Leonid Andreyev is of a dual personality: the artist, and the mouthpiece of society. In his early sketches, in his short stories, and in his greatest achievement, _The Seven Who Were Hanged_, he is the wonderful psychologist, the unveiler of the soul mysteries with an art that approaches that of Maeterlinck. Russian reality, however, is a Moloch clamoring victims; the powerful tragedy of life absorbs and subjugates all individual forces, and it requires great artistic strength to preserve aloofness from the burning problems of the day. Andreyev has witnessed the most appalling epoch in his country's history: disastrous war, revolution, reaction, famine, national demoralization. He has been tempted to interpret the passing events, a perilous path for an artist whose field of observation must lie either in the crystallized past or in the dim future, never in chronicling the floating present. In his stories and plays of that later period, Andreyev revealed such horrors, such gruesome scenes, that we have felt as if we were in a Gallery of Tortures. Horror shrieks, screams, beats upon our senses, maddens us. But the colors are too loud, the medium of tickling our sensations too vulgar. I recall a passage from Merezhkovsky, a description of one of the museums in Florence. There is a head of Dante; the face is calm, almost indifferent, yet one sees at once that it is a face of one who saw hell. In the same room hangs a wax-image of Plague, with hideous details--rotting cadavers with outpouring bowels in which swarm enormous worms. The Sunday-visitors pass by Dante's head yawning, but wistfully crowd at the wax Plague. I confess this scene, at times, makes me draw an analogy with Chekhov and Andreyev. As a playwright Andreyev has utterly failed; he lacks dramatic constraint and proportion. He puts into the mouths of his actors bombastic phrases, to the delight of the gallery; but there is absolutely too much talking in his plays, with very little drama. The two plays published in the book now before me, _Savva_ and _Life of Man_, have caused more discussion than any of his other plays,--a fact due not to their particular merit, but to their pyrotechnic effects and "understandableness." Savva, a young man "with a suggestion of the peasant in his looks," has a modest intention to annihilate everything. Man is to remain, of course. What is in his way is the stupidity that, piling up for thousands of years, has grown into a mountain. The modern sages want to build on this mountain, but that, of course, will lead to nothing but making the mountain still higher. It is the mountain itself that must be removed. It must be levelled to its foundation, down to the bare earth.