Page:Phelps - Essays on Russian Novelists.djvu/278



is at this moment regarded by many Russians as the foremost literary artist among the younger school of writers. He was born at Orel, the birthplace of Turgenev, in 1871, and is thus only two years younger than Gorki. He began life as a lawyer at Moscow, but according to his own statement, he had only one case, and lost that. He very soon abandoned law for literature, as so many writers have done, and his rise has been exceedingly rapid. He was appointed police-court reporter on the Moscow Courier, where he went through the daily drudgery without attracting any attention. But when he published in this newspaper a short story, Gorki sent a telegram to the office, demanding to know the real name of the writer who signed himself Leonid Andreev. He was informed that the signature was no pseudonym. This notice from Gorki gave the young man immediate prominence. Not long after, he published another story in the Russian periodical Life; into the editor's rooms dashed the famous critic Merezhkovski, who enquired whether