United States or Brazil ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is a delight to me to know that you have continued to cherish the best principles of humanity.... Allow me, from a great distance, to clasp you by the hand, dear comrade. At the end of January, Romain Rolland replied, accepting the proposal that he should rewrite the life of Beethoven for young people, and asking Gorki to indicate the length and the method of treatment.
The literature of Russia, too, reflects this trait of the Russian soul, and not only in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgeneiff, Tolstoy, Repin, Dostoyevsky, and Glinka, or yet in Kuprine, Gorki, Anoutchin, Merejkowsky, and Baranovsky, but in those simpler and perhaps cruder writings which speak directly to uneducated minds, the same striving after the spiritual is everywhere to be seen.
For the worst thing about Gorki is his dull monotony, and vice is even more monotonous than virtue, perhaps because it is more common. Open the pages of almost any of his tales, it is always the same thing, the same criminals, the same horrors, the same broken ejaculations and brutish rage. Gorki has shown no capacity for development, no power of variety and complexity.
The normal interests him even more than the abnormal, which is the great difference between his work and that of Gorki and Andreev, as it was the most striking difference between Shakespeare and his later contemporaries. To reveal ordinary people just as they really are, sometimes in terrific excitement, sometimes in humdrum routine, this was his aim.
Just at the moment when Chekhov appeared to stand at the head of young Russian writers, Gorki appeared, and his fame swept from one end of the world to the other. In Russia, his public was second in numbers only to Tolstoi's; Kuprin and Andreev both dedicated books to him; in Germany, France, England, and America, he became literally a household word.
If Rudin is a transitional type, why does the same kind of character appear in Tolstoi, in Dostoevski, in Gorki, in Artsybashev? Why has Sienkiewicz described the racial temperament in two words, improductivite slave? It is generally agreed that no man has succeeded better than Chekhov in portraying the typical Russian of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century.
She does, indeed, quote the remark of Gorki, who, at the time of Strindberg's death, compared him to the ancient Danubian hero, Danko, "who, in order to help humanity out of the darkness of problems, tore his heart out of his breast, lit it, and holding it high, led the way."
I am short-sighted. I knew that I should never be a soldier. I fancied that in Russia they would not say: 'Oh, John Trenchard of Polchester.... He's no good! before they'd seen whether I could do anything. Then of course I had read about the country Tolstoi and Turgeniev, and a little Dostoevsky and even Gorki and Tchekov. I went quite suddenly, making up my mind one evening.
Yet Turgenev is not typical of that Russian school of novelists of which Tolstoy and Gorki are distinguished examples; rather he belongs to the school of Thackeray, George Eliot, and Dickens. I. A Student's Marriage Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky came of an ancient noble family. His father, a strangely whimsical man, determined that his son should grow up a Spartan.
This single mistake cost the Russian revolutionary cause an enormous sum of money, and may have altered history. Gorki was expelled from his hotel, and refused admittance to others; unkindest cut of all, Mark Twain, whose absence of religious belief had made Gorki believe him to be altogether emancipated from prejudices, positively refused to have anything more to do with him.