-war play, War (Voina) was banned from the stage in 1914. His anti-Bolshevik writings in 1917-1918 were enough to get him on a list of people to be killed, but the moral objections to him seem to have boiled down to the idea that a man who could write Sanine would do anything.
After being driven out of Soviet Russia in 1923, Artsybashev lived in Warsaw, where he founded and edited the newspaper, For Liberty! (Za svobody!), and also published items in the Lithuania-based journal, The Echo. Artsybashev died in Warsaw on March 24, 1927, of the tuberculosis he had suffered with since the age of 21. He was forty-eight years old.
ARTSYBASHEV AND THE CRITICS
The critical reception to Artsybashev's work has been dismal, although here and there one encounters allusions to the author outside of literary circles. One of Artsybashev's stories about death terrified composer Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1916, setting loose in the composer a neurotic fear of death, echoed in his use of the medieval Dies Irae chant as a motif in his music. (3)
One American critic, William Lyon Phelps, a Yale English professor and essayist, defended Sanine in 1911 as a novel of ideas:
It is not sensational in the incidents, though two men commit suicide, and two girls are ruined; it is sensational in its ideas … his novel made a tremendous noise, the echoes of which quickly were heard all over curious and eclectic Germany, and have even stirred Paris. Since the failure of the [1905] Revolution, there has been a marked revolt in Russia against three ideas that have at different times dominated Russian literature: the quiet pessimism of Turgenyev, the Christian non-resistance religion of Tolstoy, and the familiar Russian type of will-less philosophy. Even before the Revolution Gorky had expressed the spirit of revolt; but his position, extreme as it appears to an Anglo-Saxon, has been left far behind by Artsybashev, who with the genuine Russian love of the reductio ad absurdum, has reached the farthest reaches of moral anarchy in the creation of his hero Sanin. . . .
The Revolution was a failure, and it being impossible to fight the government or to obtain political liberty, people in Russia of all classes were ready for a revolt against moral law, the religion of self-denial, and all the conventions established by society, education, and the church. At this moment of general desperation and smoldering rage, appeared a work written with great power and great art, deifying the natural instincts of man, incarnating the spirit of liberty in a hero who despises all so-called morality as absurd tyranny. . . . Sanine is not in the least a politically revolutionary book, and critics of that school see no real talent or literary power in its pages.(4)
Perhaps too much has been quoted here about Sanine, but what can be said for the novel, pertains to Artsybashev's stories as well. They are all unpredictable, written from beyond the pale of conventional politics and morality. Almost no similar critical attention has been paid to his other fiction. The aforementioned Prof. Phelps did comment on one Artsybashev story, "Nina" (published in this volume under its other title, "The Horror"): "Twenty-three pages are sufficient for the author to produce a finished work that begins in laughter, and ends in horror so awful that no one should read it whose nerves are not under control."(5)
The curious after-life of two English-language translations, Artsybashev's Tales of the Revolution, and an anthology in which he and Andreyev both appeared, Best Russian Short Stories, propelled his name and stories forward in ways of which he was unaware, and from which he would not profit. Chinese writer Lu Xun, in 1920, found a 1909 German translation of Tales of the Revolution, and was sufficiently impressed to make a Chinese version. As critic Mark Gamsa observes, "As everything written or translated by Lu Xun was cherished and reprinted, Artsybashev remained known in China — his stories associated, for some, more with the Revolution of 1917, from which he had fled abroad, than that of 1905, with which he had sympathized — long after Soviet censors had removed the émigré writer's works from bookstores and libraries at home."(6)
The 1917 Boni & Liveright anthology, Best Russian Stories, went through various editions with confusing copyright dates, and stayed in print in some form until at least 1970. Gamsa has established that editor and compiler Thomas Seltzer raided earlier English-language publications of many of the stories, without attribution to translator or publisher,(7) and owing to the narrow range of international copyright at the time, many of the translations already were, and all certainly now are, firmly in the Public Domain.
Artsybashev's story, "The Jew," was selected by Gorky, Andreyev, and Sologub to be part of a 1916 volume titled The Shield, a collection of essays and stories by non-Jewish Russians. This volume, which was translated into English and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1917, made the case strongly that many Russian intellectuals were not anti-Semites, and had much to say in protest about the treatment of Russian Jews. If there be any doubts about the seeming ambivalence of Artsybashev's story, its inclusion in this volume indicates that fellow Russians understood the story's humanity and its deep irony.
