One contemporary called him the most popular and most discussed writer after Leo Tolstoy. Another peer--Kornei Ivanovich Chukovsky--identified him as the "most modern of modern writers." Leonid Andreev elicited extremes of praise and scorn. He was the quintessential modernist in his expressionistic flights, his narrative experimentalism, and what Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok called (in his 1922 reminiscence of Andreev) the "chaos he bore within" signaling "horror at the gates" of the age. The metaphysical revolt informing his works has an important place in the literature of existentialism.

Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev was born 9 August 1871 in Orel. The neighborhood was rough, but his father, Nikolai Ivanovich Andreev, the out-of-wedlock son of a landowner and serf, provided well as a land surveyor and bank clerk. Andreev inherited Nikolai Ivanovich's love of nature and also, possibly, the disease of alcoholism. His mother, Anastasiia Nikolaevna (Patskovskaia) Andreeva, born of impoverished Polish noble lineage, was subliterate...