and colour. "Foma Gordeyev" is the romance of
life on the Volga.

With what intimacy, familiarity, and heart-felt emotion Gorki here
describes and sees! The great River, with its diversified
characteristics, its ominous events, mingles with the life of Man, and
flows on past us. . . .

It is this characteristic union of the Human-All-Too-Human with his
impressions of Nature in so many of Gorki's works, that makes them at
the outset desirable and readable to a large proportion of his public.
Much of his description of life beyond the social pale would be
repulsive if it were not for this interpretative nature-painting.
Especially would this be the case in "Malva." This robust,
free-loving, and free-living maiden attracts us by her vigorous
participation in Nature, when, for instance, she leaps into the water,
and sports in the element like a fish.

Gorki's countless wanderings through the Russian Steppes, his sojourns
by the southern shores of the Russian Seas, are intimately interwoven
with the course of Nature, and have given him poetic insight and
motives which are ignored by other authors, who have grown up in the
University, the Bureau, or the Coffee-houses of large towns. His life
of poverty has made him rich. He has evolved some significant
prose-poems from the life of Nature, and the contest of her forces.
While the sketch, "Spring Voices," is a satire, bristling with tangible
darts and stings, "The Bursting of the Dam" expresses the full force
that rages and battles in a stormy sea. The unemancipated workers
construct steep, rocky dams that jut out into the free, unbridled sea.
The waves that so long rolled on merrily, without fell intent, are now
confined, and beat against the hard, cold, sullen rocks. The winds and
tempests join in a colossal attack upon the unyielding barriers, and
the rocks are shivered in fragments.

[Illustration: A confabulation (_Act II. of "The Doss-house"_)]

Quite different again is the romance entitled "Three Men" (or "Three of
Them"). The tales and sketches published prior to this work were
merely founded on episodes, catastrophes, or descriptive passages from
the author's rich store of material. They certainly conveyed the
essence of the life of his characters. They disclosed the axis of
these people's existence. But they are seldom free from a certain
tiresome impressionism--and often make quite undue pretensions. The
didactic is too obvious. Gorki is not a