The Seven That Were Hanged Book

Trial, verdict, awaiting an execution: Leonid Andreyev paints vivid and livid psychological portraits of those sentenced to death - both idealists and dreamers; and also mean and calloused criminals. The story is profound, precise and frightful.
Time had gone, it seemed to have been converted into space - translucent and airless - a vast physical area with everything there upon it, the earth, life and people, and all of it could be absorbed at a single glance, all of it right up to the end, to the very edge of mystery, to death itself. Some sacrilegious hand had drawn aside the age-old curtain hiding the mystery of life and the mystery of death, rendering them no longer mysterious, though still incomprehensible. It was like a truth engraved in a foreign language. His human brain had no access to the concepts, and his human speech had no access to the words, needed to capture what he had seen.
Nearness of death, closeness of a lethal hour irrevocably and radically changes human psychology and nature - it's a journey without return.