"The Human Comedy of Pre-Revolutionary Russia," in Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others, translated by Edith Bone, Hillway Publishing Co., 1950, pp. 206-41.

In the following excerpt, Lukács examines Gorky's portrayal in his short stories of the erosion of personality and society caused by capitalism.

Like most great story-tellers, Gorki began his career with the short story; that form which has for its theme a strange, out-of-the-common, surprising event—an event so conceived that its surprising aspect gives a both personally and socially characteristic picture of one or more persons. This nature of the short story makes it a primeval and ever-popular form of art. Gifted story-tellers among the people, when they want to tell an audience the story of some strange and characteristic happening, instinctively adopt a form that approaches that of the short story...