Twenty-six and One

Twenty-six and One and Other
Stories, by

Maksim Gorky, et al
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Title: Twenty-six and One and Other Stories
Author: Maksim Gorky
Release Date: December 27, 2004 [eBook #14480]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
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TWENTY-SIX AND ONE AND OTHER STORIES***
E-text prepared by Al Haines

TWENTY-SIX AND ONE and OTHER STORIES
by

MAXIME GORKY
From the Vagabond Series
Translated from the Russian
Preface by Ivan Strannik
New York J. F. Taylor & Company
1902

PREFACE
MAXIME GORKY
Russian literature, which for half a century has abounded in happy
surprises, has again made manifest its wonderful power of innovation.
A tramp, Maxime Gorky, lacking in all systematic training, has
suddenly forced his way into its sacred domain, and brought thither the
fresh spontaneity of his thoughts and character. Nothing as individual
or as new has been produced since the first novels of Tolstoy. His work
owes nothing to its predecessors; it stands apart and alone. It, therefore,
obtains more than an artistic success, it causes a real revolution.
Gorky was born of humble people, at Nizhni-Novgorod, in 1868 or
1869,--he does not know which--and was early left an orphan. He was
apprenticed to a shoemaker, but ran away, a sedentary life not being to
his taste. He left an engraver's in the same manner, and then went to
work with a painter of ikoni, or holy pictures. He is next found to be a
cook's boy, then an assistant to a gardener. He tried life in these diverse
ways, and not one of them pleased him. Until his fifteenth year, he had
only had the time to learn to read a little; his grandfather taught him to
read a prayer-book in the old Slav dialect. He retained from his first
studies only a distaste for anything printed until the time when, cook's
boy on board a steam-boat, he was initiated by the chief cook into more
attractive reading matter. Gogol, Glebe Ouspenski, Dumas pere were

revelations to him. His imagination took fire; he was seized with a
"fierce desire" for instruction. He set out for Kazan, "as though a poor
child could receive instruction gratuitously," but he soon perceived that
"it was contrary to custom." Discouraged, he became a baker's boy with
the wages of three rubles (about $1.50) a month. In the midst of worse
fatigue and ruder privations, he always recalls the bakery of Kazan with
peculiar bitterness; later, in his story, "Twenty-Six and One," he
utilized this painful remembrance: "There were twenty-six of
us--twenty-six living machines, locked up in a damp cellar, where we
patted dough from morning till night, making biscuits and cakes. The
windows of our cellar looked out into a ditch, which was covered with
bricks grown green from dampness, the window frames were
obstructed from the outside by a dense iron netting, and the light of the
sun could not peep in through the panes, which were covered with flour
dust. . . ."
Gorky dreamed of the free air. He abandoned the bakery. Always
reading, studying feverishly, drinking with vagrants, expending his
strength in every possible manner, he is one day at work in a saw-mill,
another, 'longshoreman on the quays. . . . In 1888, seized with despair,
he attempted to kill himself. "I was," said he, "as ill as I could be, and I
continued to live to sell apples. . . ." He afterward became a gate-keeper
and later retailed kvass in the streets. A happy chance brought him to
the notice of a lawyer, who interested himself in him, directed his
reading and organized his instruction. But his restless disposition drew
him back to his wandering life; he traveled over Russia in every
direction and tried his hand at every trade, including, henceforth, that of
man of letters.
He began by writing a short story, "Makar Tchoudra," which was
published by a provincial newspaper. It is a rather interesting work, but
its interest lies more, frankly speaking, in what it promises than in what
it actually gives. The subject is rather too suggestive of certain pieces
of fiction dear to the romantic school.
Gorky's appearance in the world of literature dates from 1893. He had
at this time, the acquaintance of the writer Korolenko, and, thanks to

him, soon published "Tchelkache," which met with a resounding
success. Gorky henceforth rejects all traditional methods, and free and
untrammeled devotes himself to frankly and directly interpreting life as
he sees it. As he has, so far, lived only in