



Produced by Martin Adamson





FOMA GORDYEFF

(The Man Who Was Afraid)

By Maxim Gorky


Translated by Herman Bernstein




INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

OUT of the darkest depths of life, where vice and crime and misery
abound, comes the Byron of the twentieth century, the poet of the
vagabond and the proletariat, Maxim Gorky. Not like the beggar, humbly
imploring for a crust in the name of the Lord, nor like the jeweller
displaying his precious stones to dazzle and tempt the eye, he comes to
the world,--nay, in accents of Tyrtaeus this commoner of Nizhni Novgorod
spurs on his troops of freedom-loving heroes to conquer, as it were,
the placid, self-satisfied literatures of to-day, and bring new life to
pale, bloodless frames.

Like Byron's impassioned utterances, "borne on the tones of a wild and
quite artless melody," is Gorky's mad, unbridled, powerful voice, as he
sings of the "madness of the brave," of the barefooted dreamers, who are
proud of their idleness, who possess nothing and fear nothing, who are
gay in their misery, though miserable in their joy.

Gorky's voice is not the calm, cultivated, well-balanced voice
of Chekhov, the Russian De Maupassant, nor even the apostolic,
well-meaning, but comparatively faint voice of Tolstoy, the preacher: it
is the roaring of a lion, the crash of thunder. In its elementary power
is the heart rending cry of a sincere but suffering soul that saw the
brutality of life in all its horrors, and now flings its experiences
into the face of the world with unequalled sympathy and the courage of a
giant.

For Gorky, above all, has courage; he dares to say that he finds the
vagabond, the outcast of society, more sublime and significant than
society itself.

His Bosyak, the symbolic incarnation of the Over-man, is as naive and
as bold as a child--or as a genius. In the vehement passions of the
magnanimous, compassionate hero in tatters, in the aristocracy of his
soul, and in his constant thirst for Freedom, Gorky sees the rebellious
and irreconcilable spirit of man, of future man,--in these he sees
something beautiful, something powerful, something monumental, and is
carried away by their strange psychology. For the barefooted dreamer's
life is Gorky's life, his ideals are Gorky's ideals, his pleasures and
pains, Gorky's pleasures and pains.

And Gorky, though broken in health now, buffeted by the storms of fate,
bruised and wounded in the battle-field of life, still like Byron and
like Lermontov,

     "--seeks the storm
     As though the storm contained repose."

And in a leonine voice he cries defiantly:

     "Let the storm rage with greater force and fury!"

HERMAN BERNSTEIN.

September 20, 1901.




FOMA GORDYEEF

     Dedicated to

     ANTON P. CHEKHOV

     By

     Maxim Gorky




CHAPTER I

ABOUT sixty years ago, when fortunes of millions had been made on the
Volga with fairy-tale rapidity, Ignat Gordyeeff, a young fellow, was
working as water-pumper on one of the barges of the wealthy merchant
Zayev.

Built like a giant, handsome and not at all stupid, he was one of those
people whom luck always follows everywhere--not because they are gifted
and industrious, but rather because, having an enormous stock of energy
at their command, they cannot stop to think over the choice of means
when on their way toward their aims, and, excepting their own will,
they know no law. Sometimes they speak of their conscience with fear,
sometimes they really torture themselves struggling with it, but
conscience is an unconquerable power to the faint-hearted only; the
strong master it quickly and make it a slave to their desires, for
they unconsciously feel that, given room and freedom, conscience would
fracture life. They sacrifice days to it; and if it should happen
that conscience conquered their souls, they are never wrecked, even in
defeat--they are just as healthy and strong under its sway as when they
lived without conscience.

At the age of forty Ignat Gordyeeff was himself the owner of three
steamers and ten barges. On the Volga he was respected as a rich and
clever man, but was nicknamed "Frantic," because his life did not flow
along a straight channel, like that of other people of his kind, but
now and again, boiling up turbulently, ran out of its rut, away from
gain--the prime aim of his existence. It looked as though there were
three Gordyeeffs in him, or as though there were three souls in Ignat's
body. One of them, the mightiest, was only greedy, and when Ignat lived
according to its commands, he was merely a man seized with untamable
passion for work. This passion burned in him by day and by night, he
was completely absorbed by it, and, grabbing everywhere hundreds and
thousands of roubles, it seemed as if he could never have enough of
the jingle and sound of money. He worked about up and down the Volga,
building and fastening nets in which he caught gold: he bought up grain
in the villages, floated it to Rybinsk on his barges; he plundered,
cheated, sometimes not noticing it, sometimes noticing, and, triumphant,
be openly laughed at by his victims; and in the senselessness of his
thirst for money, he rose to the heights of poetry. But, giving up so
much strength to this hunt after the rouble, he was not greedy in
the narrow sense, and sometimes he even betrayed an inconceivable but
sincere indifference to his property. Once, when the ice was drifting
down the Volga, he stood on the shore, and, seeing that the ice was
breaking his new barge, having crushed it against the bluff shore, he
ejaculated:

