y are treated. And it is only in the works
of the great dramatist Ostrovsky that we find any happy vagabonds,
with a deep love of nature and beauty.

Gorky's vagabonds have, like Ostrovsky's, exalted feelings for
natural beauties, but they possess, besides, a full consciousness of
themselves, and they declare open war against society. Gorky lives
the lives of his heroes; he seems to sink himself into them, and, at
the same time, he idealizes them, and often uses them as his
spokesmen. Far from being crushed by fate, his vagabonds clothe
themselves with a certain pride in their misery; for them, the ideal
existence is the one they lead, because it is free; with numerous
variations, they all exalt the irresistible seduction of
vagabondage:

"As for me, just listen! How many things I've seen in my fifty-eight
years," says Makar Choudra. "In what country have I not been? That
is the only way to live. Walk, walk, and you see everything. Don't
stay long in one place: what is there out of the ordinary in that?
Just as day and night eternally run after one another, thus you must
run, avoiding daily life, so that you will not cease to love it...."

"I, brother,"--says, in turn, Konovalov,--"I have decided to go all
over the earth, in every sense of the word. You always see something
new.... You think of nothing.... The wind blows, and you might say
that it blows the dust out of your soul. You feel free and easy....
You are not troubled by any one. If you are hungry, you stop, and
work to earn a few pennies; if there is no work to be had, you ask
for some bread and it is given to you. So you see many countries,
and the most diverse beauties...."

Likewise, in "Tedium," Kouzma Kossiyak thus clearly expresses
himself:

"I would not give up my liberty for any woman, nor for any
fireplace. I was born in a shed, do you hear, and it is in a shed
that I am going to die; that is my fate. I am going to wander
everywhere until my hair turns grey.... I get bored when I stay in
the same place."

In their feeling of hostility to all authority, and all fixed
things, including bourgeois happiness and economical principles,
some of Gorky's characters resemble some of those superior heroes
of Russian literature, like Pushkin's Evgeny Onyegin, Lermontov's
Pechorine, and, finally, Turgenev's Rudin, who, in their way, are
vagabonds, filled with the same independent spirit in their
respective social, intellectual, or political circles.

On