The stratum of society from which Górkiy took the heroes of his first short stories—and in short stories he appears at his best—is that of the tramps of Southern Russia: men who have broken with regular society, who never accept the yoke of permanent work, labouring only as long as they want to, as “casuals” in the sea-ports on the Black Sea; who sleep in doss-houses or in ravines on the outskirts of the cities, and tramp in the summer from Odessa to the Crimea, and from the Crimea to the prairies of Northern Caucasia, where they are always welcome at harvest time.
That eternal complaint about poverty and bad luck, that helplessness and hopelessness which were the dominant notes with the early folk-novelists, are totally absent from Górkiy’s stories. His tramps do not complain. “Everything is all right,” one of them says; “no use to whine and complain—that would do no good. Live and endure till you are broken down, or if you are so already—wait for death. This is all the wisdom in the world—do you understand?”
Far from his whining and complaining about the hard lot of his tramps, a refreshing note of energy and courage, which is quite unique in Russian literature, sounds through the stories of Górkiy. His tramps are miserably poor, but they “don’t care.” They drink, but there is nothing among them nearly approaching the dark drunkenness of despair which we saw in Levítoff. Even the most “down-trodden” one of them—far from making a virtue of his helplessness, as Dostoyévskiy’s heroes always did—dreams of reforming the world and making it rich. He dreams of the moment when “we, once ‘the poor,’ shall vanish, after having enriched the Crœsuses with the richness of the spirit and the power of life.” (A Mistake, I, 170.)
Górkiy cannot stand whining; he cannot bear that self-castigation in which other Russian writers so much delight: which Turguéneff’s sub-Hamlets used to express so poetically, of which Dostoyévskiy has made a virtue, and of which Russia offers such an infinite variety of examples. Górkiy knows the type, but he has no pity for such men. Better anything than one of those egotistic weaklings who gnaw all the time at their own hearts, compel others to drink with them in order to perorate before them about their “burning souls”; those beings, “full of compassion” which, however, never goes beyond self-commiseration, and “full of love” which is never anything but self-love. Górkiy knows only too well these men who never fail to wantonly ruin the lives of those women who trust them; who do not even stop at murder, like Raskólnikoff, or the brothers Karamázoff, and yet whine about the circumstances which have brought them to it. “What’s all this talk about circumstances!” he makes Old Izerghil say. “Everyone makes his own circumstances! I see all sorts of men—but the strong ones—where are they? There are fewer and fewer noble men!”
Knowing how much the Russian “intellectuals” suffer from this disease of whining, knowing how rare among them are the aggressive idealists, the real rebels, and how numerous on the other hand are the Nezhdánoffs (Turguéneff’s Virgin Soil), even among those “politicals” who march with resignation to Siberia, Górkiy does not take his types from among “the intellectuals,” for he thinks that they too easily become “the prisoners of life.”
In Váreñka Olésova Górkiy expresses all his contempt for the average “intellectual” of our own days. He introduces to us the interesting type of a girl, full of vitality; a most primitive creature, absolutely untouched by any ideals of liberty and equality, but so full of an intense life, so independent, so much herself, that one cannot but feel greatly interested in her. She meets with one of those “intellectuals” who know and admire higher ideals, but are weaklings, utterly devoid of the nerve of life. Of course, Váreñka laughs at the very idea of such a man’s falling in love with her; and these are the expressions in which Górkiy makes her define the usual hero of Russian novels:
“The Russian hero is always silly and stupid,” she says; “he is always sick of something; always thinking about something that cannot be understood, and is himself so miserable, so mi-i-serable! He will think, think, then talk, then he will go and make a declaration of love, and after that he thinks, and thinks again, till he marries.... And when he is married, he talks all sorts of nonsense to his wife, and then abandons her.” (Váreñka Olésova, II, 281.)
Górkiy’s favourite type is the “rebel”—the man in full revolt against Society, but at the same time a strong man, a power; and as he has found among the tramps with whom he has lived at least the embryo of this type, it is from this stratum of society that he takes his most interesting heroes.
In Konováloff Górkiy himself gives the psychology, or, rather, a partial psychology, of his tramp hero:—“An ‘intellectual’ amongst those whom fate has ill-used—amongst the ragged, the hungry and embittered half-men and half-beasts with whom the city slums teem.”—“Usually a being that can be included in no order,” the man who has “been torn from all his moorings, who is hostile to everything and ready to turn upon anything the force of his angry, embittered scepticism” (II, 23). His tramp feels that he has been defeated in life, but he does not seek excuse in circumstances. Konováloff, for instance, will not admit the theory which is in such vogue among the educated ne’er-do-well, namely, that he is the sad product of adverse conditions. “One must be faint-hearted indeed,” he says, “to become such a man.” “I live, and something goads me on” ... but “I have no inner line to follow ... do you understand me? I don’t know how to say it. I have not that spark in my soul, ... force, perhaps? Something is missing; that’s all!” And when his young friend who has read in books all sorts of excuses for weakness of character mentions “the dark hostile forces round you,” Konováloff retorts: “Then make a stand! take a stronger footing! find your ground, and make a stand!”
Some of Górkiy’s tramps are, of course, philosophers. They think about human life, and have had opportunities to know what it is. “Everyone,” he remarks somewhere, “who has had a struggle to sustain in his life, and has been defeated by life, and now feels cruelly imprisoned amidst its squalor, is more of a philosopher than Schopenhauer himself; for abstract thought can never be cast into such a correct and vivid plastic form as that in which is expressed the thought born directly out of suffering.” (I, p. 31.) “The knowledge of life among such men is striking,” he says again.