"Gorky," in Modern Russian Literature from Chekhov to the Present, Oxford University Press, 1953, pp. 125-52.

In the following excerpt, Slonim surveys the style and subject matter of Gorky's short stories.

'Men do not know how to live,' says the old gypsy who is the narrator of Gorky's first tale, 'Makar Chudra' (1892); they work and die like slaves, and in this they do not resemble the proud men of his own tribe. The hero, Loyko Zobar, had fallen in love with the beautiful and willful Rodda, and wound up by killing her, since she wanted to dominate him and he refused to surrender his freedom—even to love. Izerghil, whose brave lovers defied law and convention, tells legends about men of might: the Son of the Eagle, free but solitary and incapable of loving, and Danko, the hero, who, in order to save his own people lost...