The Ocean

The Ocean is a long short story by Leonid Andreyev, originally published in Russian in 1911. It is one of the more ambitious of Andreyev’s middle-period short fictions and shows his developing interest in symbolic and allegorical writing that would dominate his later plays and novels before his death in 1919.

The story is set on a small island in the open ocean, where a lighthouse keeper and his small community of fellow workers maintain the navigation light that guides ships through the dangerous waters of the region. The ocean itself, with its constant changing moods, its tendency to produce dramatic storms, and its capacity to bring sudden death to the ships and the men who sail them, functions as the central presence of the story. The human characters live in relation to the ocean and are defined by their various responses to it.

Andreyev was working in the symbolist tradition that was central to Russian literature of the period. The Symbolist movement that had developed in Russian poetry across the 1890s and 1900s emphasized the use of natural and supernatural images for their symbolic resonance rather than for their direct narrative or descriptive content. The ocean in Andreyev’s story functions in this symbolic register, representing the various forces of fate, mortality, and meaning that human beings live in relation to.

The story has affinities with the broader European modernist short fiction tradition of the period. Joseph Conrad’s sea fiction, particularly The Nigger of the Narcissus and various of his shorter sea stories, works in a related mode where the ocean is both literal setting and symbolic presence. Andreyev was working from the inside of the Russian symbolist tradition rather than from the inside of the British maritime tradition, but the basic literary impulse was similar.

The story runs about a hundred pages in English translation. For readers interested in early-twentieth-century Russian literature or in the broader European symbolist short fiction tradition, it is essential reading. It pairs with The Seven Who Were Hanged, with Andreyev’s plays including The Life of Man and He Who Gets Slapped, and with the broader pre-Revolutionary Russian fiction tradition.