"That's it. Again. Crush it! Now, once more! Try!"

"Well, Ignat," asked his friend Mayakin, coming up to him, "the ice is
crushing about ten thousand out of your purse, eh?"

"That's nothing! I'll make another hundred. But look how the Volga is
working! Eh? Fine? She can split the whole world, like curd, with a
knife. Look, look! There you have my 'Boyarinya!' She floated but once.
Well, we'll have mass said for the dead."

The barge was crushed into splinters. Ignat and the godfather, sitting
in the tavern on the shore, drank vodka and looked out of the window,
watching the fragments of the "Boyarinya" drifting down the river
together with the ice.

"Are you sorry for the vessel, Ignat?" asked Mayakin.

"Why should I be sorry for it? The Volga gave it to me, and the Volga
has taken it back. It did not tear off my hand."

"Nevertheless."

"What--nevertheless? It is good at least that I saw how it was all done.
It's a lesson for the future. But when my 'Volgar' was burned--I was
really sorry--I didn't see it. How beautiful it must have looked when
such a woodpile was blazing on the water in the dark night! Eh? It was
an enormous steamer."

"Weren't you sorry for that either?"

"For the steamer? It is true, I did feel sorry for the steamer. But
then it is mere foolishness to feel sorry! What's the use? I might have
cried; tears cannot extinguish fire. Let the steamers burn. And even
though everything be burned down, I'd spit upon it! If the soul is but
burning to work, everything will be erected anew. Isn't it so?"

"Yes," said Mayakin, smiling. "These are strong words you say. And
whoever speaks that way, even though he loses all, will nevertheless be
rich."

Regarding losses of thousands of roubles so philosophically, Ignat knew
the value of every kopeika; he gave to the poor very seldom, and only to
those that were altogether unable to work. When a more or less healthy
man asked him for alms, Ignat would say, sternly:

"Get away! You can work yet. Go to my dvornik and help him to remove the
dung. I'll pay you for it."

Whenever he had been carried away by his work he regarded people
morosely and piteously, nor did he give himself rest while hunting for
roubles. And suddenly--it usually happened in spring, when everything on
earth became so bewitchingly beautiful and something reproachfully wild
was breathed down into the soul from the clear sky--Ignat Gordyeeff
would feel that he was not the master of his business, but its low
slave. He would lose himself in thought and, inquisitively looking about
himself from under his thick, knitted eyebrows, walk about for days,
angry and morose, as though silently asking something, which he feared
to ask aloud. They awakened his other soul, the turbulent and lustful
soul of a hungry beast. Insolent and cynical, he drank, led a depraved
life, and made drunkards of other people. He went into ecstasy, and
something like a volcano of filth boiled within him. It looked as though
he was madly tearing the chains which he himself had forged and carried,
and was not strong enough to tear them. Excited and very dirty, his face
swollen from drunkenness and sleeplessness, his eyes wandering madly,
and roaring in a hoarse voice, he tramped about the town from one tavern
to another, threw away money without counting it, cried and danced
to the sad tunes of the folk songs, or fought, but found no rest
anywhere--in anything.

It happened one day that a degraded priest, a short, stout little
bald-headed man in a torn cassock, chanced on Ignat, and stuck to him,
just as a piece of mud will stick to a shoe. An impersonal, deformed and
nasty creature, he played the part of a buffoon: they smeared his
bald head with mustard, made him go upon all-fours, drink mixtures of
different brandies and dance comical dances; he did all this in silence,
an idiotic smile on his wrinkled face, and having done what he was told
to do, he invariably said, outstretching his hand with his palm upward:

"Give me a rouble."

They laughed at him and sometimes gave him twenty kopeiks, sometimes
g