“The Joy of All the Afflicted”: The Seven Who Were Hanged as a Meditation on Death and the Human Condition
This experience is captured viscerally in Leonid Andreev’s story The Seven Who Were Hanged, which catalogues the ruminations of seven awaiting execution. Of the seven, five belong to a terrorist group, convicted of the attempted assassination of a minister. The members of the group are relatively young, inexperienced in life and driven by strong emotions, and the vitality they each outwardly present—for the continuation of their cause, for their comrades—draws a stark contrast against the reality of isolation in a small, dark cell, and the knowledge of what will come. The gravity of their situations unwraps each of their psyches and lays them out for the audience to consider. Vasily, a young man whose repressed fear intensifies until he is left a shell, Musya, a cynic who finds joy in the legacy she will leave behind as a martyr to her cause and Werner, the leader of the group, whose internal apathy has plagued his ability to enjoy life—all fill the cold solitude around them by intently ruminating on their own relation to death. Solitude prior to death allows for the exploration of the characters’ psyches through rambling internal monologue, hallucinations, and haunting physical descriptions. The Seven Who Were Hanged does not moralize; it instead intricately explores the inner minds of people who are caged both by the physical—the prison cell—and by the mental—the intimate understanding of their hours remaining on earth as short and finite.
Out of the seven, Vasily undergoes the most traumatic experience as his sense of self cracks under the stress of knowing he will die. Hours before his death, Vasily’s mother visits him, arguing with him over trivial matters. The tension characterizing the visit no doubt aggravates the sense of isolation and desperation that begins later that night as Vasily realizes that “the eternal misunderstanding which all his life long had stood like a wall between him and those nearest to him” has even prevented him from properly saying goodbye to his mother (230). For the remainder of the evening until sunrise, Vasily must face his impending death understanding that he has never been, and will never have the chance to be, genuine with another human being.
Increasingly agitated by the loss of his agency, Vasily slowly descends into despair, his movements erratic and wracked with fear. Not only is this a product of the physical walls that confine him, but also the conceptualization of the ultimate lack of being that awaits him; he will spend these remaining hours unable to exercise that which innately characterizes the human person, after which he no longer be the human person. The realization is deeply traumatic, and one which prompts the unraveling of Vasily’s psyche. The fear enfolds his surroundings and fractures it into puppets and dolls—a world that he can deal without, one where death seems “acceptable…having[lost] its great and enigmatic significance, becoming something mechanical and only for that reason terrible” (247). This fantasy world is the one in which Vasily retreats, preferring to deal with a concept of death without the fundamentally human component. The “mechanical” death that Vasily visualizes is only concerned with the physical: dolls being things which lack agency and consciousness, two traits fundamental to the human condition.
Having dealt with the physical, Vasily, as many are described to have done before death, appeals to the spiritual — to God. Blindly searching for salvation from his fate, he is reminded of his religious upbringing and a phrase which he had repeated throughout his life, a mantra which has provided him comfort throughout his life. He invokes, “Joy of all the afflicted!” and continues, “You are silent! Will you not say anything to Vaska Kashirin?" (248). The afflicted, the downtrodden with whom Vasily feels companionship for, do not answer. Recognizing both his bodily mortality and the deconstruction of his consciousness, Vasily shrinks into himself. By the time the seven meet to depart for their execution, Vasily himself is defamiliarized- his eyes see nothing, he is barely able to move on his own, and his “tongue” answers for him, all that is left after the metaphorical death of his consciousness. Vasily’s experience is a deeply traumatic one, influenced by the “internal misunderstanding” from which he experiences cutting isolation and regret and reflecting on the importance of autonomy and genuine human connection to identity.
Werner, the leader of the five terrorists, is a man that possesses the qualities that Vasily attempts to emulate. He plays the leader naturally, exuding both coolness and a dedication to the cause that puts his comrades at ease. However, Werner’s internal state presents a very different character—apathy and cynicism reside beneath the calm exterior. Because of this, he is markedly unafraid of execution. This perspective is fundamentally informed by a homicide Werner committed and the circumstances around it, after which he is unable to contend with the cruel triviality of humanity, which had resulted in this loss of life. The target of Werner’s disgust is humanity, which he believes to innately possess this brutality, and which he recognized in himself through the act of murder. As he waits in his cell, his second confrontation with death (this time his own), instead results in an inexplicable feeling of joy and liberation. Werner pronounces, “I feel so free, as though I were not in prison, but had just come out of some prison where I had spent all my life" (252). Werner’s understanding of humanity had been, until this point, one influenced by the cruelty that he had witnessed in both others and himself. From this train of thought, it is not hard to conceptualize how the thought of death could be interpreted as liberation.
