“The Red Laugh” (1904), which has been translated into German, French, and English, is Andreev’s most terrible piece of realism. If this inspired picture of the Manchurian War is true, and one feels that it is, General Sherman was conservative. Those who thrill at war pictures and feel the power of patriotism in the call of battle will not enjoy the bloody horror of “The Red Laugh.” The story is a service--of the heroic remedy sort--which Andreev renders to the cause of peace. Naked, lustful, scheming war, hellish and brutal, that is the Russian’s picture--like Wiertz in his mad paintings of blood and torment. The title takes itself naturally from an incident which the narrator, an officer, tells early in the book, how that a young volunteer approaches him with a countenance so intensely white that the officer asks, “Are you afraid?” With that the young man’s face bursts into the red laugh--He has become a victim of war’s awful stroke, frightful, unspeakable. Sidorov fell suddenly to the ground and stared at me in silence, with great, terrified eyes. Out of his mouth poured a stream of blood. “Judas Iscariot and the Others” (1907) is a short novel truly notable for its unique motif--the traitorous apostle is not inspired to betray Jesus by mercenary motives, but in order to force the Master to manifest his power and demonstrate his Divinity. Thus were Judas a high-minded patriot instead of a contemptible bribe-taker. “The Seven Who Were Hanged” (1907) is Andreev’s most distinguished work. As a novel, it is sincere, powerful, and provocative. Whatever one’s views of the death penalty for crime, the author makes a tremendous appeal to pity. Here are seven condemned ones who are to suffer “the horror and the iniquity of capital punishment,” and they surely are of “all sorts and conditions,” from Musya, whose large womanhood flows, a sustaining stream, to the least of her fellow victims, down to that miserable one whose inert soul suffers less than his brutalized body. The identity of each is not lost for a moment in the circumstances and occupations of imprisonment, nor yet in the midnight journey to the hanging place. They are individual, yet they are pitiably types. Oh, the sadness of it--we feel that to be the burden of the author’s soul, and so it becomes our own. It is a poignant, fearful picture, depressing and relentless, but more deeply imbued with pity than anything else Andreev has written. “Silence,” which was published in 1900, and is therefore one of our author’s earliest stories, is a sketch whose iterant impressionism is felt in every line. SILENCE _By Leonid Andreev_ I