Short Fiction
Translated by Various translators
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This collection offers a masterful, unflinching exploration of the human condition that will resonate with readers who appreciate psychological depth and existential literature.
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Book Summary
Leonid Andreyev's short fiction collection delves into the darkest corners of the human psyche, exploring madness, suffering, and cruelty through tales of desperate characters. From a boy's fleeting hope in a melting wax angel to a man's fatal obsession with a card game, these stories confront the fragility of life and the search for meaning in a harsh world.
The collection opens with 'Bargamot and Garaska,' where a policeman's Easter peace is disrupted by a drunken man, revealing unexpected compassion. 'The Little Angel' follows Sashka, a troubled boy who finds momentary beauty in a wax angel that melts, symbolizing lost innocence. 'Petka at the Bungalow' contrasts urban drudgery with rural freedom as a young apprentice briefly escapes his harsh life. 'A Grand Slam' portrays a card player who dies just as he achieves his dream hand, underscoring life's cruel irony. 'Love, Faith and Hope' traces a man's spiritual rebirth and subsequent imprisonment for fighting evil. The Haggart sequence (chapters IV–VII) depicts murder, betrayal, and a community's moral collapse. 'The Crushed Flower' explores a child's painful awakening to adult secrets. 'The Confessions of a Little Man During Great Days' captures wartime panic and suicidal despair. Throughout, Andreyev examines isolation, death, and the thin line between sanity and madness, often leaving characters in states of profound loss or existential crisis.
Reading guide
Go deeper in Short Fiction
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Judas Iscariot
Judas of Kerioth travels with Jesus and the disciples, keeping the money chest and testing every village with cynical predictions that keep proving wrong. He craves proof and certainty, yet invents falsehoods faster than Thomas can expose them, and his thievish eyes and mad dreams set him apart from the calm believers around him. His uneasy bond with Thomas—half mockery, half pleading—anchors the story's meditation on doubt, betrayal, and what it means to see truly.
Haggart
Haggart paces a motionless floor like a man imprisoned in a dungeon who does not want to escape, trading barbs and bottles with the old sailor Khorre who once nursed him aboard ship. He longs for a deck dancing under his feet but cannot leave, and Khorre's pleas to flee only deepen his sadness. His bloodied hands and refusal to explain himself make him the story's central knot of guilt, longing, and stalled escape.
Father Vassily
Father Vassily presides over a parish and a family equally afflicted—a drunken wife, an idiot son who eats cockroaches, and Nastya, who serves like a scullery maid and loves no one. In the gathering dusk he trades confessions with her that are more like accusations, half-laughing at his own numbness. His immense, black figure against the window and the crowded, anguished church that follows mark him as a man carrying his whole town's dread.
The Governor
At a smoky garden fête the Governor tolerates Commissioner Pike's flattery and clumsy spycraft while unease about the workmen gnaws at him. He is loved at home but feared a little and, lately, pitied—his son's blank astonishment at his worries stings more than any official rebuke. His halting attempt to confide in Aljosha exposes a man whose public power and private doubt have begun to diverge.
Ivan Yanson
Yanson robs and stabs his master, is caught striking matches behind the barn, and arrives in court in a muddy-red shawl with his hair half-plastered down. He seems not to grasp the proceedings, picking his nose and staring until the death sentence jolts him into agitated, childlike protest. His stubborn, uncomprehending question, repeated to a smiling courtroom, makes him the story's unsettling center of justice without understanding.
Mitrofan Krilov
Krilov, in an outworn coat with a torn button, adopts the manner of a police spy and finds the role deliciously alarming—strangers shrink from him, and a student girl with a torn black glove freezes under his gaze. He savors her trapped agitation while secretly envying the vividness of her hunted life compared to his own meagre existence. His petty cruelty and self-loathing make him a study of how dull men manufacture drama from others' fear.
Madness and Rationality
The book repeatedly explores the thin line between sanity and insanity, often through characters who question their own mental states, such as Dr. Kerzhentseff's analysis of his own murderous actions and the narrator's struggle with the 'solitude of madness.'
Suffering and Injustice
A pervasive theme is the experience of profound suffering and perceived universal injustice, seen in characters like the imprisoned narrator who curses life after betrayal and loss, and in the depiction of prisoners and the condemned.
Isolation and Alienation
Characters frequently experience deep loneliness and separation from others, as exemplified by the prisoner's lament about being left alone by friends and family, and Father Vassily's alienated, distant demeanor among people.
Truth and Deception
The narrative grapples with the elusiveness of truth, both in personal relationships and in broader existential terms, as characters like Father Vassily search for a 'great all-solving truth' while others, like the spy, engage in deliberate deception.
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