Search results for ""author leonid andreyev""

As the young Zinaida and her sweetheart, the student Nemovetsky, stroll through the idyllic Russian countryside, their memories, dreams and thoughts about life and the future mingle in the evening breeze. But when night falls, they hasten to retrace their steps back to town through a small wood, where they are accosted by three threatening drunkards, who knock Nemovetsky unconscious and start to chase the girl through the underwood. When the young student comes round, he is confronted with the horror of what has just happened. Haunting, disquieting, shocking, `The Abyss' - one of the most powerful short stories ever written - is accompanied in this volume by fifteen other stories, never translated into English before by Andreyev, including `Silence', `The Thief' and `Lazarus, some of them never translated before into English. Together, they provide a clear account of the lasting legacy of Russia's foremost man of letters of the early twentieth century.

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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.

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