page_title: Daniil Andreyev
section_title: Childhood and adolescence
hierarchical_section_title: Daniil Andreyev / Detailed biography / Childhood and adolescence
caption_attribution_description: English: Daniil Andreev as a child - year 1914
context_page_description: Daniil Leonidovich Andreyev was a Russian writer, poet, and Christian mystic.
context_section_description: Daniil Andreyev was the second son of the famous Russian writer Leonid Andreyev (a prominent Russian writer at the start of the 20th century) and Alexandra Mikhailovna Andreyeva, who was the great-niece of Taras Shevchenko. Daniil Andreev's older brother was V.L. Andreev. On November 2, 1906, Daniil Andreev was born in Berlin's Grunewald at Herbertstrasse, 26.
  A few days after the birth of Daniil, his mother dies from a postpartum fever. The shocked father blames the newborn son for the death of his beloved wife, and the grandmother Euphrosyne Varfolomeevna Veligorskaya (1846-1913) takes the boy to Moscow, to the family of her other daughter, Elizaveta Mikhailovna Dobrova (1868-1942), the wife of the famous Moscow doctor Philip Alexandrovich Dobrov. At this time, the Dobrovs lived in Chulkov's house (No. 38), on the corner of Arbat and Spasopeskovsky Lane. Daniil was often sick, it was hard work for his adopted family to help him survive. Later the Dobrovs settle in Maly Levshinsky Lane (No. 5).
  Andreev's grandmother contracts diphtheria from ill Daniil and then dies. That summer, at a dacha on the Black River near St. Petersburg, a boy was stopped at the last moment on a bridge across the river: he was about to drown himself, yearning to see his mother and grandmother again.
  Surrounded by care and attention, the boy was brought up in the family of his aunt as her own son. The Dobrov House was one of the literary and musical centers of Moscow at the time. Among guests in Daniil's home were famous people: I. A. Bunin, M. Gorky (Daniil's godfather), A. N. Scriabin, F. I. Chaliapin, actors of the Art Theater, etc. Under the influence of the atmosphere of the house, the boy begins to write poems and prose early.
  In the spring of 1915 he wrote his first poem, "The Garden". In the same year, the first stories are written: “The Journey of Insects” and “The Life of Antediluvian Animals” (not preserved). Also in childhood, according to the memoirs of his spouse A. A. Andreeva, Daniil writes a great epic, where the action takes place in a fictional interplanetary space. In his room, the boy draws portraits of the rulers of the dynasty he invented, portraits as tall as the boy.
  In September 1917, Andreev entered the Moscow Gymnasium of E. A. Repman ( Nikitsky Boulevard d. 9/10), which he graduated in 1923. In 1924 he continued his studies at the Higher Literary and Art Institute of Bryusov (Higher State Literary Courses Mosprofobr). At the same time, work begins on the novel "Sinners." In 1926 he entered the Union of Poets (which existed until 1929).
  At the age of 15, in August 1921, in one of the squares surrounding the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a vision of the “Heavenly Kremlin” opens to young Daniil. He writes about it in the first chapter of the second part of the book “Rose of the World”.
  At the end of August 1926, Andreev marries Alexander Lvovna Gubler (pseudonym Gorobova; 1907–1985), who studied with him at the Higher State Literary Courses. The wedding takes place in the temple of the Resurrection of the Word. Marriage does not last long and disintegrates by the end of the second month. In February 1927, the couple officially divorced, and Andreev leaves the Higher State Literary Courses.
  He experienced the second event of mystical nature on Easter 1928 in the Church of the Intercession in Levshin. It was a powerful insight into the world history of the planet as a singular mystical stream, which he writes about in the second chapter of the first part of the "Rose of the World" book: "Through the exultant movements and sounds of the service being performed in front of me, I was able to perceive that higher region, that heavenly land in which our entire planet appears as the Great Church and where an eternal liturgy is celebrated without ceasing by enlightened humankind in a splendor beyond our imagination."
  In 1928, the poem “Red Moscow” was written (not preserved), work continues on the novel “Sinners” (not preserved), the cycle “The Catacombs” began. Daniil spends summer of 1928 in Tarusa.
  In the 1930s, Andreev wor
caption: 8-year old Daniil
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