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Updated: June 24, 2025
The feverish activity of so keen an intellect in an organism so crushed had, as its consequence, one of the attempts at suicide which are so frequent among the younger generation of the Russians. In 1889, at the age of twenty-one, Gorky shot himself in the chest, but he did not succeed in killing himself.
Doubtless, in real life, people are not as original and not as heroic as Gorky represents them to be. And he himself agrees that their inventive faculties are very highly developed. He shows this in putting the following words into the mouth of Promtov: "I have very probably exaggerated, but that's not of much importance.
"Ah, the fool!" finally murmurs a vagabond, "he spoiled our song...." The hope in a better life that Luke had awakened in the actor made him kill himself, when he saw that he had not enough strength to realize this hope. This drama is the quintessence of all that Gorky has, up to this time, written on the "ex-man," whom he has thoroughly "explored."
With marvelous psychological analysis, Gorky shows how some of these simple creatures understand the new truth, and how it gradually penetrates their ardent souls. Pavel Vlassov, a young, intelligent workingman, is thirsty for knowledge, and is the apostle of the new ideal. He throws himself heart and soul into the dangerous struggle he has undertaken against ignorance and oppression.
Gorky's vagabonds have, like Ostrovsky's, exalted feelings for natural beauties, but they possess, besides, a full consciousness of themselves, and they declare open war against society. Gorky lives the lives of his heroes; he seems to sink himself into them, and, at the same time, he idealizes them, and often uses them as his spokesmen.
It may be that a man like Ibsen in Norway or a man like Gorky in Russia are the only people left who have so much faith that they can really believe in scepticism. It may be that they are the only people left who have so much animal spirits that they can really feast high and drink deep at the ancient banquet of pessimism.
But this enthusiasm for an ideal, vague as it is, this passionate appeal for energy in the struggle, has awakened powerful echoes in the hearts of the Russians, especially the younger of them. Gorky suddenly became their favorite author, and it is to this warm reception that he owes a great part of his renown.
And this note of plainness and of something nobly prosaic is as characteristic of Gorky, in some ways the most modern, and sophisticated of Russian authors, as it is of Tolstoy or any of the Tolstoyan type of mind. The very title of this story strike the note of this sudden and simple vision.
Nietzsche finished the ruin that Marx had begun; his art, chiefly derived from Dostoïevsky and Tchekov, succumbed to a sentimental socialism. Andreiev is still strong, though enveloped in "mystic anarchism." He is as naturally gifted as Gorky and a thinker of more precision. His play, Les Ténèbres, reveals the influences of Dostoïevsky and Tolstoy.
Poor fellows like Gorky and Dostoieffsky have to form their own reflections on the scenery without the assistance of large quotations from Schiller on garden seats, or inscriptions directing them to pause and thank the All-Father for the finest view in Hesse-Pumpernickel.
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