The original critical response to the play was mixed, even if the Moscow Art Theatre production was met with unanimous acclaim. Especially harsh were the
modernist critics who chose to pan it for its allegedly 'reactionary' politics. Avrely in
Vesy called the play "the unique, in its own right, collection of banalities."
Dmitry Filosofov (in the May 1907 issue of
Tovarishch) labeled it "the most reactionary piece of work in the Russian literature to date."
Zinaida Gippius (writing under the moniker Anton Krainy) attacked the author personally, describing him as 'uncultured', 'poorly educated', 'pretentious' and thus unequal to the task he'd burdened himself with.
Anatoly Lunacharsky saw this figure as the embodiment of the impersonal, absolute Law, outside the realm of good and evil. Unlike his friend
Maxim Gorky who, while praising his rebellious, anti-establishment attitude, still considered Andreyev's outlook be utterly pessimistic, the author himself insisted that his play was life-affirming. "Everybody tells me I am a pessimist. But I think you should play Man as somebody who is very strong, powerful and unwilling to succumb to his destiny," he told (an unspecified) actor, according to
Vikenty Veresayev. This interpretation was endorsed by
Alexander Blok (who saw Man as "a wonderful sphynx, rather than a mere puppet"), as well as
Korney Chukovsky, who praised Blok for his critical review of the play.
D.S. Mirsky in his 1925 essay wrote: "In his symbolic dramas Andreyev is keen to avoid even remote similarities with the real life... They are totally abstract and rhetorical, the distant relatives of the Byron mysteries, seeped in through their Teutonic interpretations, written in tense, lofty, didactic manner... daubed with crude palette of black and red, no overtones allowed. The best of them is, still,
The Life of Man; at least the other-worldliness of these howling, spectral characters creates a certain atmosphere. Its success was to some extent justified but to re-read it now is unbearable. [As all his plays, this one] is driven by one single motif, that of death, and void and the futility of all human effort." ==Revivals==