His Notes of A Writer (not available in English even now) might shed a lot more light on his struggles while remaining in Russia, and that book also includes an essay on Tolstoy that elaborates on his opposition to Tolstoy's world-view. Ronald D. LeBlanc, in his exploration of sex in Russian fiction, lifts the lid off this spat with this excerpt: "Tolstoy is not worth a brass farthing. …Not a single one of his numerous writings on philosophical or religious themes is worth even three pages out of the Gospels. … He got so muddled in trivialities, he so weighed down an idea with trifling nonsense that, as way to hoist the truth about the corruption of the spirit by the flesh, he demonstrated the indecency of ladies' jerseys and the indubitable harm of tobacco" (8).
The author's fierce anti-Bolshevism must be taken into account when considering his fading from sight. In 1926, he issued a public statement against the Soviet government, which was reprinted in many newspapers. In the decades that followed, editors and critics on the Left were not terribly inclined to reprint, or even to speak favorably, of anti-Communist Russians. "Anarchist," "decadent," "libertine," and "anti-Bolshevik" were a fatal combination of labels for Anglophone acceptance into the 1930s and 1940s. One finds piles of reprints of Maxim Gorky's books, in used bookstores, and none of Artsybashev or Andreyev. He ought to be read side-by-side with D. H. Lawrence, Camus, and other modern writers.
When Artsybashev died at the age of 48, his American defender Phelps reported his death in Scribner's, surprised that hardly anyone had bothered to note his passing. The critic's summation of the writer was: "Artsybashev was more sensational than profound; but his novel The Breaking Point showed great ability, and some of his short stories are impressive. Pessimism is as fashionable in Russian literature as optimism is in ours; but Artsybashev's pessimism began where that of others left off. Those who think Main Street gives a gloomy picture of small-town life should read Artsybashev's The Breaking Point, and hear the physician talk" (9).
The same month Artsybashev died, a Chinese language edition of his stories titled The Bloodstain (Xuehen) was issued by Kaiming Book Company. Stern medicine for the soul, his stories seemed to travel to where they were most needed.
Nicholas Luker, who has published a modern translation of Sanine, appears to be the Russian's current primary defender in academia, publishing a volume of five essays and a complete bibliography of Artsybashev's writing in 1990. This study, unfortunately, is not readily obtainable (10).
LEONID ANDREYEV
I did not discover the fiction of Leonid Andreyev until very recently, and although his writings were banned by the Soviets until 1959, his work was not unknown, and he had the reputation, from afar, as being the Edgar Allan Poe of Russia. This, of course, intrigued me. Once I plunged into the author's "The Red Laugh," which evokes the title of Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," I knew that I had a new Russian writer to add to my pantheon, and that the shadow of Poe had indeed reached Russia. The Poe-Andreyev connection is asserted via word-play: the title "The Red Laugh" is "Krasnyi Smekh" in Russian, while "The Red Death" is "Krasnyi Smyert.'"
"The Red Laugh" turns out to be one of the most powerful anti-war stories ever written, full of deep intuition about mob behavior, hysteria, sleep deprivation, post-traumatic stress, soldier suicides, war mania among the civilian population, and the degradation of a society that valorizes killing. Its power is all the more startling since it is based on Andreyev's experiences in the Manchurian War, and its publication in Britain in 1905 makes it a horrifying prophecy of the wars that would envelop Europe and Russia from 1914 on.
Andreyev provided the following autobiography in 1908:
I was born in Oryol, in 1871, and studied there at the gymnasium. I studied poorly; while in the seventh class I was for a whole year known as the worst student, and my mark for conduct was never higher than 4, sometimes 3. The most pleasant time I spent at school, which I recall to this day with pleasure, was recess time between lessons, and also the rare occasions when I was sent out from the classroom .... The sunbeams, the free sunbeams, which penetrated some cleft and which played with the dust in the hallway — all this was so mysterious, so interesting, so full of a peculiar, hidden meaning.
When I studied at the gymnasium, my father, an engineer, died. As a university student I was in dire need. During my first course in St. Petersburg I even starved — not so much out of real necessity as because of my youth, inexperience, and my inability to utilize the unnecessary parts of my costume. I am to this day ashamed to think that I went two days without food at a time when I had two or three pairs of trousers and two overcoats which I could have sold.
It was then that I wrote my first story — about a starving student. I cried when I wrote it, and the editor, who returned my manuscript, laughed. That story of mine remained unpublished .... In 1894, in January, I made an unsuccessful attempt to kill myself by shooting. As a result of this unsuccessful attempt I was forced by the authorities into religious penitence, and I contracted heart trouble, though not of a serious nature, yet very annoying. During this I made one or two unsuccessful attempts at writing; I devoted myself with greater pleasure and success to painting, which I loved from childhood on. I made portraits to order at three and five rubles a piece.
