Here indeed Andreev is like Poe. Now and then I hear him called “The Russian Poe.” The epithet is not satisfactory. Something of our American poet there is in the Russian, for both, like Hawthorne, are masters of introspection, and both know the ritual of fantasy as past-masters, but when Andreev depicts the weird there is always a basis of human reality. Poe could harrow the soul with a sense of fantastic horrors impending, but Andreev need only draw aside the curtains and show us truth unadorned, truth unrelieved by truth’s beautiful other half, and a deeper shudder rocks the soul than ever chilled the flesh at Poe’s phantasmagoric evocations. Really, this young titan is two men--one mystical like Hawthorne, a vein of melancholy in his pessimism, but sympathetic withal, and showing more pity for his characters than the realistic school approves. The other fairly makes revel with the gibbering images of war, abnormalities of soul rise and take on flesh at his bidding, and there is no spirit so gloomy, wicked, and repellent but he can conjure it into being for these terrible story-pictures. Which will be the artist’s final mood, one may not surely forecast. In either extreme he is not his best self, one may surmise. Certainly we should deplore the constant choice of a theme like that of “The Abyss,” his first important story, in which the love of a pure lad for a spotless girl is transformed into a vicious thing that leads at length to a revolting crime. At the other end of the gamut sounds the author’s idealistic note. “To the Stars,” his first drama, is as far removed in tone from “The Abyss” as the titles indicate. But Andreev’s dramas are worthy of a separate study. Doubtless the mantle of fatalism which dropped from the shoulders of Turgenev and Tolstoi successively will some day be discarded by Russia’s younger prophets. Nietzsche influences Andreev strongly, but so do the former great Russian novelists; is it too much to expect that a spirit of hope may yet penetrate the heart of this genius who is still young? Just now the revolution is outwardly cowed, anticipation of better things has been rebuffed; but the spirit of progress rising everywhere else is not for nought, and out of the very blackness painted by Russia’s realists must come a determined and successful struggle for vital reforms. Think of a nation of which the recent Congress of Pathology at Moscow could report: They all drink, the students, the collegians, and even the pupils of the primary schools. There are a great number of alcoholics among children of from seven to ten years of age. In the government of Perm, all the students in the primary school, without exception, drink vodka. In Livonia, 72 per cent. of the school-children drink systematically. At Moscow, 64 per cent. are given up to the vice.