Full Description
Leonid Andreyev's Expressionist novella The Red Laugh is an experimental, fragmentary depiction of war and its psychological effects, both on those who participate in the fighting and on those who hear of its atrocities from afar; it was inspired by the horrors of the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. Translated into English for the first time since 1905, it is here paired with a fresh translation of Andreyev's earlier story 'The Abyss,' which caused scandal when it first appeared in 1902. This edition provides an illuminating introduction by translator Kirsten Lodge establishing the importance of Andreyev to both the Russian and to the overall modernist canon, as well as a range of background materials that help set the novel in its historical, literary, and artistic contexts.
Contents
Introduction
The Red Laugh
The AbyssIn Context
'The Abyss': The Scandal
from Leo Tolstoy, as quoted in The Stock Exchange News (1902)
from Leonid Andreyev (J. Lynch), 'Moscow: The Small Details of Life,' The Courier (1902)
from M.P. Nevedomsky, 'On Contemporary Art. Leonid Andreyev,' God's World (1903)
from Leonid Andreyev, Letter to the Editor of The Courier (1903)
Leo Tolstoy's Call for Protest Against the War from Leo Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves! (1904)
Fiction and Reality: Accounts of the Russo-Japanese War
Contemporary Newspaper Reports
from V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, The Russian Word (10 January 1904)
from V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, The Russian Word (11 January 1904)
from P. Krasnov, The Russian Invalid (9 July 1904)
from Anonymous, The Russian Word (5 October 1904)
from Vikenty Veresaev, In The War: Memoirs of V. Veresaev (1917)
Degeneration on a Mass Scale
from Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895)
Andreyev's Correspondence
from Leonid Andreyev, Letter to Vikenty Veresaev, July 1904
from Leonid Andreyev, Letter to Maxim Gorky, 6 August 1904
from Leonid Andreyev, Letter to Maxim Gorky, 6-7 November 1904
from Leonid Andreyev, Letter to Maxim Gorky, 14-15 November 1904
from Maxim Gorky, Letter to Leonid Andreyev, 16-17 November 1904
from Leonid Andreyev, Letter to Maxim Gorky, 17-18 November 1904
from Leonid Andreyev, Letter to Leo Tolstoy, 16 November 1904
from Leo Tolstoy, Letter to Leonid Andreyev, 17 November 1904
from Leonid Andreyev, Letter to O. Dymov, 28 January 1905
from Leonid Andreyev, Letter to M.P. Nevedomsky, date unknown
Responses to The Red Laugh by Prominent Symbolists
from Vyacheslav Ivanov, 'On The Red Laugh and 'Proper Madness,''Vesy [The Scales] (1905)
from Andrei Bely, 'Apocalypse in Russian Poetry' (1905)
Images
Depictions of War in Nineteenth-Century Art
Propaganda Posters from the Russo-Japanese War
Expressionist Paintings by Edvard Munch
Other images