In 1897 I received my diploma and became an assistant attorney, but I was at the very outset sidetracked. I was offered a position on The Courier, for which I was to report court proceedings. I did not succeed in getting any practice as a lawyer. I had only one case and lost it at every point. In 1898, I wrote my first story — for the Easter number — and since that time I have devoted myself exclusively to literature. Maxim Gorky helped me considerably in my literary work by his always-practical advice and suggestions. (11)
Andreyev's stories did not attract a great deal of notice until he was attacked by name by the wife of Leo Tolstoy, who wrote, "The poor new writers, like Andreyev, succeeded only in concentrating their attention on the filthy point of human degradation and uttered a cry to the undeveloped, half-intelligent reading public, inviting them to see and to examine the decomposed corpse of human degradation and to close their eyes to God's wonderful, vast world…"(12).
The author continued to publish stories whose subject matter and sweep proved him to be more than a realist sensation-seeker, taking on the darker aspects of human morality and sexuality, the horrors of war, and the daily cruelties of the Tsarist regime.
In 1908, Herman Bernstein, having just interviewed Leo Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, sought out Andreyev, not in Russia, but just across the border in Finland (then part of the Russian Empire), where the writer was building the summer home that would become his unintended place of exile. This account of Andreyev in his prime is worth quoting at length.
As I drove from Terioki to Andreyev's house, along the dust-covered road, the stern and taciturn little Finnish driver suddenly broke the silence by saying to me in broken Russian:
"Andreyev is a good writer .... Although he is a Russian, he is a very good man. He is building a beautiful house here in Finland, and he gives employment to many of our people."
We were soon at the gate of Andreyev's beautiful villa — a fantastic structure, weird-looking, original in design, something like the conception of the architect in the "Life of Man."
"My son is out rowing with his wife in the Gulf of Finland," Andreyev's mother told me. "They will be back in half an hour."
As I waited, I watched the seething activity everywhere, on Andreyev's estate. In Yasnaya Polyana, the home of Count Tolstoy, everything seemed long-established, fixed, well-regulated, serenely beautiful. Andreyev's estate was astir with vigorous life. Young, strong men were building the House of Man. More than thirty of them were working on the roof and in the yard, and a little distance away, in the meadows, young women and girls, bright-eyed and red faced, were haying. Youth, strength, vigor everywhere, and above all the ringing laughter of little children at play. I could see from the window the "Black Little River," which sparkled in the sun hundreds of feet below. The constant noise of the workmen's axes and hammers was so loud that I did not notice when Leonid Andreyev entered the room where I was waiting for him.
"Pardon my manner of dressing," he said, as we shook hands. "In the summer I lead a lazy life, and do not write a line. I am afraid I am forgetting even to sign my name."
I had seen numerous photographs of Leonid Andreyev, but he did not look like any of them. Instead of a pale-faced, sickly-looking young man, there stood before me a strong, handsome, well-built man, with wonderful eyes. He wore a grayish blouse, black, wide pantaloons up to his knees, and no shoes or stockings.
It was a very warm day. The sun was burning mercilessly in the large room. Mme. Andreyev suggested that it would be more pleasant to go down to a shady place near the Black Little River.
On the way down the hill Andreyev inquired about Tolstoy's health and was eager to know his views on contemporary matters. "If Tolstoy were young now he would have been with us,'" he said.
We stepped into a boat. Mme. Andreyev took up the oars and began to row. We resumed our conversation.
"The decadent movement in Russian literature," said Andreyev, "started to make itself felt about ten or fifteen years ago. At first it was looked upon as mere child's play, as a curiosity. Now it is regarded more seriously. Although I do not belong to that school, I do not consider it worthless. The fault with it is that it has but few talented people in its ranks, and these few direct the criticism of the decadent school. They are the writers and also the critics. And they praise whatever they write. Of the younger men, Alexander Blok is perhaps the most gifted. But in Russia our clothes change quickly nowadays, and it is hard to tell what the future will tell us — in our literature and our life."
"How do I picture to myself this future?" continued Andreyev, in answer to a question of mine. "I cannot know even the fate and future of my own child; how can I foretell the future of such a great country as Russia? But I believe that the Russian people have a great future before them — in life and in literature — for they are a great people, rich in talents, kind and freedom-loving. Savage as yet, it is true, very ignorant, but on the whole they do not differ so much from other European nations."
