The Man Who Was Afraid | Page 3

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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