Leonid Andreev and Henri Bergson: laughing as a thought about agreement

Currently, the specifics of laughter in the artistic world of Leonid Andreev are not fully understood. An attempt to characterize the nature of the occurrence of laughter and to comprehend the model of behavior of participants in a laughter situation is made in the article. The study is based on a typological comparison of Henri Bergson’s ideas about laughter and Leonid Andreev’s novel “He. A stranger’s story”. The essay of the French philosopher reveals an understanding of the nature of laughter at the turn of the century, considering the context of the era and summarizing the experiences of the existing ideas about the comic at that time. The article offers an interpretation of Leonid Andreev’s novel, in particular his understanding of laughter, illustrating H. Bergson’s thesis about laughter as a thought of agreement, where laughter acts not as a reaction to the comic, but as a way of modeling one’s own image of the world and integrating into another system of the world. The author consistently examines situations where laughter is heard and describes the behavior of the characters. One of the conclusions that the author comes to is the idea that laughter becomes a sign of the quasi-culturality of a certain social circle, in which the formula “fun and cultured” is perceived as a concept of life. Laughter, according to H. Bergson, which requires a degree of indifference, becomes the only correct reaction in Norden’s house and displaces the right to other emotions. At the same time, laughter plays a unifying role: all family members are forced to laugh. However, forced, illogical laughter replaces a true understanding of life with its ritual side. Any hint of mechanization, the inertia of life, according to Bergson’s philosophy, contains a hidden comedy. Laughter in the story also marks the space of “friend and foe”, and becomes a way of “social training”, subject to which the hero-narrator not only loses his identity, but also becomes close to madness. Thus, with the help of Henri Bergson’s essay “Laughter” we can better understand the nature of the emergence of laughter in the oeuvre of Leonid Andreev.