# LBL Reviews "My Notes" by Leonid Andreyev



## Lobolover (Jun 18, 2010)

Today I finished Leonid Andreyev's "My notes" (not knowing the english title or the russian one you probably won't be able to find any information on it , because there is no online bibliography of Andreyev aparently  ), which Andreyev called his best story .

It's basicly a diary written as if for future reading by someone else . It has an old man , wrongly put in prison for the murder of his family (though Andreyev , in an interview , said he started to think he is guilty after all , because of how often he pleads his innocence) and who spends decades in prison . Finaly at the end of his life , after he is released , he reunites with his old fiancé , but rejects her and runs off . He then rejects worldly fame and turns to using his fortune to create a perfect replica of his former cell and hires a guard to strictly keep him under prison surveilance , and to even punish him if he breaks the rules .

However most of this story is plagued both by long windedness , with nearly the entiere thing devoted to the man's boring philosophy of "usefullness" , his praise of the prison system , and his numerous pseudo religious ramifications and exploits , where he becomes a sort of holy man and even provides confessions to his listeners and most of all , an iritating amount of notes , serving no purpose then to add even more side tracking ramifications , unneeded explanations and the man's poinless comentary on his_ very own coments _.

Overall , this is a book which , though banned in the USSR (mostly for the mentions of Christ I believe) it has little interesting in it , and it is strange that the man who wrote Lazarus thinks of this as his best .


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