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Updated: June 24, 2025
These three remarkable works, riddled by the Russian censor, so that the complete version has appeared only abroad, have recently been followed by two important stories: "Among the People" and "Matvey Kozhemyakine." With his accustomed power, Gorky shows us, in the first of these stories, the spread of socialism among the agricultural proletariat.
This is perhaps the reason why people have thought they saw in his work the Nietzschean influence, which praises an insistence on individuality in defiance of current conventions, and gives us just as vague a solution as Gorky does.
Just as it would be interesting to know what French audiences enjoyed at the time of the French revolution, so I think it worth while to record the character of the entertainments at present popular in Moscow. Opera at the Great Theatre. "Sadko" by Rimsky-Korsakov and "Samson and Delilah" by Saint-Saens. Small State Theatre. "Besheny Dengi" by Ostrovsky and "Starik" by Gorky. Moscow Art Theatre.
He is of humble origin, as is Gorky, and being of a consumptive tendency, he lives in the Crimea. He began as a journalist. His photograph reveals him as a young man of a fine, sensitive type, truly an apostle of pity and pain. He passionately espouses the cause of the poor and downtrodden, as his extraordinary revolutionary short stories The Millionaire among the rest show.
None of these writers belong to the aristocracy, and two of them Tchekoff and Gorky have come up from the masses: the former was the son of a serf, and the latter the son of a workingman. Let me add that, among the women of letters, the one who is most distinguished by her talent in describing scenes from popular life Mme. Dmitrieva is the daughter of a peasant woman.
Perhaps "freedom" is the reason. And what would this critic have said of the De Profundis of Maxim Gorky? Are there still darker depths to be explored? Little wonder Mr. Robertson calls Kipling's "the art of a great talent with a cheap culture and a flashy environment." Therefore, to talk of such distinctions as realism and romance is sheer waste of time.
It lives and breathes from page to page with a swing and dash and go that they rarely attain. Their mantle has fallen on his young shoulders, and he promises to wear it royally. Even so, but so helpless, hopeless, terrible is this life of Foma Gordyeeff that we would be filled with profound sorrow for Gorky did we not know that he has come up out of the Valley of Shadow.
Gorky had violated this convention and he had to pay the penalty; and concerning the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary of the revolution, his blunder was worse than a crime. To the period of Clemens's residence in Fifth Avenue belongs his efflorescence in white serge.
Gradually all the baseness of the world becomes clear to him. In a moment of jealousy he kills his mistress's lover, an old miser. Several months later he publicly confesses his crime, and, in order to escape from human justice, he commits suicide. In his first two dramas, "The Smug Citizen," and "A Night's Refuge," as in his short stories, Gorky shows us his usual characters.
Another great literary man has of late visited America; and it is possible that Maxim Gorky may be in a position to state how far democracy is likely to err on the side of mere liberty and laxity. He may have found, like Dickens, some freedom of manners; he did not find much freedom of morals.
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