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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Crushed Flower, and Other Stories," Leonid Andreyev explores the depths of human emotion and the complexities of existence through a series of poignant narratives. His literary style, characterized by a rich, evocative prose and profound psychological insight, presents characters grappling with despair, love, and the impact of fate. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century Russia, these tales reflect the turmoil of the times, intertwining existential questions with the raw realities of life. Andreyev's keen observations and vivid imagery command attention, rendering the ordinary extraordinary and offering readers a glimpse into the darker aspects of the human condition. Leonid Andreyev, a prominent figure in Russian literature, was influenced by the tumult of his era, including the social upheavals and the emerging psychological depth in literature. His experiences as a playwright, journalist, and novelist informed his literary output, allowing him to delve deeply into thematic concerns such as isolation, moral conflict, and the search for meaning. Andreyev's unique perspective, shaped by both personal and societal crises, lends authenticity to the emotional weight of his stories. Readers seeking a profound exploration of human nature will find "The Crushed Flower, and Other Stories" an essential addition to their literary repertoire. Andreyev's ability to evoke empathy and illuminate the complexities of life makes this collection not only a reflection of its time but also timeless in its relevance. This is a book that will resonate with anyone interested in the intricacies of the human experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Crushed Flower, and Other Stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Crushed Flower, and Other Stories gathers a substantial selection of Leonid Andreyev’s prose into a single-author volume designed to showcase the breadth of his narrative imagination. Rather than a complete works or a single-cycle project, it presents a wide arc of his fiction across varied lengths and structures. Readers will find compact tales alongside extended narratives arranged in chapters, allowing sustained immersion into his recurring concerns while also sampling the distilled intensity of his shorter pieces. As a whole, the collection’s purpose is to offer a coherent, panoramic entry point into Andreyev’s art and to highlight its continued resonance.
The texts included here are works of prose fiction spanning short stories, novellas, and longer narratives divided into chapters. The table of contents points to discrete tales—A Story Which Will Never Be Finished, On the Day of the Crucifixion, The Serpent’s Story, Love, Faith and Hope, and The Ocean—set beside multipart works marked by chapters. It also features Judas Iscariot and Others and “The Man Who Found the Truth,” both presented in chaptered form, signaling their extended scope. Across these modes, the collection demonstrates Andreyev’s facility with parable-like brevity and novelistic development within the same authorial voice.
Unifying the volume is Andreyev’s distinctive fusion of psychological intensity and philosophical inquiry. His characters often confront moral ambiguity, existential unease, and the pressures of conscience, while the prose tends toward vivid imagery, sharp contrasts, and suggestive symbolism. The mood leans contemplative and, at times, stark, yet remains animated by empathy and a quest for meaning. Even in the most compressed pieces, Andreyev cultivates an atmosphere of inwardness and tension, inviting readers to test easy certainties. As a whole, the collection shows why his fiction remains significant: it probes perennial human dilemmas without simplifying their complexity.
Several works draw on religious or sacred history to sharpen ethical and metaphysical questions. Judas Iscariot and Others, for example, situates its inquiry within a well-known figure to examine responsibility, betrayal, and the burden of decision. On the Day of the Crucifixion contemplates belief and witness against the background of an event that has shaped cultural memory. In these pieces Andreyev treats inherited narratives not as dogma but as frameworks for exploring human interiority, allowing readers to consider how faith, doubt, and interpretation intersect in moments when choices bear both personal and universal weight.
Elsewhere, Andreyev turns to openly philosophical and self-reflective forms. A Story Which Will Never Be Finished places the act of storytelling itself under scrutiny, balancing urgency with acknowledged limits. “The Man Who Found the Truth,” presented across multiple chapters, pursues the costs and consequences of seeking certainty, keeping the focus on how knowledge can transform—and unsettle—experience. The Serpent’s Story and The Ocean introduce fable-like and elemental registers, shifting perspective to test readers’ assumptions. Across these works, questions outlast answers, and form becomes part of the inquiry, mirroring the unsettled terrain of the themes themselves.
