Leonid Andreev's Letters to Zinaida Sibileva. Part 2 (1890–1892)

Abstract

This is the first complete publication of Leonid Andreev's letters to his first lover, Zinaida Nikolaevna Sibileva. The course of their relationship between 1889 and 1892 was stormy and very uneven. The letters reveal many previously unknown features of Andreev's life as a schoolboy and student. But they are more important for what might be called the diary of their writer's “inner states” reflected in them, the stream of his complex, sometimes “liminal” psychological experiences. Accepting (on Maupassant's authority) that letters illuminate someone's personality more clearly, that they “expose the soul without any embellishments”, Andreev nevertheless regarded his epistolary output (as well as his diaries) as a kind of exercise in creative writing.

Keywords

• leonid andreev at school and university
• letters as a source of information and an “exercise in creative writing
• ” early 20th-century russian literature
• modernism