Daniil Andreyev

Daniil Andreyev, the son of Leonid Andreyev (a prominent Russian writer of the start of the 20th century), had Maxim Gorky as his godfather. After the infant's mother, Aleksandra Mikhailovna (Veligorskaya) Andreyeva (a great-niece of Taras Shevchenko), died shortly after childbirth, Leonid Andreyev gave the infant Daniil to his late wife's sister, Elizabeth Mikhailovna Dobrova, to raise. This act had two important consequences: it meant that when Leonid Andreyev, like many other writers and intellectuals, left Russia (he emigrated to the newly independent Finland in December 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution), his young son remained behind; it also meant that Daniil was raised in a household that remained deeply religious.