Leonid Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped: Who Gets Slapped?

Abstract

Leonid Andreyev is at once one of the most prominent and yet one of the most enigmatic figures in the rise of the Russian modernist theatre. Of his prominence little needs to be said. A prodigious writer of plays, Andreyev achieved dubious celebrity in a career which encompassed both spectacular successes — of which the Meyerhold production of The Life of Man (‘Zhizn’ cheloveka’) was the undoubted highlight — and a growing coolness on the part of audiences and critics towards the works of his later years, in which he came to experiment with a perplexing variety of styles and forms. To this public story of Andreyev’s fall from grace first the gossip columnists, then the memoirists and biographers have added the poignant account of the private man, whose life became poisoned by a sense of injustice at the often vitriolic attacks of his critics and increasingly burdened by the symptoms of the grave illness which was to result in his premature death in 1919. The famous dacha, built in Finland at the height of Andreyev’s fame, but which fell rapidly into disrepair and eventual ruin, has somehow become an emblem of a writer whose name is almost invariably invoked as a case study of the rise and fall of the popular man of letters in early twentieth-century Russia.¹