



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