Andreev’s Silence.

I think Leonid Andreev (also romanized as Andreyev) first swam into my ken in 2016, when I edited Leonid Livak’s In Search of Russian Modernism — see my 2018 review of that superb book, in particular the first quoted paragraph. It took me a long while to get around to him, though, because at the time I was reading my way through the 1850s and when I finally finished my Long March through Russian literature in 2019 I headed straight to the late 20th century. But I finally caught up with him a couple of years ago, prompted by Dmitry Bykov; as I wrote Lizok at the time:

I was reading Bykov again — his “100 books for 100 years” series — and I decided to read his pick for 1900, Leonid Andrev’s “Молчание,” which he calls the beginning of Russian Gothic, and when I read it I thought “that’s Gorbunova’s line of descent.” If you eliminated a lot of details and any hint of пафос and just kept the basic story line, it could fit into one of her collections. (One of her signatures is squeezing out пафос the way Chekhov squeezed the serf out of himself.) Then I read his 1901 story “Жили-были” and could see why it was so popular: he puts vivid characters in a stressful situation and lets things develop very effectively. I’ll have to read more of him.

The story is online here; молчание means ‘silence,’ and in my Chronology I summarized it thus:

after the haughty Father Ignatii’s daughter kills herself and his wife has a stroke, an audible silence fills the house and then the world; in Zhurnal dlya vsekh 12; D. Bykov calls it the beginning of Russian Gothic: “This silence is the main sound of the 20th century”

(Bykov’s entire «100 лекций о русской литературе ХХ века», all 548 pages, is here as a pdf, or you can read it online here — the Andreev chapter is the first one.) So the other day I decided to follow it up with a longer story, his 1903 Жизнь Василия Фивейского [The life of Vasily Fiveisky, translated in 1920 by Archibald J. Wolfe as The Life of Father Vassily], about which I knew nothing — I vaguely assumed it was the life of a saint, since Vasily Fiveisky (Vasily the Theban, or Basil of Thebes) sounded very saintly. But it was not that at all, and the (very sparse) commentary I’ve found on it completely misinterprets it, so I am here to remedy that, with the aid of the earlier short story.

The Life of Father Vassily, in Wolfe’s translation, begins thus:

A strange and mysterious fate pursued Vassily Feeveysky all through his life. As though damned by some unfathomable curse, from his youth on he staggered under a heavy burden of sadness, sickness and sorrow, and the bleeding wounds of his heart refused to heal. Among men he stood aloof, like a planet among planets, and a peculiar atmosphere, baneful and blighting, seemed to enshroud him like an invisible, diaphanous cloud.

The son of a meek and patient parish priest, he was meek and patient himself, and for a long time failed to observe the ominous and mysterious deliberation with which misfortunes persistently broke over his unattractive shaggy head.

Swiftly he fell, and slowly rose to his feet; fell again, and slowly rose once more, and laboriously, speck by speck, grain by grain, set to work restoring his frail anthill by the side of the great highway of life.

But when he was ordained priest and married a good woman, begetting by her a son and a daughter, he commenced to feel that all was now well and safe with him, just as with other people, and would so remain for ever. And he blessed God, for he believed in Him solemnly and simply, as a priest and as a man in whose soul there was no guile.

And it happened in the seventh year of his happiness, in the noon hour of a sultry day in July, that the village children went to the river to swim, and with them went Father Vassily’s son, like his father Vassily by name, and like him swarthy of face and meek in manner. And little Vassily was drowned.

If you’re getting a whiff of Job here, that’s definitely one of the ingredients in the stew. But here there will be no divine reward at the end. After the death of little Vassily, the priest’s wife basically goes mad (“she, sluggish and indolent, rose to her feet, eyeing the others so fixedly and queerly that they were forced to avert their gaze, and languidly lolled through the house, as though hunting for some needless article, a key, or a spoon or a glass”), and their little daughter Nastya “shambled after her, morose and sullen, as though the black shadow of impending doom had lodged itself even over her little six-year-old heart”:

She anxiously hurried her little steps to keep pace with the distracted big stride of her mother, casting furtively yearning glances upon the familiar, but ever mysterious and enticing garden, and she longingly stretched out her disengaged hand towards a bush of sour gooseberries, and stealthily plucked a few, though the sharp thorns cruelly scratched her. And the prick of these thorns that were sharp as needles, and the acid taste of the berries, intensified the scowl on her face, and she longed to whimper like an abandoned pup.

