Often, when an idea has gained a powerful hold on Andreyev, he pursues it a long time, presenting it under various aspects, until at last it assumes its final form, rounded and completed, as it were, in some figure or symbol. As such it appears either as the leading theme of an entire story or drama, or as an important subordinate theme. Thus we have seen that the idea of death finds concrete expression in the character of Lazarus. The idea of loneliness, of the isolation of the individual from all other human beings, even though he be physically surrounded by large numbers, is embodied in the story of "The City." Similarly the conception of the mystery and the indifference by which man finds himself confronted is definitely set forth in the figure of _Someone in Gray_ in "The Life of Man."
The riddle, the indifference--these are the two characteristics of human destiny that loom large in Andreyev's conception of it as set forth in that figure. _Someone in Gray_--who is he? No one knows. No definite name can be given him, for no one knows. He is mysterious in "The Life of Man," where he is _Man's_ constant companion; he is mysterious in "Anathema," where he guards the gate leading from this finite world to eternity. And as _Man's_ companion he looks on indifferently, apparently unconcerned whether _Man_ meets with good or bad fortune. _Man's_ prayers do not move him. _Man's_ curses leave him calm.
It is Andreyev's gloomy philosophy, no doubt, that so often causes him to make his heroes lonely, so that loneliness is developed into a principle of human existence, in some cases, as in "The City," becoming the dominant influence over a man's life. Particularly the men whom life has treated senselessly and cruelly, whom it has dealt blow after blow until their spirits are crushed out--it is such men in particular who become lonely, seek isolation and retirement, and slink away into some hole to die alone. This is the significance of the saloon scene in "The Life of Man." The environment of the drunkards who are withdrawn from life, and therefore lonely themselves, accentuates the loneliness of _Man_ in the last scene. It is his loneliness that Andreyev desired to bring into relief. His frequenting the saloon is but an immaterial detail, one of the means of emphasizing this idea. To remove all possible misunderstanding on this point, Andreyev wrote a variant of the last scene, "The Death of Man," in which, instead of dying in a saloon surrounded by drunkards, _Man_ dies in his own house surrounded by his heirs. "The _loneliness_ of the dying and unhappy man," Andreyev wrote in a prefatory note to this variant, "may just as fully be characterized by the presence of the _Heirs._"