Sasha - the hero of Andreev’s “Christmas story” - had a rebellious and bold soul, could not calmly relate to evil and avenged his life. For this purpose, he beat his comrades, rude his superiors, torn textbooks and lied to teachers and mothers all day ... Before Christmas, Sasha was expelled from the gymnasium, but despite this, he was invited to a Christmas tree in a rich house. Before leaving for the visit, Sashka’s father - Ivan Savvich, who had drunk, had gone down, but was a kind-hearted man, asked to bring something from the Christmas tree. The block that built the "Angel" to the story of F. M. Dostoevsky, "The Boy Is at the Christmas Tree," wrote about Sasha: "He was just dragged onto the Christmas tree, forcibly brought into a festive paradise. What was in the new paradise? It was positively bad there, everything was as it is in many decent families - simply, peacefully and badly. ” “To an evil boy,” as Sasha was called, looking at clean, beautiful children, “it seemed that someone’s iron hands took his heart and squeezed the last drop of blood out of him.”

And suddenly (the hero’s reincarnation beloved by Andreev, obligatory in the Christmas story sets in), Sashka’s “narrow eyes” sparkled with amazement: “On the side of the Christmas tree, which was lit weaker than the others and made it inside out, he saw what was missing in the picture of his life, and without which it was so empty around, as if the people around were inanimate. It was a wax angel, casually hung in the thick of dark branches and as if howling through the air. " Amazed Sashka saw that “the face of the angel did not shine with joy, was not fogged by sorrow, but there was a stamp on it of a different feeling, not transmitted by words, not defined by thought and accessible to understanding only the same feeling. Sasha did not realize what secret power attracted him to the angel, but felt that he always knew him and always loved ... ".

Sashka is rude at first, and then kneeling before the mistress of the house begs the angel from the Christmas tree. And when he achieves his goal, in a short moment of happiness "everyone noticed a mysterious similarity between the awkward, schoolgirl who grew up from his dress and the angel’s face inspired by the hand of an unknown artist." Sasha brings the angel home, and the father is also shocked: “Father and son did not see each other; their sick hearts were sad and cried in different ways, but there was something in their feeling that merged hearts and destroyed the bottomless abyss that separates man from man and makes him so lonely, miserable and weak. ” Both soon fall asleep, and an angel hung by the stove began to melt. "Here the little angel started, as if for a flight, and fell with a soft thud on the hot plates." And it is not clear whether the meeting with the angel will remain the beginning or end of a miracle.

Ten years later, in 1909, Blok would write his own, poetic, version of Andreev's story that struck him - the poem "The Susal Angel."