Leonid Andreyev

Andreyev was for a few years around 1905 the most talked-about writer in Russia, outselling Gorky, who had helped him start. His best-known novella follows five revolutionaries and two ordinary criminals through their last days under sentence, and refuses to make any of them heroic. He Who Gets Slapped puts a ruined intellectual into a circus as a clown who is struck for laughs. He wrote about death constantly, came close to ending his own life more than once as a young man, and built a huge house in Finland with the money. He hated the Bolsheviks, was cut off in Finland when the border closed after 1917, and died there in 1919, poor and largely forgotten in his own country until much later. Satan's Diary was unfinished when he died.