the monologue of nearly a year ago. And his enormous room this evening appeared suddenly very small—and his talk lonely. Was it not sad that an artist with such attentive, sharp, and eager eyes should see nothing besides snow, should sit within four walls and listen to the howling of the wind? At the time when his beloved Kipling, London, and Wells were wandering over four continents he was living in a wilderness, without any external material for creation. One was amazed at the power of the poetic streams in him, which even in this desert had not run dry.
Leonid Andreyev gave himself up to writing with the same recklessness as to everything else—until his strength was utterly exhausted. Often he wrote nothing for months at a time and then suddenly he would produce with incredible speed in the course of a few nights an enormous tragedy or story. He would walk up and down the room, declaim aloud, and drink black tea; his typewriter would clatter as if possessed, yet still be hardly able to keep pace with him. His periods were subordinated to the musical rhythm which was carrying him along like a wave. Without this almost poetical rhythm he could not write even a letter.
He did not simply write his works; he was devoured by them as by a fire. He became for the time being a maniac and was aware of nothing but the particular piece of writing he had in hand; however small it was he extended it to grandiose dimensions, loaded it with gigantic images, for in his artistic creation as in his life he went to extremes; it was not for nothing that his favourite words in his books were "huge," "extraordinary," "monstrous." Every theme he touched became colossal, much larger than he himself, and shut him off from everything else in the universe.
And it was a remarkable fact: when he was creating his Leizer, the Jew from the play Anathema, he even in his private conversation, over tea, fell into a biblical style of speech. He himself had become for a time a Jew. But when he was writing Sachka Zhegulev his voice took on the bold tones of a Volga boatman. He involuntarily echoed the voices and gestures of his characters, the quality of their souls, entering into them like an actor. I remember, one evening, how he astonished me by his reckless gaiety. It appeared that he had just drawn the character of Tsyganek, the audacious character from The Seven That Were Hanged. In creating Tsyganek he turned into him himself, and out of inertia re-
