Judas Iscariot and Others

Judas Iscariot and Others, originally Iuda Iskariot i drugie, is a long novella by Leonid Andreyev, first published in Russian in 1907. The work is one of Andreyev’s most controversial fictions and one of the most important early-twentieth-century literary reimaginings of the Judas figure from the Christian Gospels.

Andreyev retells the events of Christ’s Passion from Judas’s perspective rather than from the perspective of the other apostles or the Gospel narrators. His Judas is a complex psychological figure rather than the simple villain of the conventional Christian interpretation. The Judas in Andreyev’s reading loves Jesus deeply, understands him better than the other apostles do, and betrays him precisely because of this understanding rather than out of ordinary greed or jealousy. The betrayal becomes a kind of necessary act that fulfills the meaning of the events rather than a simple moral failure.

The theological position is provocative. Andreyev was working in the broader early-twentieth-century European literary tradition that was reexamining traditional religious narratives from new psychological and moral angles. Various other writers including George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, and various of the continental European modernists were producing similar work in their own different ways. Andreyev’s contribution was particularly Russian in its psychological intensity and in its willingness to handle religious material with the same seriousness that orthodox theology brought to it while reaching very different conclusions.

The novella was widely read across Europe in translation and contributed substantially to Andreyev’s international reputation in the years before the First World War. Russian Orthodox church authorities condemned the work as blasphemous, and the book was controversial within Russia even outside religious circles. The political and religious authorities of Tsarist Russia were generally hostile to the kind of psychological and literary religious reexamination that Andreyev’s novella exemplified.

The other stories included in the book vary by edition. Various of Andreyev’s other longer short fictions on religious, political, or psychological subjects appear in the different English-language printings.

The book runs about two hundred pages. For readers interested in early-twentieth-century Russian literature or in literary reimaginings of religious narratives, it pairs with Andreyev’s other major works and with the broader pre-Revolutionary Russian literature on religious subjects.