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The Seven That Were Hanged and Other Stories
Contents:
"The Seven That Were Hanged"
"The Abyss" (reprinted — © 1943)
"Silence"
"The Lie"
"Lazarus"
"Laughter"
"Ben Tobit"
"The Marseillaise"
"The Red Laugh"
"The Seven That Were Hanged"
"The Abyss" (reprinted — © 1943)
"Silence"
"The Lie"
"Lazarus"
"Laughter"
"Ben Tobit"
"The Marseillaise"
"The Red Laugh"
249 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1908
About the author
Leonid Andreyev
744 books451 followersLeonid Nikolayevich Andreyev (Russian: Леонид Николаевич Андреев; 1871-1919) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who led the Expressionist movement in the national literature. He was active between the revolution of 1905 and the Communist revolution which finally overthrew the Tsarist government. His first story published was About a Poor Student, a narrative based upon his own experiences. It was not, however, until Gorky discovered him by stories appearing in the Moscow Courier and elsewhere that Andreyevs literary career really began. His first collection of stories appeared in 1901, and sold a quarter-million copies in short time. He was hailed as a new star in Russia, where his name soon became a byword. He published his short story, In the Fog in 1902. Although he started out in the Russian vein he soon startled his readers by his eccentricities, which grew even faster than his fame. His two best known stories may be The Red Laugh (1904) and The Seven Who Were Hanged (1908). His dramas include the Symbolist plays The Life of Man (1906), Tsar Hunger (1907), Black Masks (1908), Anathema (1909) and He Who Gets Slapped (1915).
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 1, 2018
Phenomenal not just for their technical skill and tight command of aesthetic, but also their diversity. In this collection of short stories, we get snippets of horror, physiological drama, and literary fiction. The opening story (the eponymous Seven That Were Hanged) is a direct, Nabokovian work that illustrates well the pathos in the approach of death in a manner reminiscent of Koestler's better works. Th Abyss is a simply bloodcurdling tale whose leap from the normal to the macabre is expertly crafted for maximal jarring effect. Lazarus is another gem, a beautifully crafted story based around a simply fantastic (and remarkably unexplored) premise with metaphysical undertones that make it comparable to the famed Grand Inquisitor passage from The Brothers Karamazov. But the true pièce de résistance is the last story, The Red Laugh. Portraying first person madness brought on by traumatic stress in a manner that is simultaneously realistic, horrifying, and thematically powerful requires incredible technical skill, but Andreyev succeeds. Furthermore, the story's aesthetic, equal parts Camus and Kafka to go along with the Gogolian narration, is simply sublime, producing an absurdist's take on war that is frighteningly original in its vividness.
This book is simply a must read.
This book is simply a must read.
July 6, 2024
“To die is not so terrible; the terrible thing is to know that one is going to die.”
“She was weeping so much so that she could not see her way. And the farther she got from prison, the more abundant became her tears. She retraced her steps, losing herself in this city in which she was born, in which she had grown up, in which she had grown old. She entered a little abandoned garden and sat down on a damp bench.
And suddenly she understood: tomorrow they would hang her son! She sprang to her feet and tried to shout and run, but suddenly her head turned and she sank to the earth.”
[I’d only recently added this to my TBR stack, based on the recommendation from my JHU professor in his course on Pasternak/Bulgakov/Akhmatova; excellent recommendation; I don’t know that I’d ever heard of Andreyev; I probably saw his name in a list of Russian writers and passed by it since I didn’t recognize any of his titles. His writing is excellent! Really vivid and thoughtful explorations of the mind, especially when engaged with conflict all around or under extreme duress. Unfortunate lack of name recognition like so many excellent short story writers who toil in obscurity. ***The is the best collection of short stories written by a single author that I’ve read in a long, long time.***]
The Seven That Were Hanged is an interesting psychological exploration of each of the condemned’s thoughts in the time leading up to
…..
The Red Laugh
“I recognized it—that red laugh. I had been searching for it and I had found it—that red laugh. Now I understood what there was in all those multilated, torn, strange bodies. It was in the sky, it was in the sun, and soon it was going to overspread the whole earth—that red laugh!”
“Are there many wounded?” I asked.
He waved his hand. “A great many madmen. More so than the wounded.”
“Real madmen?”
“What others can there be?”
“Ever since that night, he wrote for two months, without leaving his chair, refusing all food, weeping and scolding whenever we wheeled him away from his table even for a short time. He moved his dry pen over the paper with wonderful rapidity, throwing aside page after page, and kept on writing and writing.”
“Now I am afraid of returning to my empty home. When I put my key into the lock and look at the dumb, flat door, I can feel all its dark, empty rooms behind it…the air seems to have still retained the traces of talking and laughing and the merry clang of dishes. Sometimes I hear the scraping of a dry pen…”
“This morning, looking in the newspaper through the endless list of killed, I saw a familiar name…And an hour later, the postman handed me a letter addressed to my brother, and I recognized the handwriting of the deceased on the envelope: the dead was writing the dead. But still it was better so than the dead writing to the living.”
An interesting exploration of PTSD before the condition was diagnosed as such. Interesting also that the point of view shifts about two-thirds into the story, but Andreyev pulls it off.