Father Vassily goes out into the fields:

Alone he stood, lost in the dense field of grain, alone before the face of Heaven—set high above him and blazing. […]

“I—believe!”

Unechoed in the wilderness of sky and of fields was lost this wailing orison that so madly resembled a challenge. And as though contradicting some one, as though passionately pleading with some one and warning him, he repeated once more:

“I—believe.”

And returning home, once more, speck by speck, grain by grain, he fell to the work of restoring his wrecked anthill: he watched the milking of cows, with his own hands he combed Nastya’s long and coarse hair, and despite the late hour he drove ten versts into the country for the district physician in order to seek his advice with regard to his wife’s ailment. And the doctor prescribed her some drops.

II.
No one liked Father Vassily, neither his parishioners, nor the vestry of the church. He intoned the service awkwardly, without decorum: his voice was dry and indistinct, and he either hurried so that the deacon had a hard time to keep up with him, or he fell behind without rime or reason. He was not covetous, but he accepted money and donations so clumsily that all believed him to be greedy and scoffed at him behind his back. And everybody knew that he was unlucky in his private life and avoided him, considering it a poor omen to meet him or to talk with him. […] But it was the head of the vestry, Ivan Porfyritch Koprov, who treated the priest worse than the rest of the parishioners. He openly exhibited his contempt for the luckless man […]

The deacon shook his head reproachfully and mentioned the long-suffering of Job, how God had loved him, but turned him over to Satan to be tried, but later rewarded him an hundredfold for all his sufferings. But Ivan Porfyritch smiled scornfully into his beard and without the slightest compunction cut short the disagreeable admonition.

“Don’t tell me, I know. Job, so to speak, was a righteous man, a holy man, but what is this one? Where is his righteousness? Rather remember, deacon, the old proverb: God marks a rogue. There is sound sense in that proverb.”

(I might mention that Ivan Porfyritch reminded me of Trollope’s Archdeacon Grantly.)

Vassily’s wife, in her desperation, decides the solution is to have another child, so she drags him to bed and gets pregnant, which produces brief happiness: “all through the summer she abstained from liquor, and a peace, serene and joyous, was enthroned in Father Vassily’s household.” But the child, named Vassily like the earlier son, turns out to be an intensification of the “unfathomable curse”:

His head was large and his legs were thin and little, and there was something strangely vacant and insensate in the immobile stare of his globe-shaped eyes. For the space of three years after the child’s birth the priest and his wife lived ’twixt fears, doubts and hopes, but when three years had passed it became evident that little Vassya had been born an idiot.

As you can imagine, things go from bad to worse. I’ll spare you the details and leap ahead to this striking passage:

And it happened during confession; fettered by his immovable thoughts Father Vassily was coldly putting the customary queries to some old woman, when he was suddenly struck by an odd thing which he had never noticed before: there he stood calmly prying into the innermost secret thoughts and feelings of another, and that other looked up to him with awe and told him the truth—that truth which it is not given to anyone else to know. And the wrinkled countenance of the old woman assumed a peculiar expression, it became brightly radiant, as though the darkness of night reigned all around, but the light of day was falling on that face alone. And suddenly he interrupted her and asked:

“Art thou telling the truth, woman?”

But what the old woman answered he heard not. The mist had departed from before his face, with flushing eyes—as though a bandage had fallen from them—he was gazing in amazement upon the face of the woman, and it seemed to him to bear a peculiar expression: clearly outlined upon it was some mysterious truth of God and of life. On the old woman’s head, beneath an openwork kerchief, Father Vassily noticed a parting line, a narrow grey strip of skin running through hair that was carefully combed on either side of it. And this parting line, this absurd care for an ugly, aged head that nobody else had any use for, was likewise a truth: the sorrowful truth of the ever lonely, ever sorrowful human existence. And it was then, for the first time in his life of forty years, that Father Vassily became aware with his eyes and with his hearing and with every one of his senses that beside him there were other creatures on earth—creatures that were like him, having their own lives, their own sorrows, their own fates.

