A page from Gorki's last work (Transcribed and forwarded by the author to Hans Ostwald)
"As an implacable foe to all that is mean and paltry in the aspirations of Humanity, I demand that every individual who bears a human countenance shall really be—a MAN!"
"Senseless, pitiful, and repulsive is this our existence, in which the immoderate, slavish toil of the one-half incessantly enables the other to satiate itself with bread and with intellectual enjoyments."
From "Man." By Maxim Gorki.
It is vain for Maximovich Pjeschkov not to term himself Gorki, the "Bitter One." He opposes a new Kingdom of Heroes in contrast to the old hero-world, to the great strategists and wholesale butchers. Bluebeard and Toggenburg, Richard Coeur-de-Lion—what are these bloody tyrants for us of to-day? It is impossible to resuscitate them as they were of old. They were,—and have become a form, in which the exuberant and universal Essence of Life no longer embodies itself.
But… we must have our Heroes still; heroes who master their lives after their own fashion, and who are the conquerors of fate. We cry out for men who are able to transcend the pettiness of every day, who despise it, and calmly live beyond it.
And Gorki steps forward with the revelation of the often misrepresented Destitutes—or the homeless and hearthless—who are despised, rejected, and abused. And he makes us know them for heroes, conquerors, adventurers. Not all, indeed, but many of them.
The sketch entitled "Creatures that once were Men," which is in a measure introductory to the famous "Doss-house" ("Scenes from the Abysses") is especially illuminating.