Page:Andreyev - When the King Loses His Head.djvu/9

Rh hypochondriac and the follower of Tchekhov. Maxim Gorki is to him the personification of the joy of life and of the will to battle, which permeates the earlier writings of Andreyev.

The stormy period of the political convulsion which shook Russia in the wake of the Japanese war, evoked a number of beautiful stories and essays from Andreyev's pen, thrilled and aflame with the love of budding freedom. But even here the pessimism of Andreyev breaks through. In his charming story of the French Revolution, with which we begin this present volume, "When the King Loses His Head," when liberty is in danger, when the Twentieth, the symbol of monarchy, is in the toils of the people, here and there the crowd cries "Long Live the Twenty-First," ready to resume the badge of servitude.

In the "Abyss" Andreyev portrays the shameful fall of the young idealist, but in "The Marseillaise," the prose-poem with which we conclude the present volume, written in 1905, Andreyev pictures the apotheosis of a hero hidden behind the absurd exterior of a physical weakling. "The Marseillaise" is an overture to the stirring drama of the brief but glorious epoch of the popular risings after the Japanese war.

But the monarchic power crushed the spirit of the people. A period of unparalleled persecutions, executions and repressions followed. "The Story of the Seven that were Hanged" is characteristic of this terrible period which preceded the World War. This story is dedicated to Tolstoy, and its motto might well be "Fear not them that kill the body, but cannot kill the soul." Some of the passages of this story are so stirring that it is impossible to read them without shedding a tear.

After the fall of the Romanovs, a brief period of intoxicating sense of freedom overwhelmed Russia. It was