This (it seems to me) is a crucial point of the story: Father Vassily is extricated from his obsession with his own problems and opens himself to the larger world of humanity. He hears the woman’s confession and tells her to go:

Strange days commenced now for Father Vassily, and something unwonted was going on in his mind; hitherto only this had been; there had existed a tiny earth whereon lived only the enormous figure of Father Vassily. Other people did not seem to exist. But now the earth had grown, had become unfathomably big, peopled all over with creatures like Father Vassily. There was a multitude of them, each living an individual existence, suffering individual sufferings, hoping and doubting individually, and among them Father Vassily felt like a lonely tree in a field about which suddenly an immense and trackless forest had grown. Gone was the solitude; and with it the sun and the bright desert distances, and the gloom of the night had grown in intensity.

All the people gave him truth. When he did not hear their truthful utterances, he saw their homes and their faces: and upon homes and faces was engraved the inexorable truth of life. He sensed this truth, but he was unable to grasp and name it and he eagerly sought new faces and new words. Few came to confession during the fast days of Advent, but he kept them in the confessional for hours at a time, examining each one searchingly, insistently, stealing himself into the most intimate nooks of the soul where man himself looks in but rarely and with awe. He did not know what he was searching for and he mercilessly plowed up everything—that the soul rests on and lives by. In his questions he was pitiless and shameless, and each thought which he conceived was a stranger to fear. But it did not take him long to realize that all these people who were telling him the whole truth, as though he were God, were themselves ignorant of the truth of life. Back of their myriads of trifling, severed, hostile truths he dimly saw the shadowy outlines of the one great and all-solving truth. Everyone was conscious of it, everyone longed for it, yet none could define it with a human word—that overwhelming truth of God and of people, and of the mysterious fates of human life.

This is part of what I go to Russian literature for, this grasping at the mysteries of life, this search for “overwhelming truth.” One might think he would now proceed into the light and achieve some kind of redemption, but that’s Dostoevsky, not Andreev; not long after, he finds his daughter imitating the idiot, and we get a dialogue in which she tells him “I love nobody” and he responds “Just like me.” Lent comes, and Vassily hears the confession of a peasant named Semyon Mosyagin: “His breath came fast and heavy as though choking in that senseless, dull and savage something which was called the life of Semen Mossyagin and which seemed to grip him as though in the black coils of some mysterious serpent.” He tells him to pray, and then to arise and go.

Communicants were now flocking daily in increasing numbers to the confessional and numberless faces, both wrinkled and youthful, alternated before Father Vassily in wearisome procession. He quizzed them all insistently and severely, and timid, incoherent speeches were poured into his ears by the hour, and the purport of each speech was suffering, terror and a great expectation. All united in condemning life, but none seemed anxious to die, and everybody appeared to be waiting for something, and this expectation seemed to have been handed down as an inheritance from the father of the race.

He can’t bear the weight of their expectation, and tells them all “Ask him!” (meaning God). But they keep coming: “Sorrowing they believed him and departed, and in their place came others in fresh and serried ranks, and again he frantically repeated the terrible and relentless words.” Eventually his wife dies in a fire:

“No! No!” shouted the priest in a loud and frightened voice. “No! No! I believe! Thou art right! I believe.” […] Once more he prayed, without words, without thoughts, but straining taut every fibre of his mortal body that in fire and death had realized the inexplicable nearness of God. He had ceased to sense his own life as such,—as though the intimate bond between body and spirit has been cut, and freed from all that is earthy, freed from itself, the spirit had soared to unfathomed and mysterious heights. The terrors of doubt and of tempting thoughts, the passionate wrath and the bold outcries of resentful human pride—all had crumbled into dust with the abasement of the body; only the spirit alone, having torn the hampering fetters of its “I” was living the mysterious life of contemplation.

