Twenty-six and One | Page 2

the society of tramps, himself
a tramp, and one of the most refractory, it has been reserved for him to
write the poem of vagrancy.
His preference is for the short story. In seven years, he has written
thirty, contained in three volumes, which in their expressive brevity
sometimes recall Maupassant.
The plot is of the simplest. Sometimes, there are only two personages:
an old beggar and his grandson, two workmen, a tramp and a Jew, a
baker's boy and his assistant, two companions in misery.
The interest of these stories does not lie in the unraveling of an intricate
plot. They are rather fragments of life, bits of biography covering some
particular period, without reaching the limits of a real drama. And these
are no more artificially combined than are the events of real life.
Everything that he relates, Gorky has seen. Every landscape that he
describes has been seen by him in the course of his adventurous
existence. Each detail of this scenery is fraught for him with some
remembrance of distress or suffering. This vagrant life has been his
own. These tramps have been his companions, he has loved or hated
them. Therefore his work is alive with what he has almost
unconsciously put in of himself. At the same time, he knows how to
separate himself from his work; the characters introduced live their
own lives, independent of his, having their own characters and their
own individual way of reacting against the common misery. No writer
has to a greater degree the gift of objectivity, while at the same time
freely introducing himself into his work.
Therefore, his tramps are strikingly truthful. He does not idealise them;
the sympathy that their strength, courage, and independence inspire in
him does not blind him. He conceals neither their faults, vices,
drunkenness nor boastfulness. He is without indulgence for them, and
judges them discriminatingly. He paints reality, but without, for all that,

exaggerating ugliness. He does not avoid painful or coarse scenes; but
in the most cynical passages he does not revolt because it is felt that he
only desires to be truthful, and not to excite the emotions by cheap
means. He simply points out that things are as they are, that there is
nothing to be done about it, that they depend upon immutable laws.
Accordingly all those sad, even horrible spectacles are accepted as life
itself. To Gorky, the spectacle presented by these characters is only
natural: he has seen them shaken by passion as the waves by the wind,
and a smile pass over their souls like the sun piercing the clouds. He is,
in the true acceptation of the term, a realist.
The introduction of tramps in literature is the great innovation of Gorky.
The Russian writers first interested themselves in the cultivated classes
of society; then they went as far as the moujik. The "literature of the
moujik," assumed a social importance. It had a political influence and
was not foreign to the abolition of serfdom.
In the story "Malva," Gorky offers us two characteristic types of
peasants who become tramps by insensible degrees; almost without
suspecting it, through the force of circumstances. One of them is
Vassili. When he left the village, he fully intended to return. He went
away to earn a little money for his wife and children. He found
employment in a fishery. Life was easy and joyous. For a while he sent
small sums of money home, but gradually the village and the old life
faded away and became less and less real. He ceased to think of them.
His son Iakov came to seek him and to procure work for himself for a
season. He had the true soul of a peasant.
Later he falls, like the others, under the spell of this easy, free life, and
one feels that Iakov will never more return to the village.
In Gorky's eyes, his work is tainted by a capital vice. It is unsuited to
producing the joy that quickens. Humanity has forgotten joy; what has
he done beyond pitying or rallying suffering? . . . These reflections
haunt him, and this doubt of his beneficent efficacy imparts extreme
sadness to his genius.
IVAN STRANNIK.

CONTENTS
Preface Twenty-Six and One Tchelkache Malva

Twenty-Six and One
BY MAXIME GORKY
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. Our proprietor stopped up our
windows with