Suddenly the author of "Red Laughter" looked upon me intently, and asked: "How is it that the European and the American press has ceased to interest itself in our struggle for emancipation? Is it possible that the reaction in Russia appeals to them more than our people's yearnings for freedom, simply because the reaction happens to be stronger at the present time? In that event, they are probably sympathizing with the Shah of Persia. Russia today is a lunatic asylum. The people who are hanged are not the people who should be hanged. Everywhere else honest people are at large and only criminals are in prison. In Russia the honest people are in prison and the criminals are at large. The Russian Government is composed of a band of criminals, and Nicholas II is not the greatest of them. There are still greater ones. I do not hold that the Russian Government alone is guilty of these horrors. The European nations and the Americans are just as much to blame, for they look on in silence while the most despicable crimes are committed. The murderer usually has at least courage, while he who looks on silently when murder is committed is a contemptible weakling. England and France, who have become so friendly to our Government, are surely watching with compassion the poor Shah, who hangs the constitutional leaders. Perhaps I do not know international law. Perhaps I am not speaking as a practical man. One nation must not interfere with the internal affairs of another nation. But why do they interfere with our movement for freedom? France helped the Russian Government in its war against the people by giving money to Russia. Germany also helped — secretly. In well-regulated countries each individual must behave decently. When a man murders, robs, dishonors women he is thrown into prison. But when the Russian Government is murdering helpless men and women and children the other Governments look on indifferently. And yet they speak of God. If this had happened in the Middle Ages a crusade would have been started by civilized peoples who would have marched to Russia to free the women and the children from the claws of the Government."
Andreyev became silent. His wife kept rowing for some time slowly, without saying a word. We soon reached the shore and returned silently to the house.
That was twelve years ago. I met him several times after that. The last time I visited him in Petrograd during the July riots in 1917. (13)
THE FRIENDSHIP OF ANDREYEV AND GORKY
Andreyev's friendship with Maxim Gorky spanned many years, and the author owed much to Gorky's encouragement and sponsorship of his early work. Their gradual estrangement, in which Gorky displayed his hardening into Bolshevist absolutism, led Gorky into tirades against his friend's apparent mysticism and his refusal to commit to the values of the new regime. The 1958 publication of some of their correspondence showed the extent of their estrangement, with Gorky self-avowedly transforming himself into an engine of hatred, and Andreyev refusing the bait. Of Andreyev's final break with Gorky, reviewer R. A. Scott-James wrote, "Only at the last does he turn in despair to rend his correspondent and destroy utterly the grounds of the false accusations and abuse, which, in growing savagery, Gorky had heaped upon him. Andreyev was up against something worse than the anger of an ordinary man — he was confronted by the incarnate spirit of modern Communism with all its materialism and all its cruelty. It was against this that he was beating his head in vain — a brick wall of irrational, implacable hatred" (14). It was perhaps inevitable that the two would be estranged, for Andreyev had to look the other way as early as 1905, when Gorky had written to him: "Life is built on cruelty, horror, force; for reconstruction a cold, rational cruelty is necessary, that's all. They are being killed? They must be killed" (15).
Andreyev felt a surge of patriotism during World War I, and denounced German militarism. His fiction-writing languished in favor of journalism. He welcomed the Russian Revolution when it came, but condemned the Bolshevik seizure of power that swiftly betrayed its ideals. He fled Petrograd in late 1917 for his summer home. The author's grand-daughter recalled: "Andreyev regarded the Bolshevik takeover as a catastrophe for Russia. The use they made of terror he saw as absolute evil. . . . As the Bolsheviks triumphed, Andreyev became an outcast, an exile in his own house, which now lay beyond the Soviet border"(16). Finland declared its independence at this time, and "White Guard" Finns waged battles across the Finnish countryside against "Red Guard" Bolsheviks. Being a Russian in newly-free Finland was a peril.
Andreyev's grand-daughter, who professed more admiration and sympathy for Gorky than he perhaps deserves, adds a final note to the frail thread that remained between the two writers:
Shortly before [Andreyev's] death, Gorky, whom Lenin had entrusted with the task of saving Russian writers from starvation while bringing them into the fold of Soviet literature, sent an emissary to Andreyev. Gorky offered two million rubles for the rights to Andreyev's books and for his support for the Bolsheviks' literary work. Andreyev angrily refused. According to Chukovsky, when the news and Andreyev's death reached Gorky, he wept. 'However strange as it may seem, he was my only friend,' he said. 'Yes, the only one' (17).
In 1922, while visiting England, Gorky penned some reminiscences about Andreyev, which were translated and privately-printed in a limited edition. It portrays Andreyev, in the years before his marriage, as a binge drunkard, and Gorky confesses joining in many such adventures, depicting himself as the better angel who saved his fellow writer from even worse excesses. The anecdotes are worth reading, and many are doubtless true, despite the narcissism and self-serving nature of the narrative. Andreyev's essential mysticism and darkness baffled Gorky, although in emotional outbursts the revolutionary would find Andreyev in seeming accord with his world-view. Two geniuses were never more far apart, yet youth and animal magnetism, and perhaps fatal fascination cemented their friendship until politics made it impossible. In Soviet Russia, one could no longer have friends with whom one "agreed to disagree." In Gorky's account, Andreyev's marriage saved him from his excesses, although he, like a certain great American writers, alternated between periods of unproductive lassitude and frenetic productivity. But the same can be said of many writers of a more poetic temperament.
