e should not
content himself with straightening out the balance sheet of social
deterioration, and in giving photographs of daily life. The writer
must also awaken in the hearts of men a desire for liberty, and
speak energetically, in order to infuse in man an ardent desire to
create other forms of life.... "It seems to me," says Gorky, "that
we desire new dreams, gracious inventions, unforeseen things,
because the life which we have created is poor, dreary, and tedious.
The reality which formerly we wanted so ardently, has frozen us and
broken us down.... What is there to do? Let us try: perhaps
invention and imagination will aid man in raising himself so that he
may again glance for a moment at the place which he has lost on
earth."

All of Gorky's characters curse life, but without ceasing to love
it, because they "have the taste for life." Their complaints are
only a means by which the author hopes to raise up around him "that
revengeful shame and the taste for life" of which he so often
speaks. Here is the artful Mayakine, who, indignant at the
debasement of the younger generation, is ready to take the most
cruel means in order "to infuse fire into the veins" of his
contemporaries. Varenka Olessova, the heroine of a story,
incessantly repeats that people would be more interesting if they
were more animated, if they laughed, played, sang more, if they were
more audacious, stronger, and even more coarse and vulgar. Gorky
admires also the beautiful type, vigorous, with a rudimentary
mentality, which meets with his approval simply because he sees in
it a nature which is complete, untouched, and filled with a love of
life.

Gorky suffers miseries inherent in the mere fact of existence, but
he has found no remedy; he looks for consolations in the cult of
beauty, in the strength of free individuality, in the flight towards
a superior ideal. But he does not know where to find this superior
ideal, which vivifies everything. This is perhaps the reason why
people have thought they saw in his work the Nietzschean influence,
which praises an insistence on individuality in defiance of current
conventions, and gives us just as vague a solution as Gorky does.

But this enthusiasm for an ideal, vague as it is, this passionate
appeal for energy in the struggle, has awakened powerful echoes in
the hearts of the Russians, especially the younger of them. Gorky
suddenly became their favorite author, and it is to this warm
receptio