L. Andreev’s contemporaries called him “the Sphinx of the Russian intelligentsia.” Andreev is one of the most famous and still unread authors of the early 20th century. The peak of L. Andreev’s popularity occurred in the period 1906–1911, when his philosophical drama “The Life of a Man” and “The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men” shocked the entire reading Russia. The intellectual support of Andreev’s work was the works of A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche and F. Dostoevsky, and the quintessence of the writer’s mood was the tragedy of a lonely person who, having lost faith in God, found herself faced with the Absurd.