After deciding to dip into Project Gutenberg and see what was there, and to postpone getting bogged down further in the Dostoyevsky I'm trying to read, I downloaded The Crushed Flower and Other Stories by Leonid Andreyev.
It's shaping up to be quite a diverse collection of short stories with different techniques used here to cover such themes as adultery (The Crushed Flower), love and faith (Love, Faith and Hope) as well as the very short tale from the view point of a snake (The Serpent's Story).
The serpent tail did make me think of Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, in the sense it takes the reader into an animal's mind. And I have to confess thinking of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole series when reading The Crushed Flower, because it has that ability to show the reader an adult world through the eyes of an innocent child.
There are some great descriptive flourishes and you sense that this is a writer on a bit more of a mission to use literature as part of a political dialogue that was moving on towards revolution.
I'm only a few stories in to the collection but did want to share some initial reactions, which are favourable. Not everything he works but the vast majority does and you find yourself being drawn back to read more and wishing the tube journey to and from work was just those few stops longer.