He goes out walking:

And wondrous were his thoughts—clear and pure they were as the air of the early morn, and strangely new; such thoughts had never before flashed through his head where sad and painful thoughts were wont to dwell. He was thinking that where he had seen chaos and the absurdity of malice, there a mighty hand had traced out a true and straight path. Through the furnace of calamity, violently snatching him from home and family and from the vain cares of life, a mighty hand was leading him to a mighty martyrdom, a great sacrifice. God had transformed his life into a desert, but only so that he might cease to stray over old and beaten paths, over winding and deceitful roads where people err, but might seek a new and daring way in the trackless waste. The column of smoke which he had seen the night before, was it not that pillar of fire which had marked for the Hebrews a path through the pathless desert? He thought: “Lord, will my feeble strength be equal to the task?” but the answer came in the flames that illumined his soul like a new sun.

He had been chosen.

He sends Nastya off to live with her aunt (“Nastya departed without exhibiting either pleasure or disappointment: she was content that her mother had died and merely regretted that the idiot had not also burnt to death”) and half-builds a new house, where he lives with his son; when the latter is frightened, he tells him the story of Jesus restoring the sight of the blind man.

Then he stopped in the center of the room and loudly cried:

“I believe, O Lord, I believe.”

And all was still. But a loud galloping peal of laughter broke the silence, striking the priest’s back. And he turned about terrified.

“What sayest thou?” he asked in fear, stepping back. The idiot was laughing. The senseless, ominous laughter had torn his immense immobile mask from ear to ear and out of the wide chasm of his mouth rushed unrestrained, galloping peals of oddly vacant laughter.

The final crisis comes when Mosyagin dies in a landslide, and at his funeral the priest definitively exits consensus reality:

And here occurred that mad and great event for which all had been waiting with such dread and such mystery. Father Vassily flung open the clanging gate, and strode through the crowd cutting its motley array of colors with the solemn black of his attire and made his way to the black, silently waiting coffin. He stopped, raised his right hand commandingly and hurriedly said to the decomposing corpse:

“I say unto thee: Arise.”

In the wake of these words came confusion, noise, screams, cries of mortal terror. In a panic of fear the people rushed to the doors, transformed into a herd of frightened beasts. […]

Needless to say, the dead man does not awaken:

Father Vassily opens his blinded eyes, raises his head and sees all about him crumble. Slowly and ponderously reel the walls and close together, the vaults slide, the lofty cupola noiselessly collapses, the stone floor sways and bends, the whole world is being wrecked in its foundations and disintegrates.

He flees the church and the village and runs as far as he can:

Father Vassily fell about three versts away from the village in the center of the broad highway. He fell prone, his haggard face buried in the grey dust which had been ground fine by the wheels of traffic, trampled by the feet of men and beasts. And in his pose he had retained the impetuousness of his flight: the white dead hands outstretched, one leg curled up under the body, the other—clad in an old tattered boot with the sole worn through—long, straight and sinewy, thrown back tense and taut, as though even in death he still continued his flight.

No redemption there! But now let me direct your attention to a passage in the scene where he quotes the parable to his son: “Молчание в комнате, свист и злое шипение метели и вязкие, глухие удары.” [Silence in the room, the whizzing and wrathful hissing of the snowstorm outside, and the dull, viscid sounds of the bell.] That word молчание, ‘silence,’ recurs forcefully in the final chapter, the funeral scene:

Привлеченные странными слухами, приехали люди из дальних сел, из чужих приходов; они были смелее и говорили громко, но скоро умолкали и они, сердясь, удивляясь, но бессильные, как и все, разорвать невидимые узы свинцового молчания. […] За одним окном неподвижно и сухо зеленел молодой клен, и много глаз неотступно глядело на его широкие, слегка обвиснувшие листья: друзьями казались они, старыми спокойными друзьями среди этого молчания, среди этой сдерживаемой сумятицей чувств, среди этих желтых дразнящих бликов. […] Началось отпевание. И снова свинцовое молчание придавило толпу и каждого приковало к его месту, отделило от людей и отдало в добычу мучительному ожиданию.

