The budding talent displayed in these and other stories being now recognized, he returned to the Volga, where he had spent so much of his youth, and began contributing short stories to the Volgeschky Viesnick.' These were followed by a longer story, 'Emilia Pilai,' which appeared in an important Moscow paper, the 'Russky Viedomoski'; and a lucky chance having brought him across Korolenko, Peshkoff, who had now taken for his nom de plume the title of Gorki (the Russian for bitter), through the influence of this leading man of letters was able to place his writings in some of the most important periodicals of the day, Korolenko did much for him also in the way of advice, and Gorki wrote later of this period of his life: "If I learnt little, it was not Korolenko's fault, but my own."
Broad sympathy with, and understanding of every expression of human nature, seems to be the prevailing characteristic of Gorki's writings; whilst his realism has a special quality, in that it is never forced, never voulu, as is too often the case with writers of another class who make literary studies of the lives of the people. Gorki, having lived the life of the tramp, of the out-of-work loafer, of the slum inhabitant, is saturated with the detail of that life, and possesses the true artistic faculty necessary for reproducing it. Many of his so-called "stories" are rather studies and sketches, so slight is the plot, so impressionist is the form under which he reproduces the "bits of life" with which he has come in contact He seems to succeed in the art of "viewing life as a whole, and viewing it sanely"; but his pictures are of necessity tinged with pessimism, for he is the mouthpiece of the unprivileged, the sweated, the "lapsed and lost" This vein of pessimism is, however, relieved by a spirituality, a sensitiveness to the consolations of music, of light, and cloud, and water effects, of nature's healing inspiration, which wholly redeem his work from the reproach of empty, crushing pessimistic teaching. He is essentially the prophet of revolt,—revolt against the dreariness, the monotony, the inhumanity of drudgery, which keeps men and women working at high pressure like machines, in order that they may be able to earn—just daily bread.... As the shoemaker Grischka says in one of the stories published in this volume: "And why do we need daily bread? In order to be able to work I And why do we work, but to obtain daily bread? What's the sense of that?"
He has certainly made very real for us a large class of our fellow human beings whom before we scarcely recognized in any other way than in their outward form of baker, shoemaker, dock-labourer, or vagrant Gorki makes them live in his pages, unfolds their psychology, makes us joy with their joys and sorrow with their sorrows, and introduces them—as fellow-sufferers from the all-pervading disease of modern life, ennui and dissatisfaction with existing social conditions—into the great human brotherhood.
Gorki acknowledges the four literary influences of his life to have been those of the cook on the steamer, of Lanine, of Kaligny and of Korolenko. Of late years he has been forbidden, because of political writings, to enter St Petersburg or Moscow. Three volumes of his works have already been published, and his stories have found their way through translations into many leading French and German Reviews.
D. B. M.
[THE ORLOFF COUPLE]
[CHAPTER I]
Almost every Saturday, just before supper-time, the dirty old house of the merchant Petounukoff was the scene of a violent and murderous attack. From the two cellar windows there rang forth into the narrow courtyard, surrounded by old tumble-down hovels, and filled with all sorts of rubbish, the horrible screams of a woman.