Three days after his burial, Lazarus returns from the grave—but he does not return unchanged.
Once warm and joyful, he is now silent, physically decayed, and utterly detached from the world of the living. He refuses to reveal what he witnessed beyond death. Yet those who meet his gaze begin to understand.
In Lazarus’s eyes, they glimpse an endless and indifferent void that strips life of beauty, ambition, love, and meaning. An inspired artist loses his creative vision. Friends and admirers fall into despair. Even the Roman emperor Augustus Caesar is forced to confront the inevitable ruin of his power, his empire, and every human achievement.
Determined to protect others from the terrible knowledge Lazarus carries, Caesar orders his eyes destroyed. Blind, feared, and abandoned, Lazarus wanders alone toward his second and final death.
First published in 1906, Leonid Andreyev’s *Lazarus* transforms the biblical miracle of resurrection into a haunting work of existential horror. Dark, philosophical, and deeply unsettling, it explores mortality, isolation, cosmic indifference, and the devastating possibility that some truths are too terrible for the living to endure.
Narrated by Paul Landergan.
