... Annihilate everything! The old houses, the old cities, the old literature, the old art.... All the old dress must go. Man must be stripped bare and left on a naked earth! Then he will build up a new life. The earth must be denuded; it must be stripped of its hideous old rags. It deserves to be arrayed in a king's mantle; but what have they done with it? They have dressed it in coarse fustian, in convict clothes. They've built cities, the idiots! ... Believe me, monk, I have been in many cities and in many lands. Nowhere did I see a free man. I saw only slaves. I saw the cages in which they live, the beds on which they are born and die; I saw their hatreds and their loves, their sins and their good works. And I saw also their amusements, their pitiful attempts to bring dead joy back to life again. And everything that I saw bore the stamp of stupidity and unreason. He that is born wise turns stupid in their midst: he that is born cheerful hangs himself from boredom and sticks out his tongue at them. Amidst the flowers of the beautiful earth--you have no idea how beautiful the earth is, monk--they have erected insane asylums. And what are they doing with their children? I have never yet seen parents who do not deserve capital punishment; first because they begot children, and secondly, because, having begot them, they did not immediately commit suicide. Well, how is this _enfant terrible_--the trumpeter of a popularized edition of Schopenhauer, Bakounin, Stirner, Nietzsche, etc., etc.--how is this "bad man" going to carry through his gigantic plans? In a very simple manner: he will destroy the wonder-working ikon of the Saviour, that made the monastery of his native town famous; he will place a bomb behind the ikon, and its explosion will open the eyes of the ignorant believers. A tempest in a cup of water! But hark and tremble: When we are through with God, we'll go for fellows like him. There are lots of them--Titian, Shakespeare, Byron. We'll make a nice pile of the whole lot and pour oil over it. Then we'll burn their cities. Monologues, long and pretentious like those quoted, fill up the play to a point of dizziness; yet there are a few oases in that unhappy work, where you find the real Andreyev, the unrivalled painter of sorrow and suffering. Here is, for instance, one of the pilgrims, a man who had killed accidentally his son and has since been wandering from monastery to monastery, fasting, wearing heavy chains, and indulging in all sorts of self-chastisement. The cynical monks give him the cruel nickname of King Herod, which he bears, like his other burdens, with the joy of a martyr. Listen to his unsophisticated talk: _King Herod_: I am wise. My sorrow has made me so. It is a great sorrow. There is none greater on earth. I killed my son with my own hand. Not the hand you are looking at, but the one which isn't here.