The Red Laugh

Something was ominously burning in a broad red glare, and in the smoke there swarmed monstrous, misshapen children, with heads of grown-up murderers. They were jumping lightly and nimbly, like young goats at play, and were breathing with difficulty, like sick people. Their mouths, resembling the jaws of toads or frogs, opening widely and convulsively; behind the transparent skin of their naked bodies the red blood was coursing angrily--and they were killing each other at play. They were the most terrible of all that I had seen, for they were little and could penetrate everywhere.
[...]
"He can crawl in under the door," said I to myself with horror, and as if he had guessed my thoughts, he grew thin and long and waving the end of his tail

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rapidly, he crawled into the dark crack under the front door.

Leonid Andreyev was a controversial and well-known writer, a contemporary of Chekhov and Gorky, but has become virtually unread in the past few decades. This novel shows why. His range is quite limited. There are no actual characters, no real human beings in this book because they are all indistinguishable... there isn't much of a storyline either. What matters more in this book is getting across a sensation, a single horrific vision.

It's a grotesque vision of war, a bit like watching a contortionist's act, and darkly comical. Andreyev does not do subtlety. The scariest parts of his vision do not come with the physical toll of war, but the mental ones. This book is filled with madmen, every one of them, including the two narrators, as if the focus had long gone out of their eyes, they tumble forward in a sleepy haze, zombies ready to tear at the throat of any shadow that flickers.

"That is the red laugh. When the earth goes mad, it begins to laugh like that. You know, the earth the earth has gone mad. There are no more flowers or songs on it; it has become round, smooth and red like a scapled head. Do you see it?"
"Yes, I see it. It is laughing."
"Look what its brain is like. It is red, like bloody porridge, and is muddled."
"It is crying out."
"It is in pain. It has no flowers or songs. And now--let me lie down upon you."
"You are heavy and I am afraid."
"We, the dead, lie down on the living. Do you feel warm?"
"Yes."
"Are you comfortable?"
"I am dying."
"Awake and cry out. Awake and cry out. I am going away..."

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Written in 1905, upon the first major war of the century (was it?), Russia-Japan – that particular setting being irrelevant; this is a horror-scape devoid of real-world setting, no details except for red and orange uniforms. War takes over the world in this account. There is a sense of its omnipresence; it saturates existence so much that corpses pop out of the ground, in the end. It is a visionary story, both in being nightmarishly constructed and in seeming to prophesy the saturation-level wars of the century ahead.

Damn, I called a Russian writer a prophet. I hate that. They’re not Rasputin. But Andreyev derives a ‘fantastic realism’ from Dostoyevsky, who is cursed to be a prophet of the century after him. It’s just the show more fantastic realism, that projects.

The other story by Andreyev I have read, Seven Who Were Hanged, is entirely realistic. That is another protest story, anti-execution while this is anti-war; he makes them step up, beyond the protest. Seven I admire more for craft, and it affected me more, but I’m giving this 5 stars too.

I hear his short stories, in their grotesquerie, are symbols for the hideous circumstances in Russia (Aileen Kelly said this, Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance). He died a couple of years after ‘loud protest’ at Bolshevik victory. He led a troubled inner life, which I think the introduction in my Dedalus edition describes almost contemptuously – along with much of his fiction. The intro writer is out of sympathy with fantastic realism or the grotesque. It says his stories lack human compassion, which is just crazy. The translation (Alexandra Lindem) did not seem bad, although there is no information given about it. Cover is a still from _Battleship Potemkin_, the only reason to get this edition. show less

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