... And everywhere, wherever I go, I see before me His pure visage. "Do you understand my suffering, O Lord?" "I understand, Yeremy, I understand everything. Go your way in peace." I am to Him like a transparent crystal with a tear inside. "You understand, Lord?" "I understand, Yeremy." "Well, and I understand you too." So we live together. He with me, I with him. I am sorry for Him also. When I die, I will transmit my sorrow to Him. "Take it Lord." In depicting individual sorrow Andreyev approaches Dostoevsky; it is when he raises general, universal questions, that he miserably fails in answering them. The Russian public has "spoiled" him, has crowned him with the title of a genius, when he is only a man of big talent. Unfortunately Andreyev took the flattery of the beast-public seriously; he said to himself: Who knows? Maybe I am, indeed, an Atlas. Let me try and shake the world. And he did try! As a result we have, among his other sore failures, the loudest commonplace--_Life of Man_. I think it was Maurice Baring, a Russologue and an admirer of the playwright, who defined _Life of Man_ as an algebraic play, with Man standing for _x_ and Fate for _y_. Not the tragedy of a certain life under certain conditions, but Life in general, under all circumstances, was the object of the drama. It is the world-old problem, the futility of man's struggles in the face of blind unreasoning fate that may at any moment overthrow his toy-castles. Perhaps a Goethe might attempt to say something new on that subject, or at least to put it in a new way. With Andreyev the task proved to be not "up to his shoulder," as the Russians say. The annoying pretentiousness of the play appears a hundred times more convex when on the stage. I saw it once in the "symbolized" theatre of Mme. Kommissarzhevskaya in St. Petersburg, and another time in the performance of the Moscow Artistic Theatre. On the first occasion I was bored to death, and pitied the gifted manager, Mr. Meyerhold, in his futile attempt to veil the platitudes of the play in mysticism, to create an atmosphere, a "_Stimmung_." The Moscow people succeeded in emphasizing the ridiculous awkwardness of the drama, the shrill incongruities of the situations and styles,--and I shall ever be grateful to them for the minutes of hearty laughter that they caused me then and which I cannot escape even now, as soon as I recall the harmony between the symbolicized Someone in Gray (sh-sh ...--Fate!) and the super-realistic shrieks of the mother giving birth to a child. The actors did their best, but no miracle could have saved the doomed loud nothingness.