The title piece, The Crushed Flower, signals one of the collection’s central preoccupations: the fragility of innocence and the marks left by chance and violence on human feeling. Love, Faith and Hope places the human virtues in dialogue with adversity, tracing how they illuminate and complicate everyday life. Throughout, Andreyev’s attention to minute psychological shifts is matched by sensitivity to social pressures, so that private turmoil and public forces remain in conversation. Whether the canvas is intimate or expansive, the prose invites readers to inhabit vulnerability, resilience, and the ethical demands of seeing others clearly.
Taken together, these works form an essential overview of Andreyev’s narrative art, balancing variety with coherence. The alternation of short, parable-like pieces and extended chaptered narratives encourages comparison across scales and methods, revealing an author equally at home with compression and breadth. The collection is well suited both to readers approaching Andreyev for the first time and to those seeking a deeper engagement with his themes. Its lasting value lies in the clarity of its concerns—conscience, belief, truth, and compassion—and in the stylistic force with which those concerns are rendered, ensuring continued relevance and challenge.
Historical Context
Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919), born in Oryol and deceased in Mustamäki, Finland, wrote during Russia’s Silver Age, when Symbolism, Decadence, and nascent Expressionism reshaped prose and drama. Emerging from the journalistic and legal milieus of Moscow and St. Petersburg, he fused psychological intensity reminiscent of Dostoevsky with the visual and metaphysical daring of European modernism. Close to Maxim Gorky, he contributed to the Znanie (Knowledge) circle in the early 1900s, while remaining more visionary and allegorical than its social realists. The stories collected in English as The Crushed Flower, and Other Stories grew from this atmosphere of artistic experimentation, cultural pessimism, and an insistent quest for spiritual meaning.
Andreyev’s formative years coincided with rapid urbanization, industrial capitalism, and legal reforms that reshaped late imperial Russia. He studied law at St. Petersburg and Moscow Universities in the 1890s, briefly practiced, and served as a court reporter for a Moscow newspaper, observing trials, prisons, and the machinery of punishment. These experiences informed his persistent focus on guilt, fear, and the state’s sovereign violence. The Okhrana’s surveillance and the fluctuating Tsarist censorship regime meant that writers calibrated tone and symbol to evade bans, reinforcing Andreyev’s penchant for parable, layered narration, and coded social critique that could resonate in Moscow’s salons and reach provincial readers alike.
Russia’s crises—Kishinev’s pogrom (1903), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), revolution and counterrevolution (1905–1907), and eventually the First World War (from 1914)—constituted the immediate historical pressure on Andreyev’s imagination. He became internationally known after the antiwar shock of The Red Laugh (1904) and deepened his indictment of violence in works surrounding 1905 and 1908. The 1917 February and October Revolutions fractured the literary field: Andreyev denounced Bolshevik rule in 1917–1918, wrote the pamphlet "S.O.S.", and resettled on the Karelian Isthmus in newly independent Finland. The war-revolution nexus underwrites his probing of betrayal, sacrifice, crowd psychology, and the tragic isolation of conscience across his fiction.
The religious-philosophical renaissance in Russia—intensified by figures such as Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov—revived debates on theodicy, freedom, and apocalyptic expectation. Andreyev absorbed these currents while remaining artistically independent of any school. Biblical reimagining and hagiographic inversion served him as tools for examining moral ambiguity and the human face of the sacred. The St. Petersburg "Religious-Philosophical Meetings" (1901–1903) and subsequent journals bridged clerical and literary circles, creating a space where Andreyev’s explorations of faith, doubt, and the loneliness of ethical choice could converse with Orthodox thought, Western skepticism, and the era’s fascination with mystical symbolism.
