“Gorky’s book is particularly valuable because it reveals not only Tolstoy as he saw him, but unconsciously Gorky reveals himself also.” Herman Bernstein
+ N Y Times p3 Ja 9 21 3100w
“It will be seen how penetrating a study Gorky has made and how the man who emerges from his powerful charcoal lines differs from the smug ‘child of nature’ of the official portraits.”
+ Spec 125:212 Ag 14 ’20 1350w The Times [London] Lit Sup p441 Jl 8 ’20 40w
“Tolstoy was too great for official biography; Gorky saw him only in fragments, but he has drawn him as Tolstoy drew his own characters, or rather, perhaps, as Dostoevsky drew his. There is no effort at an unreal synthesis, none even at judgment; what might seem to be judgment is only a record of feelings which are strong and excessive as their subject was strong and excessive.”
+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p453 Jl 15 ’20 1200w
GOSSE, EDMUND WILLIAM. Some diversions of a man of letters. *$2.50 Scribner 824
A20–530
“To his latest collection of literary essays Mr Gosse gives the cumbersome title ‘Some diversions of a man of letters.’ It combines in its pages seventeen excursions into the highways and byways of literature, its figures being of every grade of prominence from Shakespeare to Caroline Trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings. Here we shall find discussed not merely such obvious subjects as: The charm of Sterne; The challenge of the Brontes; The centenary of Edgar Allan Poe; and The lyric poetry of Thomas Hardy; but also the less conspicuous but equally interesting material offered by the lives and the literary work of Joseph and Thomas Warton, of Bulwer, of Disraeli, and of Lady Dorothy Nevill. In addition Mr Gosse also discourses on: Fluctuations of taste; The future of English poetry; and The agony of the Victorian age.”—Boston Transcript