As his cynicism melts away and his “youth,” his spirit, is returned to him, Werner experiences a newfound sense of love for a humanity still child-like and naïve—an existence which is beautiful in its ignorance and crudely cruel because it is not yet fully formed, “like the inability of a child to walk as grown people do, like a child's unconnected lisping flashing with sparks of genius; like a child's comical blunders, errors and painful bruises” (Andreev 253). He is able to forgive humanity’s transgressions and find kinship in the commonality of the human condition. Freed from the cynicism that had imprisoned him, Werner expresses to Musya, “Perhaps there is such a thing as death for some people. Meanwhile, perhaps, but later there will be no death. For me death also existed before, but now it exists no longer” (261). Death exists for Werner, not as the solemn end of life, but as an experience which connects him with humanity—a humanity that is still ignorant and fated to die, but that is able to enjoy the brevity of life with all its joy and depravity. Death will cease to exist when others recognize, like Werner, the joy of being human that can be understood through experiencing what it is to be mortal.
Werner’s reflections on death and the nature of humanity perspective that finds solace and joy in death which itself a natural part of life (in the sense that all living things must die)—states that inform the human condition. In this way, he is able to forgive the part of humanity, and, by proxy, the part of himself, that creates such cruelty. The triumph that Werner achieves through forgiveness—the triumph of reconnecting with the wonderful newness of a humanity that is still ignorant of the evil it creates—is one that allows Werner to go to his death with a contentedness and compassion he had been without.
Musya’s reflection on death does not ruminate on the finality of it, but, like Werner, the freedom it will ultimately bring. She views it as a vehicle through which she can attain idealization and martyrdom. Musya’s justification—not for committing the crime, but for becoming a martyr—is one with rather confused sensibilities. Although she wishes to be a martyr, for both her cause and the concept of self-sacrifice, she is obsessed with proving her own humility. While she strives to be genuine and modest, and to be known for these qualities, she knows that through legacy, she will be remembered this way regardless. Rather, she must know this. Because of this, she is immortal and “deathlessness, of what other death, could there be a question, since she was already dead and immortal, alive in death, as she had been dead in life?” (236). Like Werner, Musya’s outlook on life is so cynical that she is unable to derive pleasure from it. She can only conceive of immortal, sanctified happiness brought about through martyrdom.
Her justification, however, is simply a delusion. Musya is plagued not by Werner’s conviction in the brutality of humanity, but by a “boundless contempt for herself” (235), which denies her the ability to see value in herself beyond her role as a sacrificial lamb. Her narrative is filled with descriptions of herself as, “insignificant” and “simple”, and she proclaims herself of little worth. The antidote to this suffering comes in the form of a noble death: to Musya, a proclamation of strength, honor, value, even triumph over death itself. Musya’s hallucinations serve as her mind’s attempt to grapple with coming execution. Compared with Vasily’s panic-stricken state, Musya’s hallucinations present joyful pictures before her eyes, and she falls asleep peacefully, picturing her own face in gruesome death, content with her fate. Musya’s perspective is one that addresses the legacy of death, as well as the ways in which it can be abused. Suffering with self-hatred throughout life, Musya views her experience of death not as the end of herself but as the continuation of her ideals.
Beyond this, and perhaps more importantly, Musya understands this legacy, the legacy of a martyr dying a noble death, as the only way through which she can derive self-worth. Because of this, Musya is able to meet her end peacefully and nobly, though with the false conviction that through death she will attain the self-worth, love, and respect she believes her physical self to lack. The tragedy of Musya’s death is that it is a delusion, one constructed by a desire to escape the contempt she feels for herself. Musya dies happily, but at the cost of living an existence devoid of inner peace and worth, unable to see herself as deserving of love and affection beyond her utility as a martyr.
The experiences of Vasily, Werner and Musya present different perspectives on death that allow the reader to meditate on their own mortality and the nature of death. Can the experience of death be understood as a rebirth, as something which is ultimately freeing? Is it comforting to view death as a vehicle through which legacy can be achieved? How do I want to feel as I approach death? As a meditation on the human conception of death, The Seven Who Were Hanged provides depth into the intricacies of the individual person which influence their conceptions of death. Vasily, traumatized by finality of death, experiences madness born out of an inability to contend with the human condition. The reality of his ingenuity revealed (and the creation of the debilitating isolation he feels), Vasily’s inner life is extinguished, and he is left an empty vessel. Werner finds solace in death as a link between himself and a humanity that is still naïve of the brutality it commits and subject to a finality it has yet to understand. Musya’s contentment with death is a result of her self-hatred, informing her conviction that her worth can only be found in her death. The Seven Who Were Hanged ends with the deaths of the characters, but it is the readers who must go on living. Armed with these new philosophies, with the pain and regret that each character faces for the facades they wore in life, the reader is tasked with “greet[ing] the rising sun” (270) with new perspectives on how to live life fully, to escape Vasily’s regrets, Musya’s false compensation for internal self-hatred and Werner’s despair which is only contended with in his final hours. The variety of perspectives, each with their own backgrounds, philosophies and personalities, weave together an intricate narrative about the human before death. The stories of Vasily, Werner and Musya provide a greater exploration into the human conception of death and prompts consideration of one’s own understanding of death.
Bibliography
Andreev, Leonid. “Seven Who Were Hanged.” Ten Modern Short Novels. Ed. Leo Hamalian et al., Putnam, New York, 1958, pp. 199–274.
