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Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davydov family and to the crown serfs those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodino, Gorki, Shevardino, and Semenovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle.
"Does this sort of thing appeal to you?" she asked the young Russian, nodding towards the gay scrimmage of masqueraders and rather prepared to hear an amused negative." "But yes, of course," he answered; "costume balls, fancy fairs, cafe chantant, casino, anything that is not real life appeals to us Russians. Real life with us is the sort of thing that Maxim Gorki deals in.
The best homage we can pay to men like Tolstoy is to be free, as Tolstoy was free. At Geneva, in January, 1917, A. V. Lunacharski delivered a lecture on the life and works of Maxim Gorki. The following tribute to Gorki was read before the lecture. About fifteen years ago, in Paris, Charles Péguy, myself, and a few others, used to meet in a little ground-floor shop in the rue de la Sorbonne.
"No, he does not want it!" Pierre concluded. "And I know that this is our last meeting!" He sighed deeply and rode back to Gorki. On re-entering the shed Prince Andrew lay down on a rug, but he could not sleep. He closed his eyes. One picture succeeded another in his imagination. On one of them he dwelt long and joyfully. He vividly recalled an evening in Petersburg.
He became a popular author in conventional environment, surrounded by books and modern luxuries, living in the pleasant climate of Italy, with no anxiety about his meals and bed. Is it possible that wealth, comfort, independence, and leisure have extinguished his original force? Has he lost something of the picturesque attitude of Gorki the penniless tramp?
From Gorki, Bennigsen descended the highroad to the bridge which, when they had looked at it from the hill, the officer had pointed out as being the center of our position and where rows of fragrant new-mown hay lay by the riverside.
The little boy was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but ran away, as he did from a subsequent employer. By a curious irony of fate, this atheist learned to read out of a prayer-book, and this iconoclast was for a time engaged in the manufacture of ikons, holy images. As the aristocrat Turgenev learned Russian from a house servant, Gorki obtained his love for literature from a cook.
Gorki said he was glad to meet Mark Twain, 'world famous and in Russia the best known of American writers, a man of tremendous force and convictions, who, when he hit, hit hard. I have come to America to get acquainted with the American people and ask their aid for my suffering countrymen who are fighting for liberty.
But it is not permissible that a neutral journal should ignore or distort everything of which it disapproves. Is it not intolerable that the great Swiss periodicals should never give an open platform to the persons thus vilified, not even in the case of such a man as Maxim Gorki, whose genius and intellectual candour are the glory of European letters?
Finally, in reading the works of Tolstoi, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Gorki, Chekhov, Andreev, and others, what is the general impression produced on the mind of a foreigner? It is one of intense gloom. Of all the dark books in fiction, no works sound such depths of suffering and despair as are fathomed by the Russians.
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