Creatures That Once Were Men
The Duel and Other Stories. Gusev and other stories. The Black Monk and Other Stories. Family Happiness and Other Stories. Zinotchka and Other Short Stories. Creatures That Once Were Men. A Hero of Our Time. A Girl of the Limberlost: A Classic Novel of Indiana Literature.
Creatures That Once Were Men
The Man Who Was Afraid. Children of the Sun. Classical Russian Short Stories. Chelkash and Other Stories. Twenty-Six Men and a Girl. Personal Recollections of Anton Pavlovitch Chekhov. The Heart of a Beggar. The Billionaire and Confronting Life.
Tales of Two Countries. How to write a great review. El estilo del escritor es bastante asequible, pues aborda los relatos de manera simple y directa. Narra en primera persona la historia de dos jovencitos hambrientos. Trata sobre el reencuentro inesperado de dos amigos de la adolescencia.
Creatures That Once Were Men by Maxim Gorky
Comparado con los otros relatos "El timador" se distingue de manera aplastante. Me parece que este es un mal intento de emular "Bola de Sebo" de Guy de Maupassant, pero no deja de tener sus momentos interesantes. En especial el excelente "El timador". What a great phrase! Gorky himself obviously liked it, which is why he trots it out at every given opportunity during the title story of this collection. An excellent story it is too, almost of novella length, about the inhabitants of a doss house for drunks.
The 'Creatures That Once Were Men' come into conflict with their landlord and don't come off too well, though it's worth noting that he is the one who ends up momentarily grovelling on all fours like a creature.
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There's something so vivid and What a great phrase! There's something so vivid and unselfconscious about Gorky's characters, a blazing simplicity if you will, an admirable crudity. This short exchange goes a long way to capturing the general gist of how they talk and behave: Martyanoff would have broken his bones, had not Kuvalda interrupted with: Is this a home to you or even to us?
You have no sufficient reason to break his teeth for him. You have no better reason than he for living with us. We all live in the world without sufficient reason. We live, and why? In 'Twenty-Six Girl' the men slaving in a bakery exult the pretty innocence of a sixteen year old girl who they see each morning, then a boastful newcomer turns his amorous attentions her way.
An allegory for the difficulties of retaining faith or modesty in a sordid world. Then in 'Chelkash' a smuggler takes advantage of an ignorant peasant down on his luck. The psychological results of their short liason are fascinatingly played out by Gorky, I can't imagine a Western writer coming to the same resolution. A travelling peasant takes an ungrateful young Georgian under his wing. I've read before that other Russians consider the Georgians to be insane.
I can see why. The closing 'On a Raft' is both haunting and depraved. Apparently there is an ancient Russian custom where the father of a bridegroom had first dibs for want of a better phrase on his son's wife. This boat trip on the Volga is striking material with which to illustrate the difficulty of attaining spiritual purity in a material world. In his introduction G.
Chesterton pretty much labels Russians as barbarians. How dare he, the oversized Edwardian ignoramus. Jan 02, Dr. Maybe the translation was poor, or the style has no Zeitgeist but I found the book irritating.
Maxim Gorky
Y deja mucho en mi, respecto a querer conocer mas sobre esta Rusia descrita por Gorki. Oct 13, Maitha AlFalasi rated it liked it. It's true, its voice lies deep down within us, and is difficult to hear; but if we listen, we can never be mistaken. If we act according to what is in our soul, we shall always act according to the will of God. God is in the soul, and therefore, the law must be in it.
The soul was created by God, and breathed by God into man. We have only to learn to look into it- and we must look into it without sparing our own feelings. Certainly, Schopenhauer could hardly have written his hideous essay on women except in a country which had once been full of slavery and the service of fiends. It may be that these moderns are tricking us altogether, and are hiding in their current scientific jargon things that they knew before science or civilization were.
They say that they are determinists; but the truth is, probably, that they are still worshipping the Norns. They say that they describe scenes which are sickening and dehumanizing in the name of art or in the name of truth; but it may be that they do it in the name of some deity indescribable, whom they propitiated with blood and terror before the beginning of history. This hypothesis, like the hypothesis mentioned before it, is highly disputable, and is at best a suggestion. But there is one broad truth in the matter which may in any case be considered as established.
A country like Russia has far more inherent capacity for producing revolution in revolutionists than any country of the type of England or America. Communities highly civilized and largely urban tend to a thing which is now called evolution, the most cautious and the most conservative of all social influences.
The loyal Russian obeys the Czar because he remembers the Czar and the Czar's importance. The disloyal Russian frets against the Czar because he also remembers the Czar, and makes a note of the necessity of knifing him.
But the loyal Englishman obeys the upper classes because he has forgotten that they are there. Their operation has become to him like daylight, or gravitation, or any of the forces of nature. And there are no disloyal Englishmen; there are no English revolutionists, because the oligarchic management of England is so complete as to be invisible.
The thing which can once get itself forgotten can make itself omnipotent. Gorky is preeminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist; not because most Russians are revolutionists for I imagine that they are not , but because most Russians--indeed, nearly all Russian--are in that attitude of mind which makes revolution possible, and which makes religion possible, an attitude of primary and dogmatic assertion.
To be a revolutionist it is first necessary to be a revelationist. It is necessary to believe in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe or the State. But in countries that have come under the influence of what is called the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic righting of wrongs, and unless the evolutionary idea loses its hold there never will be.
These countries have no revolution, they have to put up with an inferior and largely fictitious thing which they call progress. The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many other Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact between a simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old, and a rebelliousness which we in the West feel to he very new.
We cannot in our graduated and polite civilization quite make head or tail of the Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague way that his tale is the tale of the Missing Link, and that his head is the head of the superman. We hear his lonely cry of anger. But we cannot be quite certain whether his protest is the protest of the first anarchist against government, or whether it is the protest of the last savage against civilization.
The cruelty of ages and of political cynicism or necessity has done much to burden the race of which Gorky writes; but time has left them one thing which it has not left to the people in Poplar or West Ham.