Leonid Andreyev

Leonid Andreyev's Expressionist novella The Red Laugh is an experimental, fragmentary depiction of war and its psychological effects, both on those who participate in the fighting and on those who hear of its atrocities from afar; it was inspired by the horrors of the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. Translated into English for the first time since 1905, it is here paired with a fresh translation of Andreyev's earlier story 'The Abyss,' which caused scandal when it first appeared in 1902. This edition provides an illuminating introduction by translator Kirsten Lodge establishing the importance of Andreyev to both the Russian and to the overall modernist canon, as well as a range of background materials that help set the novel in its historical, literary, and artistic contexts.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1914.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1914.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1914.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1914.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1910.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1910.

Mikhail Artsybashev (1878-1927) and Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919) both spent their last years in exile from Soviet Russia, and saw their works banned in their native land. Each had gained notoriety for shocking the reading public and alarming the authorities. Artsybashev was a realist and an anarchist. Describing one Artsybashev story, an American critic wrote, "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." Andreyev took the world as he found it, and wove an obsessive web of war, sexuality, and death, so much so that he has been called the Russian Edgar Allan Poe.These ten stories, edited/adapted and introduced by Brett Rutherford, 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, and the dehumanization of a people as they are pulled into a civil war against their fellow citizens. 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. This is the 258th publication of The Poet's Press.