Drawn by strange rumors men from distant villages, from strange parishes had come to the little church; these were bolder and spoke at first in loud tones, but they too soon lapsed into silence, with resentful amazement, but impotent like the rest to break through the invisible chains of leaden stillness. […] Back of one of the windows a young maple tree greened motionless and dry, and many eyes were riveted upon its broad leaves that were slightly curled with the heat. They seemed like friends, old, restful friends in this oppressive silence, in this repressed hubbub of feelings, amid these yellow mocking images. […] Then commenced the chanting. And once more the leaden silence oppressed the crowd and chained each one to his place, cutting him off from among his fellow-men, surrendering him a prey to agonizing expectancy.

This is a signal that calls the reader back to the earlier story, with its similar but more condensed plotline. Interestingly, later in the chapter, when he calls on the corpse to arise, we get a different word for silence, тишина:

Но неподвижен был мертвец, и вечную тайну бесстрастно хранили его сомкнутые уста. И тишина. Ни звука в опустевшей церкви. Но вот звонко стучат по камню разбросанные, испуганные шаги: то уходит вдова и ее дети. За ними рысцой бежит старый псаломщик, на миг оборачивается у дверей, всплескивает руками — и снова тишина. […] Он ждет. Шаги прозвучали ближе, миновали окно и смолкли. И тишина, и долгий, мучительный вздох. […] И в позе гордого смирения он ждет ответа — один перед черным, свирепо торжествующим гробом, один перед грозным лицом необъятной и величавой тишины. Один. Неподвижными остриями вонзаются в мглу огни свечей, и где-то далеко напевает, удаляясь, вьюга: их двое, их двое… Тишина. […] Кричит, заглушая криком грозную тишину и последний ужас умирающей человеческой души […]

But still is the corpse and its tightly locked lips are dispassionately guarding the secret of Eternity. And silence. Not a sound is heard in the deserted church. But now the resonant clatter of scattered frightened footsteps over the flagstones of the church: the widow and the orphans are going. In their wake flees the verger, stopping for an instant in the doorway he wrings his hands, and silence once more. […] He is waiting. The footsteps come nearer and nearer, pass the window and die away. And stillness, and a protracted agonized sigh. […] And in the posture of haughty humility he waits an answer—alone before the black and malignantly triumphant coffin, alone before the menacing face of fathomless and majestic stillness. Alone. The lights of the tapers pierce the darkness like immobile spears, and somewhere in the distance the fleeing storm mockingly chants: “Two of them.. Two of them..” Stillness. […] He cries out, drowning with his cry the menacing stillness and the ultimate horror of the dying human soul […]

I confess I don’t know what to make of this change. But what I do know is that the story has nothing to do with the straitjackets into which critics have tried to strap it; it is not an attack on the church or religion, and it is not an example of “hysterical decadence.” (When it came out, the critic Asheshov termed the story a “powerful, irresistible hypnosis,” which is actually not a bad description.) It is an attempt to create an alternate reality for the reader, something like what Sologub did a few years later in Мелкий бес [The Petty Demon]; as I said in this post:

The basic theme of a tormented man sinking into paranoia goes back to Gogol’s “Notes of a Madman” and was developed by Sologub’s hero Doestoevsky in The Double and, of particular relevance, in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan loses his grip on reality and sees a devil […]

It’s an approach that runs through Russian literature from Gogol to Petrushevskaya (and, as I said in the e-mail to Lizok, Alla Gorbunova); the closest thing I can think of in English literature is James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. To me, it’s not depressing but (if you’ll forgive the lucus a non lucendo) darkly illuminating, and I look forward to reading more Andreev.

I might add, as a matter of Hattic interest, that Andreev has a habit of inventing words, as in “Какой-то взмочаленный и растерянный был он; забыл тонкости обхождения с людьми, не подошел к попу за благословением и даже не поздоровался.” Not sure what that means.