Leonid Andreev

Leonid Andreyev was a Russian writer, the founder of Russian expressionism.

He was born in Oryol into a well-off family: his father was land surveyor and appraiser Nikolai Ivanovich Andreyev, and his mother was Anastasia Nikolayevna Andreyeva (Patskovskaya), the daughter of an impoverished Polish landowner. From early childhood he showed an interest in reading. He studied at the Oryol Classical Gymnasium (1882–1891). He was fascinated by the works of Schopenhauer and Hartmann; later, during his student years, by Nietzsche.

His youthful impressionability and vivid imagination several times prompted him to reckless acts: at the age of 17 he decided to test his willpower and lay down between the rails in front of an approaching locomotive, but remained unharmed.

After graduating from the gymnasium, Andreyev entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University; after his father's death the family's financial situation worsened, and Andreyev himself began to abuse alcohol. For a time he even had to go hungry. In St. Petersburg he tried to write his first stories, but, as Andreyev recalls in his memoirs, they were returned from the editorial office with laughter. Expelled for nonpayment, he entered the law faculty of Moscow University. In Moscow, according to Andreyev himself, “materially life was better: comrades and the committee helped.”

In 1894, after a romantic disappointment, Andreyev attempted to take his own life. The consequence of the failed shot was church penance and a heart ailment, which later caused the writer's death. After this incident Leonid Andreyev was again forced to live in poverty: now he had to support his mother and his sisters and brothers, who had moved to Moscow. He subsisted on odd jobs, teaching, and painting commissioned portraits. He did not take part in political activity. In 1897 he successfully passed his final university examinations, which opened the way for him into the legal profession, which he pursued until 1902. In the same year he began his journalistic work in the newspapers Moscow Herald and Courier. He signed his feuilletons with the pseudonym “James Lynch.” In 1898 his first story, “Bargamot and Garaska,” was published in Courier