Significantly, Gorky ends his account with a painful recollection of one of the outbursts by Andreyev that both baffled and dazed him with admiration:
On my arrival in Finland I met Andreyev, and talking to him, told him my cheerless thoughts. Hotly and even as though wounded by them, he argued with me. But his arguments seemed to me unconvincing: he had no facts.
But suddenly, lowering his voice, with his eyes screwed up, as though straining to look into the future, he began to talk of the Russian people in words unusual with him — abruptly, incoherently, and with great and undoubtedly sincere conviction.
I am unable, and if I could I should not like, to reproduce his words. Their force consisted not in their logic or in their beauty, but in a feeling of tormented sympathy for the people, a feeling of which, in such force and such expression, I had not thought Leonid capable.
He shook all over with nervous tension, and crying, almost sobbing like a woman, he shouted:
"You call Russian literature provincial because the majority of the great Russian writers are men of the Moscow province? Good, let us suppose so. But yet it is a world literature, it is the most serious and powerful creative activity of Europe. The genius of Dostoyevsky alone is enough in itself to justify even the senseless, even the thoroughly criminal, life of the millions of the people. And suppose the people are spiritually sick — let us heal them and remember as has been said: 'A pearl only grows in a diseased shell.'"
"And the beauty of the beast?" I asked.
"And the beauty of human endurance, of meekness and love?" he replied. And he went on to speak of the people, of literature more and more ardently and passionately.
It was the first time he had spoken so passionately, so lyrically. Previously, I had heard such strong expressions of his love applied only to talents congenial to his spirit — to Edgar Poe most frequently of all.
Soon after our conversation this filthy war broke out. Our attitude, different towards it, divide me still further from Andreyev. We scarcely met; it was only in 1916 when he brought me his books that we both once more deeply felt how much we had gone through and what old comrades we were. But, to avoid arguing, we would speak only of the past; the present erected between us a high wall of irreconcilable differences (18).
So much for Gorky, whom posterity has called to task for his sycophantic role in the Stalin years. If Andreyev had "last words," they could well be the lines found on his desk after his death:
Revolution is just as unsatisfactory a means of settling disputes as is war. If it be impossible to vanquish a hostile idea except by smashing the skull in which it is contained; if it be impossible to appease a hostile heart except by piercing it with a bayonet, then, of course, fight .... (Satan's Diary, xvii)
THE RECEPTION OF ANDREYEV'S WRITING
Critics seem to have been confounded when attempting to categorize Andreyev's fiction. Aspects of symbolism, realism, and existentialism can be found in his stories. Andreyev takes the same kinds of incidents from the daily news or from war reporting as Artsybashev does, but his stories are not plain narratives. They are closer to the story-telling of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe. Stephen Hutchings wrestles with this many-sided esthetic, noting at one point that "The deliberate indeterminacy and ambiguity of meaning cultivated in many of his stories align him with the Symbolist response, the attempt to create an arcane, absolute work of art accessible to a select few"(19). Without noting the similarities to Poe, this critic notes Andreyev's "density of language, the plethora of figures of speech, and abundance of qualifying words and phrases, the overstated literariness of the narration"(20) And then the same critic goes on to show Andreyev as a creator of folk-tale-like narratives, "formalized as types of oxymoron or, at least, as being ridden with oxymoronic structures … the living dead … the insanity of the sane … bestial cruelty within idyllic romance … imprisonment in freedom … blood and horror intermingled with laughter"(21). These characteristics might seem a puzzle if one if seeking a successor to Turgenyev or Chekhov or Tolstoy, but Andreyev fits well in the line of Hoffmann, Poe, and perhaps Gogol.
Andreyev was fascinated with film, and saw several of his plays adapted for the new medium. He was also an adept photographer, and his surviving glass-plate photographs of Russian, European, and Finnish locales, including touching details of his family life in exile, are in full color, among the oldest-known full-color photos of Russian life. They were published in 1989 in a handsome volume, Photographs by a Russian Writer, with a foreword by the author's grand-daughter, Olga Andreyev Carlisle.
The photographs of Andreyev's country house lead one to assume that he spent his last two years in comfortable exile. But Finland itself was torn with civil strife, and all of his sources of income must have been cut off. He felt that his writing could now be nothing more than "a boy throwing stones over a fence into a stranger's garden" (22). The specter of poverty and hunger was everywhere, and a heart ailment hastened his end in 1919. He was only 48 years old. When he died, the Andreyev household only had 100 marks in cash (equivalent to about six U.S. dollars), and the doctor who attended the writer's demise refused to take a payment from his widow. His funeral was delayed while a wealthy family in a nearby town kept his coffin in a mortuary.
