Russian author Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) was not only a master of the novel and short story but also an excellent literary theorist and literary critic. This fine collection contains ten essays on literature, the literary experience and individual portraits of Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy and Sergei Yesenin. To provide a brief flavor below are a number of author quotes coupled with my comments:

“Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty. The more I read, the more a wholesome and kindly spirit filled my heart, and I grew calmer, my self-confidence developed, my work improved, and I paid even less heed to the innumerable spurns life was dealing me.” --------- This statement contains a certain depth when we realize Maxim Gorky grew up as an orphan and was forced to flee the violence and brutality of his poverty-stricken rural village at age 12 to live the life of a wandering teenage tramp.

“Each book was a rung in my ascent from the brutish to the human, towards an understanding of a better life and a thirst after that life. Replete with all I had read, feeling for all the world like some vessel brimming over with exhilarating drink, I would go to the officers’ servants and the navies and tell them my stories, enacting the scenes in them.” --------- What love of literature! Not only imbibing fictional nectar right off the page but being so full to the brim his love spilled over into enthusiastically sharing those stories with men and women willing to listen.

“Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation. That is why in a little volume of Pushkin’s poems or in a novel by Flaubert I find more wisdom and living beauty than in the cold twinkling of the stars, the mechanical rhythm of the oceans, the rustling of forests, or the silence of the wilderness." ---------- Ah, the transformative power of literature. Such a stark contrast for Maxim Gorky between the cold cruel and frequently hostile world he encountered and the glow of beauty and imagination he discovered in books. I suspect many a reader here on Goodreads has their own comparable tale.

“The world I live in is a world of little Hamlets and Othellos, a world of Romeos and Goriots, Karamazovs and Mr. Dombey, of David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, a world of little Don Quixotes and Don Juans." ----------- What world do you live in? How does literature add depth and richness to your everyday dealing with the people you meet?

“Yes, comrades, I have had ample experience of fear of the boorishness and cruelty of life, and once even went so far as to attempt suicide, something that for many years I could not recollect without a feeling of burning shame and self-contempt. I got rid of that fear when I realized that people were more ignorant than evil, that I was intimidated not by them or by life, but by my social and other kinds of illiteracy, by my defenselessness and helplessness against life.” --------- - Our author’s words serve as a challenge. Elsewhere he said that the only people worthy of freedom are those that are willing to go out and fight for it each and every day.

On Anton Chekhov – “This was often the way with him. One moment he would be talking with warmth, gravity and sincerity, and the next, he would be laughing at himself and his own words. And beneath this gentle, sorrowful laughter could be felt the subtle skepticism of a man who knew the value of words, the value of dreams. There was a shade of his attractive modesty, his intuitive delicacy in this laughter, too.” ---------- The author cites Chekhov’s simplicity, a simplicity that contained a certain beauty and how the great author loved those things in life that were simple, real and sincere and how one of his lifelong enemies was vulgarity.


On Leo Tolstoy – “He reminds one of those pilgrims, who pace the earth, their staves in their hands, their whole lives, covering thousands of miles from monastery to monastery, from shrine to shrine, terribly homeless, alien to everyone and everything. The world is not for them – nor God, either. They pray to Him from habit, but in their secret hearts they hate Him; why does He drive them over the world, to the ends of the earth – why?” ---------- Gorky goes on to speak of how the very favorite subjects for Tolstoy were God, the peasants and women, how he doesn’t talk that much of literature, as if literature were an alien subject to him. And Tolstoy actually liked, of all things, playing cards! Very colorful, very human portrait.
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Russian author Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) was not only a master of the novel and short story but also an excellent literary theorist and literary critic. This fine collection contains ten essays on literature, the literary experience and individual portraits of Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy and Sergei Yesenin. To provide a brief flavor below are a number of author quotes coupled with my comments:

“Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty. The more I read, the more a wholesome and kindly spirit filled my heart, and I grew calmer, my self-confidence developed, my work improved, and I paid even less heed to the innumerable spurns life was dealing me.” --------- This statement contains a certain depth when we realize Maxim Gorky grew up as an orphan and was forced to flee the violence and brutality of his poverty-stricken rural village at age 12 to live the life of a wandering teenage tramp.

“Each book was a rung in my ascent from the brutish to the human, towards an understanding of a better life and a thirst after that life. Replete with all I had read, feeling for all the world like some vessel brimming over with exhilarating drink, I would go to the officers’ servants and the navies and tell them my stories, enacting the scenes in them.” --------- What love of literature! Not only imbibing fictional nectar right off the page but being so full to the brim his love spilled over into enthusiastically sharing those stories with men and women willing to listen.

“Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation. That is why in a little volume of Pushkin’s poems or in a novel by Flaubert I find more wisdom and living beauty than in the cold twinkling of the stars, the mechanical rhythm of the oceans, the rustling of forests, or the silence of the wilderness." ---------- Ah, the transformative power of literature. Such a stark contrast for Maxim Gorky between the cold cruel and frequently hostile world he encountered and the glow of beauty and imagination he discovered in books. I suspect many a reader here on Goodreads has their own comparable tale.

“The world I live in is a world of little Hamlets and Othellos, a world of Romeos and Goriots, Karamazovs and Mr. Dombey, of David Copperfield, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, a world of little Don Quixotes and Don Juans." ----------- What world do you live in? How does literature add depth and richness to your everyday dealing with the people you meet?

“Yes, comrades, I have had ample experience of fear of the boorishness and cruelty of life, and once even went so far as to attempt suicide, something that for many years I could not recollect without a feeling of burning shame and self-contempt. I got rid of that fear when I realized that people were more ignorant than evil, that I was intimidated not by them or by life, but by my social and other kinds of illiteracy, by my defenselessness and helplessness against life.” --------- - Our author’s words serve as a challenge. Elsewhere he said that the only people worthy of freedom are those that are willing to go out and fight for it each and every day.

On Anton Chekhov – “This was often the way with him. One moment he would be talking with warmth, gravity and sincerity, and the next, he would be laughing at himself and his own words. And beneath this gentle, sorrowful laughter could be felt the subtle skepticism of a man who knew the value of words, the value of dreams. There was a shade of his attractive modesty, his intuitive delicacy in this laughter, too.” ---------- The author cites Chekhov’s simplicity, a simplicity that contained a certain beauty and how the great author loved those things in life that were simple, real and sincere and how one of his lifelong enemies was vulgarity.


On Leo Tolstoy – “He reminds one of those pilgrims, who pace the earth, their staves in their hands, their whole lives, covering thousands of miles from monastery to monastery, from shrine to shrine, terribly homeless, alien to everyone and everything. The world is not for them – nor God, either. They pray to Him from habit, but in their secret hearts they hate Him; why does He drive them over the world, to the ends of the earth – why?” ---------- Gorky goes on to speak of how the very favorite subjects for Tolstoy were God, the peasants and women, how he doesn’t talk that much of literature, as if literature were an alien subject to him. And Tolstoy actually liked, of all things, playing cards! Very colorful, very human portrait.



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