Poetics of horror by Leonid Andreev: perception aspect

Sharing the idea of socio-cultural nature of emotions, the article’s author analyzes perception of Andreev’s work as an outcome of extremely emotional public discourse at the time of the Russian fin-de-siècle. An organic part of this discourse was the style and the language of literary criticism. The horrors were understood as social horrors, which had already been aesthetically assimilated by naturalism, and as horrors associated with the portrayal of irrational forces controlling a man. These ideas were introduced to the readers by modernism. In Andreev’s works both of these lines merged and conditioned his literary reputation of “the singer of horrors”. Poetics of fear has already attracted attention of multiple researchers (S. Rolet). However, the author of this article, distinguishing between the concepts of “fear” and “horror” and applying their philosophical interpretations (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Berdiaev), prefers the latter. In this article, the author studies the aspect of Andreev’s poetics perception using critical responses of D. Merezhkovsky, A. Bely, I. Annensky, M. Voloshin and others.