EDITOR'S NOTES
Since both Artsybashev and Andreyev were exiles after the Bolshevik seizure of power, it seemed a natural to bring some of their stories together into a single volume. Both were exiles, but neither lived long enough to be part of the long-lived Russian émigré community abroad. Leonid Andreyev died in Finland in September 1919, an exile, in despair over the fate of his homeland, while Artsybashev languished in Warsaw for four years, where he died of tuberculosis in 1927. Both writers died in their 48th year of life.
I am not the translator of the stories in this volume, and my research for this introduction has been restricted to text and criticism available in English. All these stories have been translated once or more, sometimes without attribution to a named translator, in books that are now firmly in the public domain. I have selected from these, and I have done such editing as I might apply to a manuscript crossing my desk from a living writer. Where I found awkwardness in the English version and could make a sentence here and there more engaging or logical, I have done so. I have corrected obvious errors of fact, such as temperatures, distances, or place-names. I have updated slang words and terms in industry and replaced them with words more up-to-date and suited to American readers. Where an ellipsis occurs because of either the Russian or British censor, I have supplied the word or phrase that was apparently intended. I have used italics to convey internal thoughts, since in several stories there is a fine distinction between silent thought and "talking to oneself." Here and there I have inserted words to clarify who is speaking in dialogue. Finally, I have re-punctuated some paragraphs to eliminate excessive semicolons.
In Artsybashev's "Sheviriov," I have taken sufficient liberties that this might better be called an adaptation of a translation. In Pinkerton's version, it is not made clear that the rooming house is accessed by an external staircase, not one inside the building, so I have added clarifying words. There was also an indoor/outdoor confusion in Sheviriov's visit to a factory, which a few words sufficed to fix. And most perplexing of all is the scene of Aladiev's ghastly death, where the author or translator seem to have forgotten that the bomber left two packages and not one. When Aladiev suddenly begins burning papers heretofore unmentioned, I have assumed that it is the second package whose incriminating contents the revolutionary feels compelled to burn.
In Andreyev's "The Serpent's Tale," I have taken some liberties, and as this piece is really a prose poem, I changed the existing translation to include more sibilant sounds and to enhance the intended hypnotic effect of the story.
In "The Red Laugh" I have made some word and phrase substitutions or modernizations, changed Russian versts to U.S. miles, and broken up some long paragraphs. Another change here is a typographic one: by setting the RED LAUGH in large-and-small capitals, I have raised Andreyev's title from a commonplace adjective-and-noun into an actual entity. For me, it is impossible to read this story without elevating "red laugh" to the status of an actual being. (In alternate-text versions of this book, such as epub format, this may appear as all-capitals only.) In most other regards Alexandra Linden's 1905 translation is unlikely to be bettered. It reads like the best British weird fiction, a genuinely terrifying journey through war-induced madness.
"The Dark" was taken up by Leonard and Virginia Woolf for their Hogarth Press in 1922, in a fine translation by L.A. Magnus and K. Walter. As both Russian and British censors took their toll, there are some odd moments in this bizarre tale of a young anarchist on the run, taking refuge in a brothel. As a sworn celibate, in fact a virgin, the young anarchist has no idea what he is supposed to do when Lyuba, a dream-filled prostitute, decides he is her ideal man. We are provided with blessedly little of the mechanics . The Hogarth Press version omits several section headings, the fifth of which suggests a time lapse during which the loss of innocence finally takes place. Later in the story, an ellipsis mentions a bomb but then omits the verb indicating what a bomb does. This gap I felt at liberty to fill in.
Andreyev's "The Abyss" posed the most difficulties. The 1905 translation by Marya Galinska is the only public domain translation available, yet it is clearly inadequate. Although the human aspect of this horrifying story of gang rape and temptation is all conveyed, the story takes place in an incongruously pastoral landscape and forest, on a summer night, and the translator made quite a mess of it. Studying Olga Andreyev Carlisle's more literal translation from 1987 helped somewhat in deciphering Galinska's garbled atmospherics. My solution was to paint the backdrop of the story freely on my own as a Midsummer night gone bad. If old women sitting in a ditch remind me of witches, and the moon becomes ominously gibbous, I have merely improved the set on which the horrors are acted out. This tale, which was Andreyev's response to Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata," produced howls of outrage when it was published, and it is shocking still.
