Seven Hanged by Leonid Andreyev

Death the fate of every living being,being gifted with life you must also accept the negative side of the bargain that one day sooner or later that gift will be taken from you and you will become inanimate thing, something indistinguishable from stone or sand, a sad but true fact of life which is hard to deny but also hard to accept also, person like me who think play dream and laugh will one day will become dead and i will stop thinking playing laughing or dreaming, i will become no more distinguishable from rock or wall.

No matter how many times you tell me i cant believe it and no matter how many time i lie to myself it still haunts me

this is a story of Capital Punishment in which seven inmates wait their execution, and how everyone react and contemplate their incoming doom.

in the first part of the novel we get to know the government official who barely escaped death as secret police told him there was an attempt on his life and that terrorist group was planning to assassinate him in one o’clock tomorrow

and he couldn’t stop thinking about the cruel fate that some people had had in store for him.

although being warned and foretold about the incoming attempt on his life and as the police prepared the plan to capture the terrorist group before they kill him he still couldn’t believe in his salvation

he still couldn’t quite believe in his salvation. He wasn’t sure that life wouldn’t slip away from him, suddenly, any minute now. The death that those people had planned for him, which existed only in thought and intention, seemed to be still there, and it was going to stay there, it wouldn’t go away until they were caught

eventually he was transferred to other house and that night he couldn’t sleep and what irritated him the most

because it’s me thinking. And it’s not death that is terrifying, only my knowing about it. And it would be totally impossible to live if a man were to know with complete certainty the date and time when he was sure to die

and being told the date of your death can be one of the horrible things any humans hear it makes attached to that date and you become oblivious to everything else

eventually the seven inmates are transferred to individual solitary cell and each person contemplates that tomorrow he will leave this world and he will be hanged.

you cease to be human,alive and individual when you are hanged.

one last quote from one of the narrator who contemplate the mechanical aspect of the law and capital punishment

it also became a mechanical process and only for that reason something to be dreaded. Fetch and grab, take away, hang, pull down on the legs. Cut rope, haul down, cart away and bury.

A man has gone from the world.

one of the best novels i ever read which deals with the subject of death and capital punishment and its rumored that this novel inspired the Serbian assassins who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

the Author Leonid Andreyev

 

 

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