The Short Fiction of Leonid Andreyev

Leonid Andreyev ranks among the darkest voices of Russia’s Silver Age, and this gathering of his short fiction shows why. The stories move through prison cells, battlefields and shuttered rooms, pressing hard on fear, guilt and the nearness of death. The centrepiece, published in 1908, sends five revolutionaries and two common criminals to the gallows after a failed assassination, and Andreyev follows each of them through their final days, tracing how differently a person can meet an end they cannot avoid. Elsewhere his characters confront war, madness and the silence of a universe that offers no comfort. The mood is bleak but never numb, charged instead with a strange moral intensity.