Red Laugh

The Red Laugh was written in 1904 during the uncertain period following Russia's ignominious defeat at the hands of the Japanese It is the feverish and fragmentary monologue of a Russian officer, overcome by the horror of man's inhumanity and driven to seek refuge in insanity.Although self-consciously modern and sensational in style The Red Laugh has a disturbing and prophetic power which established Andreyev's reputation as a major European writer. 'I want to be the apostle of self-destruction. I want my book to affect man's reason, his emotions, his nerves, his whole animal nature. I should like my book to make people turn pale with horror as they read it, to affect them like a drug, like a terrifying dream, to drive them mad, to make them curse and hate me but still to read me and to kill themselves.' Leonid Andreyev AUTHOR: Between the two Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Leonid Andreyev was without a doubt the foremost writer in Russia. His name was always spoken with veneration, in mysterious whispers, as a grim portentous magician who descended into the ultimate depths of the nether side of life and fathomed the beauty and tragedy of the struggle. Born Leonid Nickolayevitch in the province of Oryol, in 1871, he studied law at the University of Moscow. Those were the days of suffering and starvation; he gazed into the abyss of sorrow and despair. In January 1894 he made an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself by shooting, and then was forced by the authorities to severe penitence, which augmented the natural morbidness of his temperament. As a lawyer his career was short-lived, and he soon abandoned it for literature, beginning as a police-court reporter on the Moscow Courier. In 1902 he published the short story In The Fog, which for the first time brought him universal recognition. He was imprisoned during the revolution of 1905, together with Maxim Gorky, on political charges. Such are the few significant details of his personal life, for the true Andreyev is entirely in his stories and plays.