The Abyss :
A story about a brutal rape, and then, we’ll, raped again
Lazarus
“Someone recklessly lifted the veil…’Why don’t you tell us, Lazarus, what was There?’”
Silence
“From the day of the funeral, silence reigned in the little house. It was not stillness, for that is the mere absence of noise, but it was silence, which means those who kept silence could, apparently, have spoken if they had pleased.”
“And wherever Father Ignaty placed the portrait, the eyes continually followed him, not speaking, but silent; and the silence was so clear that it seemed possible to hear it. And by degrees, Father Ignaty came to think that he did hear the silence.”
The Lie
“And I do not know why, but i laughed, and the sharp needles pierced my heart, and right into my ear someone unseen laughed:
“Ho! ho! ho!”
Ben Tobit
“On that dread day of monstrous injustice, when Jesus Christ was crucified among the thieves on Golgotha—on that day, Ben Tobit, a merchant in Jerusalem, had been suffering from an unbearable toothache since the early hours of the morning.”
“She was weeping so much so that she could not see her way. And the farther she got from prison, the more abundant became her tears. She retraced her steps, losing herself in this city in which she was born, in which she had grown up, in which she had grown old. She entered a little abandoned garden and sat down on a damp bench.
And suddenly she understood: tomorrow they would hang her son! She sprang to her feet and tried to shout and run, but suddenly her head turned and she sank to the earth.”
[I’d only recently added this to my TBR stack, based on the recommendation from my JHU professor in his course on Pasternak/Bulgakov/Akhmatova; excellent recommendation; I don’t know that I’d ever heard of Andreyev; I probably saw his name in a list of Russian writers and passed by it since I didn’t recognize any of his titles. His writing is excellent! Really vivid and thoughtful explorations of the mind, especially when engaged with conflict all around or under extreme duress. Unfortunate lack of name recognition like so many excellent short story writers who toil in obscurity. ***The is the best collection of short stories written by a single author that I’ve read in a long, long time.***]
The Seven That Were Hanged is an interesting psychological exploration of each of the condemned’s thoughts in the time leading up to
…..
The Red Laugh
“I recognized it—that red laugh. I had been searching for it and I had found it—that red laugh. Now I understood what there was in all those multilated, torn, strange bodies. It was in the sky, it was in the sun, and soon it was going to overspread the whole earth—that red laugh!”
“Are there many wounded?” I asked.
He waved his hand. “A great many madmen. More so than the wounded.”
“Real madmen?”
“What others can there be?”
“Ever since that night, he wrote for two months, without leaving his chair, refusing all food, weeping and scolding whenever we wheeled him away from his table even for a short time. He moved his dry pen over the paper with wonderful rapidity, throwing aside page after page, and kept on writing and writing.”
“Now I am afraid of returning to my empty home. When I put my key into the lock and look at the dumb, flat door, I can feel all its dark, empty rooms behind it…the air seems to have still retained the traces of talking and laughing and the merry clang of dishes. Sometimes I hear the scraping of a dry pen…”
“This morning, looking in the newspaper through the endless list of killed, I saw a familiar name…And an hour later, the postman handed me a letter addressed to my brother, and I recognized the handwriting of the deceased on the envelope: the dead was writing the dead. But still it was better so than the dead writing to the living.”
An interesting exploration of PTSD before the condition was diagnosed as such. Interesting also that the point of view shifts about two-thirds into the story, but Andreyev pulls it off.
The Abyss :
A story about a brutal rape, and then, we’ll, raped again
Lazarus
“Someone recklessly lifted the veil…’Why don’t you tell us, Lazarus, what was There?’”
Silence
“From the day of the funeral, silence reigned in the little house. It was not stillness, for that is the mere absence of noise, but it was silence, which means those who kept silence could, apparently, have spoken if they had pleased.”
“And wherever Father Ignaty placed the portrait, the eyes continually followed him, not speaking, but silent; and the silence was so clear that it seemed possible to hear it. And by degrees, Father Ignaty came to think that he did hear the silence.”
The Lie
“And I do not know why, but i laughed, and the sharp needles pierced my heart, and right into my ear someone unseen laughed:
“Ho! ho! ho!”
Ben Tobit
“On that dread day of monstrous injustice, when Jesus Christ was crucified among the thieves on Golgotha—on that day, Ben Tobit, a merchant in Jerusalem, had been suffering from an unbearable toothache since the early hours of the morning.”
May 17, 2014
Andreyev sometimes reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft in his uncanny ability to tap into deep horror, but in the realm of human beings rather than the supernatural. His obvious psychological trauma from war is tangible, but so is his love for humanity. This struggle between hopeful and sinister forces makes for very intense but beautiful reading.
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October 19, 2024The Seven That Were Hanged is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror
November 12, 2025
This is a collection of short stories from the early 1900s, translated from Russian. They were pretty boring. My favourite was the last story called The Red Laugh. It is a war story, very realistic, gorey, captivating.
Genre: Short Stories, Classics, Russian Literature
Trigger Warnings: suicide, war, gore
“The shores of life cannot contain my love as broad as is the sea.” 79
Genre: Short Stories, Classics, Russian Literature
Trigger Warnings: suicide, war, gore
“The shores of life cannot contain my love as broad as is the sea.” 79
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews