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It is, as I expected, very good, written a la Gorky, original, very interesting; and, to begin by talking of the defects, I have noticed only one, a defect incorrigible as red hair in a red-haired man the conservatism of the form.
Gorky, a born observer, inheritor of the realistic traditions of his country, could not help turning aside, one day, from this ideological art, visibly influenced by Tolstoy's dramas. The direct part that the romanticist has played in the political events of his country sufficiently proves that he has taken a different road from that taken by the apostle of Yasnaya Polyana.
One hour later, The One Who Hopes falls dead in front of Dancing Foot, who is tremendously upset in spite of his affected indifference. A dry outline cannot possibly convey the emotion contained in this little drama, where the low mentality of the characters is rendered with the mastery which Gorky usually shows in creating his elemental heroes.
They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. Of course he was right and I wrong, and he was right as to the point at issue between Gorky and those who had helplessly treated him with such cruel ignominy. In America it is not the convention for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not their wives.
It is enough to have the assurance that now, no matter what happens, since he has arisen, he will not lie down again. Maxim Gorky is the most original and, after Tolstoy, the most talented of modern Russian writers. He was born in 1868 or 1869 he does not know exactly when himself in a dyer's back shop at Nizhny Novgorod.
OUT of the darkest depths of life, where vice and crime and misery abound, comes the Byron of the twentieth century, the poet of the vagabond and the proletariat, Maxim Gorky.
Since the abolition of serfdom in Russia, it has come to define the plebeian; and is a sort of personification of the rabble. The satirist Stchedrin has defined Kham as "one who eats with a knife and takes milk with his after-dinner coffee." Merezhkovsky has written a book on Gorky under the title of "The Future Kham." Elisaveta said reproachfully: "What a word Kham!"
The next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human nature. I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens's familiar head gave us away to the reporters waiting at the elevator's mouth for all who went to see Gorky.
Yet, though in each land, in this world of marts and exchanges, this age of trade and traffic, passionate figures rise up and demand of life what its fever is, in "Foma Gordyeeff" it is a Russian who so rises up and demands. For Gorky, the Bitter One, is essentially a Russian in his grasp on the facts of life and in his treatment. All the Russian self-analysis and insistent introspection are his.
The writer must also awaken in the hearts of men a desire for liberty, and speak energetically, in order to infuse in man an ardent desire to create other forms of life.... "It seems to me," says Gorky, "that we desire new dreams, gracious inventions, unforeseen things, because the life which we have created is poor, dreary, and tedious.
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