If Spinoza’s dictum be true, that “a wise man’s meditation is not of death but of life,” then Andreyev is surely not a wise man.  Some philosophers might have written their works even without a guarantee against immortality, though Schopenhauer, who exercised a influence on the young Andreyev, was of the opinion that “without death there would hardly be any philosophy”; but of Andreyev it is certain that the bulk of his works would not have been written, and could not be what they are, were it not for the fact of death.  If there is one idea that can be said to dominate the author of “The Life of Man,” it is the idea of death.  Constantly he keeps asking:  Why all this struggling, all this pain, all this misery in the world, if it must end in nothing?  The suffering of the great mass of mankind makes life meaningless while it lasts, and death puts an end even to this life.  Again and again Andreyev harks back to the one thought from which all his other thoughts seem to flow as from their fountain-head.  Lazarus, in the story by that name, is but the embodiment of death.  All who behold him, who look into his eyes, are never again the same as they were; indeed, most of them are utterly ruined.  “The Seven Who Were Hanged” tells how differently different persons take death.  Grim death lurks in the background of almost every work, casting a fearful gloom, mocking the life of man, laughing to scorn his joys and his sorrows, propounding, sphinx-like, the big riddle that no Oedipus will ever be able to solve.

For it is not merely the destructive power of death, not merely its negation of life, that terrifies our author.  The pitchy darkness that stretches beyond, the impossibility of penetrating the veil that separates existence from non-existence—­in a word, the riddle of the universe—­is, to a mind constituted like Andreyev’s, a source of perhaps even greater disquiet.  Never was a man hungrier than he with “the insatiable hunger for Eternity”; never was a man more eager to pierce the mystery of life and catch a glimpse of the beyond while yet alive.

Combined with the perplexing darkness that so pitifully limits man’s vision is the indifference of the forces that govern his destiny.  The wrongs he suffers may cry aloud to heaven, but heaven does not hear him.  Whether he writhe in agony or be prostrated in the dust (against all reason and justice), he has no appeal, societies, the bulk of mankind, may be plunged in misery—­who or what cares?  Man is surrounded by indifference as well as by darkness.

Often, when an idea has gained a powerful hold on Andreyev, he pursues it a long time, presenting it under various aspects, until at last it assumes its final form, rounded and completed, as it were, in some figure or symbol.  As such it appears either as the leading theme of an entire story or drama, or as an important subordinate theme.  Thus we have seen that the idea of death finds concrete expression in the character of Lazarus.  The idea of loneliness, of the isolation of the individual from all other human beings, even though he be physically surrounded by large numbers, is embodied in the story of “The City.”  Similarly the conception of the mystery and the indifference by which man finds himself confronted is definitely set forth in the figure of Someone in Gray in “The Life of Man.”