Theater shaped Andreyev’s narrative architecture. He conversed with the European stage—Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Maurice Maeterlinck—and collaborated with Russia’s innovators. Vsevolod Meyerhold staged The Life of Man (1906) at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre in St. Petersburg, while the Moscow Art Theatre of Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko premiered He Who Gets Slapped (1915). These productions refined his use of masks, archetypes, and stark scenography, devices that also animate his prose: abrupt tonal shifts, chorus-like crowds, and tableau-driven episodes. Even in story form, Andreyev’s writing often behaves like chamber drama, amplifying collision between inner monologue, ritual gesture, and the inexorable mechanics of fate.
Andreyev’s publishing path mirrors the fissures of prewar Russian letters. He rose within Gorky’s Znanie almanacs (from 1902), then drifted as aesthetic and political differences widened after 1909. Periodicals such as Russkoye Slovo and Sovremenny Mir carried his pieces to mass audiences, while censorship frequently forced symbolic camouflage. Early Anglo-American reception, beginning circa 1907–1916, owed much to translators like Thomas Seltzer and Herman Bernstein and to New York and London houses eager for "Russian" modernity. English collections, including The Crushed Flower, aligned his work with broader wartime appetites for moral seriousness and psychological revelation, extending his influence beyond Petersburg and Moscow.
Turn-of-the-century science and medicine permeated Andreyev’s craft. The rise of psychiatry under figures like Sergei Korsakov and Vladimir Bekhterev, alongside the diffusion of Freud, fed public fascination with trauma, hallucination, and obsession. Andreyev’s own bouts of depression and a youthful suicide attempt sharpened his attention to despair’s physiology and metaphysics. His training in evidence—case files, depositions, autopsies of motive—combined with fin-de-siècle occultism to produce narratives that oscillate between clinical observation and visionary dread. This synthesis allowed him to treat the self as both juridical subject and haunted soul, a duality that threads through stories of conscience, martyrdom, desire, and catastrophic knowledge.
Andreyev wrote under alternating thaws and freezes. The 1905 October Manifesto briefly loosened press controls; the 1906 counterreform restored restrictions; wartime authorities hardened again. Symbol and myth thereby became instruments of both expression and evasion. After 1917 he was attacked from the left for "bourgeois pessimism" and from the right for moral ambiguity, yet remained widely read abroad—in Berlin, Paris, and New York—well into the 1920s. His death on 12 September 1919 in Finnish exile sealed his image as a witness to Russia’s disintegration. The collection’s themes—betrayal, faith, sea-change, serpent wisdom—crystallize a career forged at the crossroads of revolution, modernism, and spiritual crisis.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Crushed Flower
A brief psychological tale in which a small, careless wrong within a household—signaled by a crushed flower—quietly wounds a young, sensitive heart and alters fragile bonds.
A Story Which Will Never Be Finished
A self-referential fragment about an author struggling to complete a love story, reflecting on chance, interruption, and the impossibility of tidy endings.
On the Day of the Crucifixion
A mosaic of viewpoints in Jerusalem observing an execution that unsettles bystanders with indifference, fear, and awe, sketching the human climate around a pivotal event.
The Serpent’s Story
A fable narrated by a snake whose bond with a child and encounters with humans expose the tensions between innocence, fear, and betrayal.
Love, Faith and Hope
A stark urban vignette in which impoverished characters test lofty ideals against the press of hunger, illness, and chance, asking what endures when life offers no mercy.
The Ocean
A shipboard novella where a cross-section of passengers confronts the sea’s immensity—and a mounting storm—forcing reckonings with faith, dread, and the meaning of survival.
Judas Iscariot and Others
A revisionist Passion narrative that humanizes Judas and the apostles, probing the motives, doubts, and frailties behind betrayal and sacrifice.
The Man Who Found the Truth
After a revelatory insight convinces him he has grasped ultimate truth, a solitary seeker struggles to communicate it, colliding with social skepticism and the edges of sanity.
