Böcker av Maxim Gorky

CONTENTS: Fragments of Recollections, Maxim Gorky, To Chekhov's Memory, Alexander Kuprin, A. P. Chekhov, Ivan A. Bunin

This is a centennial edition containing some of the best pages from memoirs and essays on Chekhov. Included in the volume are a well-known literary portrait by Maxim Gorky, reminiscences of Chekhov's last years by the writer's wife, the late actress Olga Knipper-Chekhova, as well as new essays by Professor V. Yermilov, an authority on Chekhov, and Kornei Chukovsky, a popular Soviet writer.

Gorky first met Lenin at a Party Congress in London in 1907. They met again many times - during Lenin's exile in Europe and after the successful revolution of November, 1917. With the perspicacity of "a literary man, obliged to take notes of little details," Gorky gives a profoundly intimate picture of Lenin, a picture of which the developing revolution is an integral part, for it is impossible to separate the man from his role in history, so closely are they linked. In clear outline, Lenin the Bolshevik, the builder of his Party, the organizer and the leader of the revolution, arises from these pages. And it is all the more real, seen through the eyes of Gorky, for he tells of Lenin in his moments of rest and leisure as well as in moments of heated political debate; shows him at rest in Capri, playing chess and talking to the fishermen; looking after the health and comforts of his comrades; debating about the role of the intellectuals in the revolution; talking with workers about all the details of their lives.

While Pyotr, a sometime student of law, falls for the lovely, loose-living lodger, his sister carps on about the tedium of life, lusts after Nil - who's blind to her charms but in pursuit of the servant - and botches her own suicide.

A brief profile of the Russian writer prefaces the texts of three plays characterized by their realistic portrayal of Russian life.

Modern accurate and stageable translations of five of Gorky's plays

Presents a panoramic view of a restless society, with a bourgeoisie no longer sure of its own values, and a working class steadily facing up to the terrifying sacrifices ahead. This work is described by Ronald Bryden in the "Observer" in 1971 as 'a real discovery - the missing link between Chekhov and the Russian revolution'.

The most Chekhovian of all Gorky's plays

This collection of four plays, written at the turn of the 20th century, chart the descent of Russia into revolution.

Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian. After his father, a paperhanger and upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, and with his grandmother, a tender mountain of a woman and a wonderful storyteller, who would kneel beside their bed (with Gorky inside it pretending to be asleep) and give God her views on the day's happenings, down to the last fascinating details. She was, in fact, Gorky's closest friend and the epic heroine of a book swarming with characters and with the sensations of a curious and often frightened little boy. My Childhood, the first volume of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, was in part an act of exorcism. It describes a life begun in the raw, remembered with extraordinary charm and poignancy and without bitterness. Of all Gorky's books this is the one that made him 'the father of Russian literature'.