"The Red Laugh," by Leonidas Andreief (Leonid Andreyev), 1904.
Translated by Alexandra Linden.
T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1905.
Since the 1970s, I have always gone back to Leonid Andreyev with similar feelings: admiration for his concepts, frequent bafflement at the directions these took, and a constant frustration as I peered at his work indirectly through the smog of translators. In plays and short stories, Andreyev had something to say, but how he said it, and why, often left me in the dark.
On the other hand, a novella that fascinates and frightens me despite clumsy translation is "The Red Laugh." To call it (as many have) a story about the horrors of warfare, or even (as a few have) an allegory of post-traumatic stress disorder, is to miss the point. One might as well call PSYCHO the story of a woman who runs away with stolen money: a description accurate but too limited.
No; "The Red Laugh" is about something even more unsettling than battlefields and crippling wounds.
'I am afraid of crowds -- of men, when many of them gather together. When of an evening I hear a noise in the street -- a loud shout, for instance -- I start and believe that... a massacre has begun. When several men stand together, and I cannot hear what they are talking about, it seems to me that they will suddenly cry out, fall upon each other, and blood will flow. And you know' -- he bent mysteriously towards my ear -- 'the papers are full of murders -- strange murders. It is all nonsense that there are as many brains as there are men; mankind has only one intellect, and it is beginning to get muddled.'
In "The Red Laugh," war is only the beginning. Wounded, exhausted soldiers have become infected on the battlefield by a shared psychosis. When they finally return home, this mental illness grows and spreads to poison their families, their cities, and eventually, it seems, reality itself.
At first, dreams and daylight perceptions become strange:
Those children, those innocent little children. I saw them in the street playing at war and chasing each other, and one of them was already crying in a high-pitched, childish voice -- and something shrank within me from horror and disgust. And I went home; night came on -- and in fiery dreams, resembling midnight conflagrations, those innocent little children changed into a band of child-murderers.
Something was ominously burning in a broad red glare, and in the smoke there swarmed monstrous, misshapen children, with heads of grown-up murderers. They were jumping lightly and nimbly, like young goats at play, and were breathing with difficulty, like sick people. Their mouths, resembling the jaws of toads or frogs, opened widely and convulsively; behind the transparent skin of their naked bodies the red blood was coursing angrily -- and they were killing each other at play. They were the most terrible of all that I had seen, for they were little and could penetrate everywhere.
I was looking out of the window and one of the little ones noticed me, smiled, and with his eyes asked me to let him in.
'I want to go to you,' he said.
'You want to kill me.'
'I want to go to you,' he said, growing suddenly pale, and began scrambling up the white wall like a rat -- just like a hungry rat. He kept losing his footing, and squealed and darted about the wall with such rapidity that I could not follow his impetuous, sudden movements.
Violent impulses become uncontrollable:
...In the eleventh row of stalls. Somebody's arms were pressing closely against me on my right- and left-hand side, while far around me in the semi-darkness stuck out motionless heads, tinged with red from the lights upon the stages. And gradually the mass of people, confined in that narrow space, filled me with horror. Everybody was silent, listening to what was being said on the stage or, perhaps, thinking out his own thoughts, but as they were many they were more audible, for all their silence, than the loud voices of the actors. They were coughing, blowing their noses, making a noise with their feet and clothes, and I could distinctly hear their deep, uneven breathing, that was heating the air. They were terrible, for each of them could become a corpse, and they all had senseless brains. In the calmness of those well-brushed heads, resting upon white, stiff collars, I felt a hurricane of madness ready to burst every second.
My hands grew cold as I thought how many and how terrible they were, and how far away I was from the entrance. They were calm, but what if I were to cry out 'Fire!'... And full of terror, I experienced a painfully passionate desire, of which I cannot think without my hands growing cold and moist. Who could hinder me from crying out -- yes, standing up, turning round and crying out: 'Fire! Save yourselves -- fire!'
