When you came to see him again after a few months, you discovered that he was a painter.
His hair was long and undulating, his beard the short one of the aesthete. He wore a black velvet jacket. His room was turned into a studio. He is as fertile as Rubens; the brush never leaves his hand the whole day. You pass from one room to another and he shows you his golden, yellow-green, pictures. Here is a scene from The Life of Man. Here is a portrait of Ivan Byelusov. Here again a large Byzantine ikon, representing Judas Iscariot and Christ with naive blasphemy. They appear to be twins and each has an ordinary nimbus around his head.
The whole night he tramps up and down his enormous room and talks about Velasquez, Dürer, Vrubel. You sit on the sofa and listen. Suddenly he half closes his eyes, steps back, regards you with a painter's eye, then calls his wife, and says:
"Anya, look, what chiaroscuro!"
You attempt to talk about something else. He listens only out of politeness. To-morrow is varnishing day at the Academy of Arts, yesterday he was visited by Ryepin, the day after to-morrow he is going to Gallen. You feel inclined to ask, "What about the yacht?"—but the members of the family sign to you, "Don't ask." Having become interested in something, Andreyev can talk about nothing else; all his previous enthusiasms become repulsive to him. . . . He does not like to be reminded of them.
When he plays at being an artist he forgets his previous part as a sailor; in general, he never returns to his past rôles, however brilliantly they may have been played.
And now colour photography.
It seems that not one man, but a gigantic factory, working in shifts, has produced these numberless heaps of large and small photographs, which have been piled up in his room stored in special boxes and chests, which hang in the windows and are stacked up on chairs. There is no corner of his villa which he has not taken several times. With some he has been extraordinarily successful; for instance, spring landscapes. It is difficult to believe that they are photographs, so full are they of elegiac music.
In the course of a month he has taken thousands of photographs—as if executing some colossal order—and when you went to see him he compelled you to examine them all, naïvely convinced that
