What Madness It Is to Be Man and to Seek the Truth

Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages carrying Andreyev's allegorical story of 1904, written under the title "You Lie," in W.H. Lowe's translation, first collected in Silence and Other Stories (1910). The frontispiece is The Truth by the Russian artist Natsuki, Repin's 1904 portrait of Andreyev appears near the end, and the last two pages are a list of suggested further reading on the spirit of truth drawn from seven of the site's other series.

The story is told by a man consumed by the certainty that the woman he loves is lying to him, and it opens on the accusation itself — you lie, I know you lie — met by her complaint that he is shouting, which he notes is itself a lie, since he had spoken in the quietest voice while the word hissed between them like a little serpent. She answers by saying she loves him and that he ought to believe her, and kisses him; when he reaches for her hand she is already gone. He follows her to a party where he knows nobody, sits in the corner by the band with the mouth of a great brass instrument pointed at him, and watches the dancing all night while something hidden in the depths of the instrument bellows and gives a rude staccato laugh. From time to time she passes close enough for her shoulder to press his for a second. The portrait of her is the story's centre: a profile as white, severe and truthful as a pensive angel on the tomb of the long-forgotten dead, and eyes large and calm and greedy of the light, whose pupils seem blacker and more unfathomable the longer he looks. The title states the position the story is written to test — that seeking the truth is a form of madness in a creature who cannot bear to have it — and the running head under which the pages are set, "the dark colours of truth," says the same thing more quietly.

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