After them he always became sombre and more often than not would begin one of his monologues on death. It was his favourite theme. He pronounced the word death in a special manner—with feeling and emphasis, as some voluptuaries pronounce the word woman. In this respect Andreyev possessed a great talent—he knew how to fear death as no one else could. To fear death is no easy matter: many attempt it, but without success. Andreyev succeeded magnicently: here was his real calling—to experience a deathly and terrible horror. This horror is to be discerned in all his books, and I think that his grasping at colour photography, gramophones, painting, constituted attempts to save himself from it. Somehow he had to protect himself from these sickening attacks of despair. In the terrible years after the revolution, when an epidemic of suicide was raging in Russia, Andreyev involuntarily became the leader and apostle of these abandoners of life. They felt him to be one of themselves. I remember his showing me a whole collection of letters addressed to him by suicides before their death. It had evidently become a custom before doing away with oneself to send a letter to Leonid Andreyev.
Sometimes it appeared strange. Sometimes, watching him as he strolled about the yard, among his stables and outhouses, followed by his magnificent hound, Tyucha, or posed, dressed in a velvet coat, in front of some visiting photographer, one could not believe that this man could be carrying within him a tragic consciousness of eternity, non-existence, chaos, worldly desolation. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the whole of Andreyev’s life was soaked in this feeling of worldly desolation. It was this feeling which gave to his work a special philosophical colouring, since it is impossible to spend one's whole life meditating on such desolation and not to become in the end a metaphysician. The same thing gave a key also to his personality as a writer: in his books he always handled—well or badly—eternal, metaphysical, and transcendental questions. Other themes failed to move him. The group of writers among which he found himself at the beginning of his literary career; Gorki, Chirikov, Skitalets, Kuprin—was in reality strange to him. They were describers of life, excited by the problems of life, but not by existence itself; and he was the only one among them who was exercized by the eternal and tragic. He was tragic in his very essence and all his ecstatic, affected, theatrical talent, leading
