Stories from the years when Andreyev was the most read writer in Russia: a small boy at a grown-up party discovering what the adults are doing to one another, a Jerusalem merchant with a toothache on the day of the Crucifixion, a serpent telling her own story, and Judas Iscariot as the one disciple who understood. He wrote them between the 1905 revolution and the war, and Gorky, who had promoted him, ended the friendship over their darkness. The mood is closer to Poe than to Chekhov, and the endings are never mitigated. Sixty plates of Russian painting from 1812 to 1917, among them Repin and Perov, carry the same world of provincial gardens, tea tables and hard judgment that darkens these stories.
