Leonid Andreyev wrote about fear — existential, objectless, the kind that comes at night without a cause. The Red Laugh, The Life of Man, “He”: prose and plays in which darkness is not a metaphor but a sensation.
He was born in Oryol in 1871. He studied law, lived half-starved, drank, twice tried to kill himself. Gorky printed him in the Znanie miscellanies — and success came.
The Seven Who Were Hanged (1908) is about the execution of revolutionaries: not politics, but the state of a human being on the edge of death. Judas Iscariot gives us Judas as the one who loved Christ more than all the apostles did.
He did not accept the Revolution and left for Finland. He died in 1919. From the last years came Satan's Diary — a novel about the devil who arrives in the world and cannot work out who, here, is the evil one.