Asked why I have taken the time and effort to update these translations and publish this book, I would suggest that these stories are as fresh as today's headlines. With a journalist's sharp focus, they deal with sexual predators, murderers, political fanatics, mass shooters, corrupt officials, the traumas visited upon soldiers in battle, the aftermath of the returning soldier, and the dehumanization of a people as they are pulled into a civil war against their fellow citizens. Some are incurious or unthinking people who suddenly find themselves in a world of firing squads and rebellions. Others are committed ideologues, believing themselves to be serving a high purpose, who are pulled inexorably toward doing the unspeakable.
These two authors lived in times that tested and distorted the very idea of what it is to be human, and their stories are an unflinching warning. As an outsider and anarchist, Artsybashev seems not to have an answer to the dilemmas he portrays, but he is there to show us that all these things are human; they are what people do. Andreyev has more soul and humanity, and his retreat into the Finnish countryside, to look at Russia from outside rather than be killed within in, shows him as a principled man who still had hope for his people, even if it seemed that humanistic values were no longer an assured progression.
— Brett Rutherford
Pittsburgh, PA.
December 17, 2019
END NOTES
1. Stephen Hutchings. "Mythic Consciousness, Cultural Shifts, and the Prose of Leonid Andreyev." The Modern Language Review. Vol. 85 No. 1, January 1990, p. 114.
2. Images of Satanism (Obrazy Satanizm). 1913. Moscow: Zaria. This illustrated volume includes an introduction by Artsybashev, "Ideia Diavola (The Idea of Satan)" and a story, "Razskazy o velikom znanii (Tales of Great Knowledge)".
3. Sergei Bertenson and Jay Leyda. Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music. 1956. New York: New York University Press, p. 198.
4. William Lyon Phelps. Essays on Russian Novelists. 1911. New York: The Macmillan Company, pp. 248-252.
5. William Lyon Phelps. "Russian Novels in New Translations." Yale Review. Vol. 6 No. 1, October 1917, p. 209.
6. Mark Gamsa. "Cultural Translation and the Transnational Circulation of Books." Journal of World History. Vol. 22 No. 3, 2011, p.561.
7. Gamsa, p. 566 and fn.
8. Quoted in Leblanc. Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction. 2009. Durham NC: University of New Hampshire Press, p. 175.
9. William Lyon Phelps. "As I Like It." Scribner's. Vol. 81 No. 6, June 1927, p. 688.
10. Nicholas J. L. Luker. In Defence of a Reputation: Essays on the Early Prose of Mikhail Artsybashev. 1990. Nottingham UK: Astra Press.
11. Satan's Diary, pp. vi-vii. Translated by Herman Bernstein.
12. Ibid, p. viii.
13. Ibid, pp. x-xv.
14. R. A. Scott-James. "A Great Hater." The New Republic. May 26, 1958, pp. 18-19.
15. Quoted in Scott-James, p. 19.
16. Olga Andreyev Carlisle. "Introduction." Visions: Stories and Photographs by Leonid Andreyev. 1987. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 25.
17. Ibid, p. 26.
18. Maxim Gorky. Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev. Translated by Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky. 1922. Kingswood, Surrey: Windmill Press.
19. Hutchings, p. 115.
20. Hutchings, p. 116.
21. Ibid, p. 122.
22. Ibid, p. 26.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andreyev, Leonid. And It Came to Pass That the King Was Dead. Translated by Maurice Magnus. 1921. London: C.W. Daniel, Ltd.
Andreyev, Leonid. Confessions of a Little Man During Great Days. Translated by R.S. Townsend. 1917. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Andreyev, Leonid. The Crushed Flower and Other Stories. Translated by Herman Bernstein. 1917. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. [Includes "The Crushed Flower," A Story Which Will Never Be Finished," "On the Day of the Crucifixion," "The Serpent's Story," "Love, Faith and Hope," "The Ocean," "Judas Iscariot and Others," and "The Man Who Found the Truth"].
———. "The Abyss." Hours Spent in Prison. [Stories by Gorky, Andreyev and Koroloneko]. Translated by Marya Galinska. n.d. London: Simpkin, Marhsall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., pp. 75-112.
———. The Dark. Translated by L. A. Magnus and K. Walter. 1922. Richmond UK: The Hogarth Press.
———. His Excellency The Governor. Translated by Maurice Magnus. 1921. London: C.W. Daniel, Ltd.
———. "The Lie." Translated by A.E. Chamot. Selected Russian Short Stories. 1925. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 319-329.
———. Photographs by a Russian Writer: An Undiscovered Portrait of Pre-Revolutionary Russia. Edited by Richard Davies. Foreword by Olga Andreyev Carlisle. 1989. London: Thames and Hudson.
———. The Red Laugh: Fragments of a Discovered Manuscript. Translated by Alexandra Linden. 1905. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
———. Satan's Diary. "Authorized Translation." Preface by Herman Bernstein. 1920. New York: Boni & Liveright.
