To me Gorky has never suffered from that change it has become so fashionable for young Russia to mourn. "Since he has begun to give us doctrines, he has lost all his art," they say and shake their heads. "We can get all the doctrines we want from the platform of the Social Democratic party or from the theorists of the Social Revolutionaries - why go to Gorky? Or if it is a philosophy of life that we seek, have we not always Tolstoi, who is greater, truer and has more consummate art? Why does he not write again a Foma Gordyeeff, or an Orloff and His Wife, or a Konovaloff!"
I re-read Foma Gordyeeff, Orloff and His Wife, Konovaloff and so on, and read also Mother, The Spy, In Prison, and the little fables with a purpose so sadly decried, and I see nothing there but the old Gorky writing as usual from the by-ways of life as he passes along on the road. The road has lengthened and widened in the twenty-five years of his wandering, that is all. Russia has changed and grown and passed through deep-stirring experiences from the year 1890, when Gorky first published his immortal story of Makar Chudra, to her present moment of titanic struggle in the World War - the beginning of the year 1916.
Russia's changes were Gorky's changes.
