An unknown letter from Leonid Andreev to Maxim Gorky

Abstract

This publication makes available for the first time a previously unknown letter by a novice writer to one who was already famous. It can be dated to early or mid-December 1899. It had previously been thought that the correspondence between two central figures in early-20th-century Russian literature had been comprehensively published in volume 72 of the well-known series “Literary Heritage” (1965). This imposing corpus of 181 letters written between 1899 and 1916 formed the basis for perceptive and penetrating analyses of the two writers' complex relationship. The earliest stage of the writers' love-hate relationship had given rise to the fewest disagreements among researchers: they nearly all agreed that Gorky had immediately spotted the novice writer's talent on reading “Bargamot and Garas'ka”, the first story Andreev published in the newspaper “Kur'er”, at Easter 1898, and that this had prompted him to offer Andreev his advice, as the more experienced writer, and to help him publish his new works in magazines, to introduce him to Moscow literary circles (the “Wednesday” group), and ultimately to organise the publication of his first collection of stories in 1901. The letter being published here for the first time forces us to re-examine the very earliest period of Andreev's search for a place in literature. The most striking part of the letter is his self-definition as Gorky's literary double, despite an almost complete absence in his works of any direct stylistic, let alone philosophical, echoes of his elder literary comrade. Hardly anything has survived among Andreev's papers of the numerous experiments à la Gorky he mentions in his letter: he evidently took radical steps to put the temptation of Gorky behind him, and he succeeded in doing so. No less significant is that we have here a new, if typical, existentially frank, “wide-open” Andreevan ego-document, which contains several interesting nuances to add to the known facts and concerns of both his outer biography and his inner life.

Keywords

• maxim gorky
• leonid andreev
• early-20th-century russian literature
• correspondence