———.The Seven Who Were Hanged: A Story. Translated by Herman Bernstein. 1909. New York: J. S. Ogilvie Publishing Company.
———. "Silence" Translated by A. E. Chamot. Selected Russian Short Stories. 1925. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 329-343.
———. The Sorrows of Belgium: A Play in Six Scenes. Translated by Herman Bernstein. 1915. New York: The Macmillan Company.
———."Valia." Short Story Classics (Foreign). Volume 1: Russian. Edited by William Patten. 1907. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, pp. 309-326.
———. Visions: Stories and Photographs by Leonid Andreyev. 1987. Translated by Henry and Olga Carlisle. 1987. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. [Includes new translations of the stories, "The Thought," "The Red Laugh," "At the Station," "The Thief," "The Abyss," "Darkness," and "The Seven Who Were Hanged." Olga Carlisle is the grand-daughter of Leonid Andreyev].
Artsybashev, Mikhail. "Bolshevism on trial." English Review. Vol. 43, July 1926, pp. 45-55.
———. Breaking Point. 1915. New York: B. W. Huebsch.
———."The Jew." The Shield. Edited by Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, and Fyodor Sologub. Translated by Abraham Yarmolinsky. 1917. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
———. The Millionaire. Translated by Percy Pinkerton. 1915. New York: B.W. Huebsch. [Includes the stories, "The Millionaire," "Ivan Lande," and "Nina" (aka "The Horror")].
———. "The Revolutionist." Best Russian Short Stories. Edited by Thomas Seltzer. 1917. New York: Boni and Liveright. [Story originally appeared in The Metropolitan].
———. Sanine. Translated by Percy E. Pinkerton. 1907. New York: B. W. Huebsch.
———. Tales of the Revolution. Translated by Percy Pinkerton. 1917. London: Martin Secker. [Includes the stories, "Sherviriof," "The Blood-Stain," "Morning Shadows," "Pasha Tumanoff," and "The Doctor"].
———.Testimony of M. Artsybashev. 1923. New York: Huebsch.
———. War: A Play in Four Acts. Translated by Thomas Seltzer. 1916. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
———. War: A Play in Four Acts. Translated by Percy Pinkerton and Ivan Ohzol. 1918. London: Grand Richards Ltd.
Bertenson, Sergei and Jay Leyda. Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime n Music. 1956. New York: New York University Press.
Boehle, Otto. Erotic Nihilism in Late Imperial Russia: The Case of Mikhail Artsybashev's Sanine. 2009. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Gamsa, Mark. "Cultural Translation and the Transnational Circulation of Books." Journal of World History. Vol. 22 No. 3. 2011, pp. 553-575 {Includes details on the tortured history of Best Russian Short Stories and other translations.]
Gorky, Maxim. Reminiscences of Leonid Andreyev. Translated by Katherine Mansfield and S. S. Koteliansky. 1922. Kingswood, Surrey: Windmill Press. [Limited edition of 750 copies.]
Hutchings, Stephen. "Mythic Consciousness, Cultural Shifts, and The Prose of Leonid Andreyev." The Modern Language Review. Vol. 85 No. 1, January 1990, pp. 107-123.
Images of Satanism (Obrazy Satanizm). 1913. Moscow: Zaria. [Includes an introduction by Artsybashev, "Ideia Diavola (The Idea of Satan)" and a story, "Razskazy o velikom znanii (Tales of Great Knowledge)" A lavishly illustrated anthology with essays, fiction, and poems.]
LeBlanc, Ronald D. Slavic Sins of the Flesh: Food, Sex and Carnal Appetite in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction. 2009. Durham NH: University of New Hampshire Press.
Luker, Nicholas J. L. In Defence of a Reputation: Essays on the Early Prose of Milhail Artsybashev. 1990. Nottingham UK: Astra Press. [Includes an exhaustive bibliography of Artsybashev's publications.]
Phelps, William Lyon."As I Like It." Scribner's. Vol. 81 No. 6, June 1927, pp. 687-694.
———. Essays on Russian Novelists. 1911. New York: Macmillan Company [Includes an essay on Artsybashev].
———. "Russian Novels in New Translations." Yale Review. Vol. 6 No. 1, October 1917, pp. 207-212.
Scott-James, R.A. "A Great Hater." Review of The Letters of Gorky and Andreev, edited by Peter Yershov and Lydia Weston. The New Republic. May 26, 1958, pp. 18-20.
Shield, The. Edited by Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, and Fyodor Sologub. Translated by Abraham Yarmolinsky. 1917. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Stirner, Max. The Ego And Its Own. (1844) Edited by David Leopold from the translation by Steven Tracy Byington. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. 1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
