The novelist Paul Bourget and the schoolboy Leonid Andreev (choice of reading matter and its influence on behaviour and writing practice)

Based on an analysis of Leonid Andreev's unpublished diaries, written while he was still at school, this article examines the part played by Paul Bourget's novel «The Disciple» in determining the intellectual orientation and aesthetic predilections of the future writer. It is suggested that certain features of the French novel's poetics, which were unusual in the context of Russian nineteenth-century literature, may have influenced aspects of Andreev's creativity and been particularly reflected in such characteristics of his later works as their subjective structure (often involving protagonists and/or narrators with split personalities), their radical psychological experimentation, resulting in the experimenter-heroes' defeat, and their extreme intellectual discourse (above all in the stories «Thought» and «My Notes»).