Book excerpt: A remarkable collection of short expressionist stories by Russian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev, who was considered to be the father of Expressionism in Russian literature. Traces of compassion, beauty, and sympathetic insight are encountered on every page side by side with barbarity and crudeness, the reason being that Andreyev portrays life without hiding, without neglecting any part of it. The Little Angel, and other stories (1916) was of one of his collections that were extensively translated into book form. The plots in these stories are straightforward, the characters are isolated, and the endings are harsh and profound in their sadness. Because of the cumulative descriptions of the strange and the dreadful, Andreyev has been called the Russian Edgar Allan Poe. During the 1914-1929 period, America was eager for anything similar to Edgar Allan Poe. As Poe's Russian equivalent, translations of Andreyev's work found a ready audience in the English-speaking world. This collection contains the following short stories: The Little Angel At the Roadside Station Snapper The Lie An Original Petka at the Bungalow Silence Laughter The Friend In the Basement The City The Marseillaise The Tocsin Bargamot and Garaska Stepping-stones The Spy