Tales from Gorky

CONTENTS.
We should not give very much for the chances of a poor friendless lad of feeble constitution, vagrant disposition, and an overpowering taste for excitement, who should be turned adrift to shift for himself at an age when most young lads are still safe at school. The fortunes of such a one, if adequately recorded, might, and no doubt would, be infinitely more engrossing, if less edifying, than the humdrum chronicle of the steady clerk or patient mechanic; but a prison, or workhouse infirmary, might safely be predicted as the ultimate and inevitable receptacle of such a piece of human flotsam.
But now let us suppose—a handy supposition, I admit—that our imaginary little nomad were endowed with that illuminating spark we call genius; let us suppose, too, that in late boyhood, or early manhood, he learnt to love letters, and deliberately set about describing his extraordinary experiences, as well as the strange bedfellows whom misery from time to time threw in his way—what piquant, what grotesque pen-and-ink sketches we might expect from such an inspired ragamuffin! It would be Oliver Twist or Humphrey Clinker telling his own tale without the softening intervention of Mr. Charles Dickens or Mr. Tobias Smollett.
Let us further suppose not England but Russia to be the theatre of our hero's miseries and adventures, and the interest of the story will at once be infinitely enhanced. The odds would now be a thousand to one against our hero's attaining to manhood at all, and a hundred thousand to one against his ever attaining to authorship. His risks would be out of all proportion to his chances. From first to last starvation would constantly dog his footsteps, and Siberian exile would be the least terrible of a score of those administrative measures by means of which the servants of the Tsar wage unintermittent warfare against the vagrant population of their master's immense Empire. The career, then, of a professional tramp in Russia must needs be of tragic intensity, and it was my good fortune, some eighteen months ago, in the pages of The Pilot, to be the first to call the attention of English readers to the strange history of a Russian tramp of genius, who is, moreover, his own chronicler. Maksim Gorky—Maximus the Bitter—is the pseudonym deliberately chosen, at the outset of his career, by the young Muscovite author who is at the present moment (and I do not even except the revered name of Tolstoi) by far the most popular story-teller in the Russian Empire. The following brief biographical sketch of this remarkable man is the best introduction I can affix to this selection from Gorky's unique Razskazui, in all of which the author has, more or less, embodied his grim experiences of life beneath the transparent veil of fiction.