Note {53} — VI

A short article in the form of a letter to the editor, on Leonid Andreyev on the appearance of Burenin's critical Sketches in Novoe Vremya, 1903. At the time it attracted great attention in the press owing to the exceptional bitterness with which S. A. T. attacked Andreyev and in general all modern novelists. She wrote: "One would like to continue M. Burenin's splendid article, adding ever more ideas of the same kind, raising higher and higher the standard for artistic purity and moral power in contemporary literature. Works of Messieurs Andreyevs ought not to be read, nor glorified, nor sold out, but the whole Russian public ought to rise in indignation against the dirt which in thousands of copies is being spread over Russia by a cheap journal and by repeated editions of publishers who encourage them. If Maxim Gorky, undoubtedly a clever and gifted writer from the people, introduces a good deal of cynicism and nudeness into the scenes in which he paints the life of a certain class, one always, nevertheless, feels in them a sincere sorrow for all the evil and suffering which is endured by the poor, ignorant, and drunken of fallen humanity. In the works of Maxim Gorky one can always dwell on some character or pathetic moment in which, one feels, the author, grieving for the fallen, has a clear knowledge of what is evil and what good, and he loves the good. But in Andreyev's stories one feels that he loves and takes delight in the baseness in the phenomena of vicious human life, and with that love of vice he infects the undeveloped, the reading public which, as M. Burenin says, is untidy morally, and the young who cannot yet know life.... The wretched new writers of contemporary fiction, like Andreyev, are only able to concentrate upon the dirty spots in the human fall and proclaim to the uneducated, the half-intelligent reading public, and invite them to examine deep into the decayed corpse of fallen humanity and to shut its eyes to the whole of God's spacious and beautiful world with its beauty of nature, with the greatness of art, with the high aspirations of human souls, with the religious and moral struggle and the great ideals of good...." Novoe Vremya, 1903.