The riddle, the indifference—­these are the two characteristics of human destiny that loom large in Andreyev’s conception of it as set forth in that figure. Someone in Gray—­who is he?  No one knows.  No definite name can be given him, for no one knows.  He is mysterious in “The Life of Man,” where he is Man’s constant companion; he is mysterious in “Anathema,” where he guards the gate leading from this finite world to eternity.  And as Man’s companion he looks on indifferently, apparently unconcerned whether Man meets with good or bad fortune. Man’s prayers do not move him. Man’s curses leave him calm.

It is Andreyev’s gloomy philosophy, no doubt, that so often causes him to make his heroes lonely, so that loneliness is developed into a principle of human existence, in some cases, as in “The City,” becoming the dominant influence over a man’s life.  Particularly the men whom life has treated senselessly and cruelly, whom it has dealt blow after blow until their spirits are crushed out—­it is such men in particular who become lonely, seek isolation and retirement, and slink away into some hole to die alone.  This is the significance of the saloon scene in “The Life of Man.”  The environment of the drunkards who are withdrawn from life, and therefore lonely themselves, accentuates the loneliness of Man in the last scene.  It is his loneliness that Andreyev desired to bring into relief.  His frequenting the saloon is but an immaterial detail, one of the means of emphasizing this idea.  To remove all possible misunderstanding on this point, Andreyev wrote a variant of the last scene, “The Death of Man,” in which, instead of dying in a saloon surrounded by drunkards, Man dies in his own house surrounded by his heirs.  “The loneliness of the dying and unhappy man,” Andreyev wrote in a prefatory note to this variant, “may just as fully be characterized by the presence of the Heirs.”

However, for all the gloom of his works, Andreyev is not a pessimist.  Under one of his pictures he has written:  “Though it destroys individuals, the truth saves mankind.”  The misery in the world may be ever so great; the problems that force themselves upon man’s mind may seem unanswerable; the happenings in the external world may fill his soul with utter darkness, so that he despairs of finding any meaning, any justification in life.  And yet, though his reason deny it, his soul tells him:  “The truth saves mankind.”  After all, Man is not a failure.  For though misfortunes crowd upon him, he remains intact in soul, unbroken in spirit.  He carries off the victory because he does not surrender.  He dies as a superman, big in his defiance of destiny.  This must be the meaning Andreyev attached to Man’s life.  We find an interpretation of it, as it were, in “Anathema,” in which Someone sums up the fate of David—­who lived an even sadder life than Man and died a more horrible death—­in these words:  “David has achieved immortality, and he lives immortal in the deathlessness of fire.  David has achieved immortality, and he lives immortal in the deathlessness of light which is life.”