"Strange" images of Leonid Andreev. Analysis of the story L

"Red Laughter" is a work-scream, a work-emotion created under the impression of the Russo-Japanese War. It does not contain specific political statements, there is no assessment of events, there is no social basis. But this does not mean that the story is written outside of time and space. A work that is strong emotionally affects the reader. The author's search for expressiveness of style reached its highest expression in The Red Laughter. Expressionism becomes here the fundamental principle of artistic perfection. The work itself is subtitled "Fragments from a Found Manuscript". It has a clear composition. Consists of two parts.

The first and second parts consist of nine passages. The last, 19th passage, serves as an epilogue. First part- this is a picturesque and musically detailed description of senseless hostilities, which are reproduced by the younger brother ...
according to the elders. The second part is the thoughts of the younger brother, his inner life. There are three refrain passages in the work (5, 7, 17).

In the first part, the pictures of the war are given in order of increasing complexity of both the pictures themselves and the impressions from them. The first two passages are exclusively color and light, depicting a hike under the sun. Aimless hike. The passage is red. People walking under the sun are deaf and blind. The writer here does not talk about the war, he infects the reader with its madness and horror. And the theme of madness and horror is fixed in subsequent passages in a verbal-figurative form. In the second passage, a complex symbolic image red laugh. Red laughter is the essence of war, its insane soul.“…We will destroy everything: their buildings, their universities and museums… we will dance on the ruins… we will skin those who are too white… Have you tried drinking blood? She's a little sticky...but she's red, she has such a cheerful red laugh!..".

The theme of madness is steadily increasing (officers have a picnic with a samovar in a combat position; two regiments of the same army fight like enemies; a train carrying the wounded is blown up by mines; the main character’s legs were crushed by a grenade fired by their own). Once at home, the hero tries in vain to return to his former life, but for madmen it is impossible to return from hell to heaven.

And in these passages younger brother expresses the idea that war does not go unpunished for anyone, since humanity is a single organism. And if the war is not stopped in one place, then the whole world is over the abyss of madness. People cease to understand what is possible and what is not, and the principle "everything is permitted" becomes the norm of behavior.

In the story, the painful exaggeration of tone, the grotesqueness of images, and the injection of contrasts, characteristic of the manner of the late Andreev, appeared in the story.. The war scenes depicted in the story are reminiscent of the anti-war etchings by the Spanish artist Goya, one of Andreev's favorite artists. We emphasize once again that Andreev was not interested in the social causes of the war, typical characters or typical circumstances. The most important thing for him in the story - to express oneself, one's personal attitude to this war, and through this - to any war and, in general, to the murder of a man by a man. The realistic depiction of reality clearly gives way in the story to a fundamentally new style of presentation.

Andreev realized that he was increasingly moving away from realism: as he wrote to L.N. Tolstoy, sending the manuscript of "Red Laughter", "turned" from him "somewhere to the side."

Later in world art, the method to which Andreev gravitated in Red Laughter declared itself as expressionism. With the greatest completeness, the features of this method manifested themselves in the dramaturgy of Andreev ( "Human Life", "Tsar-Hunger", philosophical dramas 1910s).

Composition

In 1904, the story "Red Laughter" was written - a sharply emotional response to Russo-Japanese War. This, according to the author, is "a daring attempt, while sitting in Georgians, to give psychology real war. However, Andreev did not know war, and therefore, despite his extraordinary intuition, he could not give the correct psychology of war. Hence the nervous excitement in the story, sometimes reaching hysterical reflections on the fate of the writer, hence the fragmentation of the narrative. "Red Laughter" is a typical example of expressionism, to which Andreev gravitated more and more.

The story has two parts, consisting of chapters called fragments. In part I, a description of the horrors of war is given, in part II - the madness and horror that gripped the rear. The form of “fragments from a found manuscript” allowed the author, naturally, without any apparent violation of the logical sequence (the manuscript could be “found” in scraps), to highlight only the horrors of the war, which engulfed people in madness. The story opens with these words: "... madness and horror." And everything in it is painted In the red color of blood, horror, death.

The writer portrays the war as an absolute senselessness. At the front they go crazy because they see horrors, in the rear because they think about them. If they kill there, the characters of the story think, then it can come here too. War becomes a habit. It is easier for Andreev's hero to get used to the murders than to agree that this is temporary, surmountable. If a participant in the Russo-Japanese War, V. Veresaev, spoke of a saving habit that does not allow a person to run wild among murders, then for Andreev, the habit of war is a nightmare and can only lead to madness.

Criticism emphasized the one-sidedness of Andreev's view of the war, a painful psychological strain in her description. “Red laughter,” Veresaev wrote, “is the work of a great neurasthenic artist who painfully and passionately experienced the war through newspaper correspondence about it.” But with all the one-sidedness and the heap of nightmarish images that reduce humanistic pathos works, the story played a certain positive role. Written from the positions of pacifism, it condemned any war, but in those conditions it was perceived as a condemnation of a specific war - the Russo-Japanese one, and this coincided with the attitude of all democratic Russia towards it.

Gorky highly praised "Red Laughter", considering it "extremely important, timely, strong." However great writer reproached Andreev for opposing the facts with his subjective attitude towards the war. L. Andreev, objecting to Gorky, emphasized that he was trying first of all to express his attitude and that the theme of the story was not war, but the madness and horror of war. “Finally, my attitude is also a fact, and a very important one,” he wrote2. This dispute reflects not just creative, but ideological positions of both writers: Gorky spoke about the objective meaning of facts, Andreev defended the subjective attitude of the artist to the facts, which, however, easily led to the loss of social criteria in assessing phenomena, which Andreev observed quite often.

There is no doubt that horrors are exaggerated in Andreev's story. However, this is only special reception images of war as an unnatural phenomenon. Russian literature knew a similar image of the war even before Andreev: “ Sevastopol stories» L. Tolstoy, V. Garshin’s story “Four Days”, which also focuses on the horrors of war, the death of a person is shown with terrifying naturalistic details and presented as something meaningless. It is hardly possible to talk about the direct impact of these writers on Andreev, if only because they had a clearer humanistic and social position. However, "Red Laughter" was written in many respects in this tradition, just like - later - "War and Peace" by Mayakovsky ("four legs in a rotting carriage for forty people"), military stories of the Ukrainian writer S. Vasilchenko "On the golden losh ”, “Chorsh Maki”, “Otruyna Kvitka” and especially “Holy Gomsh”, in which there is some dependence on the Andreev expressionist method of depicting the war.

The story is based on newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts of the Russo-Japanese War. “Madness and horror” of any war L. Andreev showed through the irrational image of the Red Laughter, created by the morbid fantasy of the protagonist, who is constantly in mental stress. Pay attention to the verbs that convey his state - “seems”, “sees”, “imagines”. Events in the story are presented in disparate episodes, incoherent passages from the “found manuscript”. In the foreground are not events, but an emotional attitude towards them. The story "Red Laughter" was a "daring attempt", according to the author, to recreate the psychology of war, to show the state of a person in an atmosphere of "madness and horror" of mass murder. The writer moved away from realism. He, no doubt, exaggerated, portraying a man in war, considering everyone to be madmen who senselessly and cruelly exterminate not only each other, but "the whole world." “…We will destroy everything: their buildings, their universities and museums… we will dance on the ruins…”
“The pictures of the war depicted in the story ... are reminiscent of the anti-war etchings by the Spanish artist Goya, one of Andreev's favorite artists. It is no coincidence that, having decided to publish the story as a separate book, Andreev wanted to illustrate it with Goya's etchings from the Caprichos series ... ”(L. G. Sokolov).

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