A convulsive wave of madness would overwhelm their still limbs. They would jump up, yelling and howling like animals; they would forget that they had wives, sisters, mothers, and would begin casting themselves about like men stricken with sudden blindness, in their madness throttling each other with their white fingers fragrant with scent. The light would be turned on, and somebody with an ashen face would appear upon the stage, shouting that all was in order and that there was no fire, and the music, trembling and halting, would begin playing something wildly merry -- but they would be deaf to everything -- they would be throttling, trampling, and beating the heads of the women, demolishing their ingenious, cunning headdresses. They would tear at each other's ears, bite off each other's noses, and tear the very clothes off each other's bodies, feeling no shame, for they would be mad. Their sensitive, delicate, beautiful, adorable women would scream and writhe helplessly at their feet, clasping their knees, still believing in their generosity -- while they would beat them viciously upon their beautiful upturned faces, trying to force their way towards the entrance. For men are always murderers, and their calmness and generosity is the calmness of a well-fed animal, that knows itself out of danger.
Cities far away from the battlefields become war zones, and then finally, zones of chaos where illusions crush the real in a shockwave of universal psychosis: the Red Laugh.
The crowd, like a living, roaring wave, lifted me up, carried me along several steps and threw me violently against a fence, then carried me back and away somewhere, and at last pressed me against a high pile of wood, that inclined forwards, threatening to fall down upon somebody's head. Something crackled and rattled against the beams in rapid dry succession; an instant's stillness -- and again a roar burst forth, enormous, open-mouthed, terrible in its overwhelming power. And then the dry rapid crackling was heard again and somebody fell down near me with the blood flowing out of a red hole where his eye had been.
In its focus on shared mental breakdown as a growing pandemic, as a type of non-traditional haunting, "The Red Laugh" reminds me of three other stories, but with significant differences.
In THE CROQUET PLAYER, by H. G. Wells (1936), people in a small district are "haunted" by violent impulses from humanity's biological history, with implications that this infection might have spread out into the greater world:
'So long as I was actively employed I kept going, but as soon as I got home I found myself slumping. I could eat nothing. I drank a lot of whisky and instead of going to bed I fell asleep in an arm-chair by the fire. I awoke in terror and found the fire nearly out. I went to bed and when at last I got to sleep the dreams closed in on me and I sat up again starkly awake. I got up and put on an old dressing-gown and went downstairs and made up the fire, determined to keep awake at any cost. But I dozed there and then went back to bed. And so between the bed and the fireside I dragged through the night. My dreams were all a mix-up of the poor scared old lady, the almost as pitiful old man, the ideas the museum custodian had put in my head and, brooding over it all, that infernal palaeolithic skull.
'More and more did the threat of that primordial Adamite dominate me. I could not banish that eyeless stare and that triumphant grin from my mind, sleeping or waking. Waking I saw it as it was in the museum, as if it was a living presence that had set us a riddle and was amused to hear our inadequate attempts at a solution. Sleeping I saw it released from all rational proportions. It became gigantic. It became as vast as a cliff, a mountainous skull in which the orbits and hollows of the jaw were huge caves. He had an effect -- it is hard to convey these dream effects -- as if he was continually rising and yet he was always towering there. In the foreground I saw his innumerable descendants, swarming like ants, swarms of human beings hurrying to and fro, making helpless gestures of submission or deference, resisting an overpowering impulse to throw themselves under his all-devouring shadow. Presently these swarms began to fall into lines and columns, were clad in uniforms, formed up and began marching and trotting towards the black shadows under those worn and rust-stained teeth. From which darkness there presently oozed something -- something winding and trickling, and something that manifestly tasted very agreeably to him. Blood.'
And then Finchatton said a queer thing. 'Little children killed by air-raids in the street.'
In QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, the television play by Nigel Kneale (1959), something terrible and toxic lurks at the heart of human sentience, waiting to be freed. When finally released, it turns London into an alien-directed slaughterhouse. Here, as in THE CROQUET PLAYER, the damage is real but limited; ways are found to deal with infection, or at least to avoid it.
More devastating is the mass hysteria that destroys "The Republic of the Southern Cross," in the story by Valery Brussov / Bryusov (1907). While "Southern Cross" maintains a tone of journalistic detachment, so that its implications become disturbing in contemplation, "The Red Laugh" is visceral, disturbing on the page. "Southern Cross" turns its horrors into a history lesson; "The Red Laugh" turns them into experience.
This visceral focus on blood, broken bodies, and the struggles of nightmare is what survives translation in Andreyev. If read "through" the words instead of "by" the words, "The Red Laugh," in English, becomes a great horror story. If it seems less frequently-encountered nowadays than it was in the past, then it might also become, for many new readers, a striking discovery.
