not acquired. Civilization
and what learning he obtained later through the reading of books have
influenced, not the manner or method of his writing, but only its
purpose and occasionally its subject matter. It is significant to
watch the dismal failure Gorky makes of it whenever, in concession to
the modern literary fashion, he attempts the mystical. Symbolism is
foreign to him except in its broadest aspects. His characters, though
hailing from a world but little known, and often extreme and extremely
peculiar, are on the whole normal.

Andreyev, on the other hand, is a child of civilization, steeped in
its culture, and while as rebellious against some of the things of
civilization as Gorky, he reacts to them in quite a different way.
He is wondrously sensitive to every development, quickly appropriates
what is new, and always keeps in the vanguard. His art is the
resultant of all that the past ages have given us, of the things that
we have learned in our own day, and of what we are just now learning.
With this art Andreyev succeeds in communicating ideas, thoughts, and
feelings so fine, so tenuous, so indefinite as to appear to transcend
human expression. He does not care whether the things he writes about
are true, whether his characters are real. What he aims to give is a
true impression. And to convey this impression he does not scorn
to use mysticism, symbolism, or even plain realism. His favorite
characters are degenerates, psychopaths, abnormal eccentrics, or just
creatures of fancy corresponding to no reality. Frequently, however,
the characters, whether real or unreal, are as such of merely
secondary importance, the chief aim being the interpretation of an
idea or set of ideas, and the characters functioning primarily only as
a medium for the embodiment of those ideas.

In one respect Gorky and Andreyev are completely at one--in their
bold aggressiveness. The emphatic tone, the attitude of attack, first
introduced into Russian literature by Gorky, was soon adopted by most
of his young contemporaries, and became the characteristic mark of the
literature of the Revolution. By that token the literature of
Young Russia of that day is as easily recognized as is the English
literature of the Dryden and Pope epoch by its sententiousness.
It contrasts sharply with the tone of passive resignation and
hopelessness of the preceding period. Even Chekhov, the greatest
representative of what may be called the period of d