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Валя
Рассказ, впервые опубликованный в 1899 году.
- GenresRussia
17 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 3, 2014
About the author
Leonid Andreyev
741 books450 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 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 15, 2026
In his short story “Valya,” written in 1899, Leonid Andreyev confronts a young boy with a moral test for which he is wholly unprepared. He understands nothing of family ties, adult grievances, or the laws by which some people gain the right to determine the course of other people’s lives. But it turns out that this child can grasp something the adults cannot.
Valya grows up in a well-off home, surrounded by love and care. He takes his aunt and uncle for his parents and has no idea that somewhere there is another woman, his birth mother. When she appears and demands her son back, the boy’s familiar world starts to fall apart. The adults quarrel, weep, and go to court, while Valya cannot work out why the word “mama,” which has always meant one person, now means another.
Andreyev conveys a child’s perception remarkably well. Valya judges people by the most immediate impressions: smell, voice, touch, with no regard for kinship or moral worth. His birth mother strikes him as unpleasant, even frightening. Her caresses are prickly, her smile unnatural, her clothes shabby, and she smells of damp and rot. The home of his aunt and uncle, by contrast, is full of light, books, and familiar things. For the boy, the difference between the two worlds is above all the difference between comfort and fear.
But behind this domestic story a more complex conflict emerges. Who has the greater right to a child, the woman who bore him or the people who raised him? Can love be measured by degree of kinship? And what does a just decision mean when any possible decision will hurt someone?
Andreyev offers no simple answers. There are no villains here to whom the misfortunes can be assigned. Each of the adults loves Valya in their own way, but that love is inevitably mixed with fear of loss, jealousy, resentment, and the wish to keep a loved one close. Each believes their claim is justified. The more insistently the adults defend their rights, the clearer it becomes that the child has little voice in their dispute.
Books play a special role. Valya reads constantly, immersing himself in a world of fairy-tale adventures, monsters, and unhappy heroes. At first these invented stories seem much more interesting to him than the adults’ incomprehensible talk. Gradually, the boundary between the monsters in his books and the world around him dissolves. Imagination, once a diversion, becomes a way to make sense of what is happening, and the stories he has read quietly teach him to imagine another person’s grief.
The adults have experience, knowledge, money, social standing; they can reason about duty, love, and justice. But faced with a real test, they are helpless before their own feelings. Little Valya discovers that he can look at events through eyes other than his own. Where the adults demand love, he comes to understand that love sometimes demands something of the person who gives it.
Beneath the quarrel over a mother’s rights, “Valya” is a story about the unexpected maturity of a child’s soul. Andreyev shows that adulthood begins with the capacity to see another person’s pain, to recognize it as no less important than one’s own, and to feel responsible for another human being. Age, life experience, even the power to make decisions give a person none of this. A child can prove capable of such compassion sooner than those who are used to thinking of themselves as grown-up.
Valya grows up in a well-off home, surrounded by love and care. He takes his aunt and uncle for his parents and has no idea that somewhere there is another woman, his birth mother. When she appears and demands her son back, the boy’s familiar world starts to fall apart. The adults quarrel, weep, and go to court, while Valya cannot work out why the word “mama,” which has always meant one person, now means another.
Andreyev conveys a child’s perception remarkably well. Valya judges people by the most immediate impressions: smell, voice, touch, with no regard for kinship or moral worth. His birth mother strikes him as unpleasant, even frightening. Her caresses are prickly, her smile unnatural, her clothes shabby, and she smells of damp and rot. The home of his aunt and uncle, by contrast, is full of light, books, and familiar things. For the boy, the difference between the two worlds is above all the difference between comfort and fear.
But behind this domestic story a more complex conflict emerges. Who has the greater right to a child, the woman who bore him or the people who raised him? Can love be measured by degree of kinship? And what does a just decision mean when any possible decision will hurt someone?
Andreyev offers no simple answers. There are no villains here to whom the misfortunes can be assigned. Each of the adults loves Valya in their own way, but that love is inevitably mixed with fear of loss, jealousy, resentment, and the wish to keep a loved one close. Each believes their claim is justified. The more insistently the adults defend their rights, the clearer it becomes that the child has little voice in their dispute.
Books play a special role. Valya reads constantly, immersing himself in a world of fairy-tale adventures, monsters, and unhappy heroes. At first these invented stories seem much more interesting to him than the adults’ incomprehensible talk. Gradually, the boundary between the monsters in his books and the world around him dissolves. Imagination, once a diversion, becomes a way to make sense of what is happening, and the stories he has read quietly teach him to imagine another person’s grief.
The adults have experience, knowledge, money, social standing; they can reason about duty, love, and justice. But faced with a real test, they are helpless before their own feelings. Little Valya discovers that he can look at events through eyes other than his own. Where the adults demand love, he comes to understand that love sometimes demands something of the person who gives it.
Beneath the quarrel over a mother’s rights, “Valya” is a story about the unexpected maturity of a child’s soul. Andreyev shows that adulthood begins with the capacity to see another person’s pain, to recognize it as no less important than one’s own, and to feel responsible for another human being. Age, life experience, even the power to make decisions give a person none of this. A child can prove capable of such compassion sooner than those who are used to thinking of themselves as grown-up.
May 7, 2018
Умеет Андреев довести честного программиста до слёз своими рассказами.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews