| | 1 | Author: | Kropotkin, Peter | Add | | | Title: | Maxím Górky  | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | FEW writers have established their reputation so rapidly as
Maxím Górky. His first sketches (1892-95), were
published in an obscure provincial paper of the Caucasus, and were
totally unknown to the literary world, but when a short tale of his
appeared in a widely-read [illustration omitted] review, edited by
Korolénko, it at once attracted general attention. The
beauty of its form, its artistic finish, and the new note of strength
and courage which rang through it, brought the young writer
immediately into prominence. It became known that
Maxím Górky was the pen-name of quite a young
man, A. Pyeshkoff, who was born in 1868 in Nizhni Novgorod, a
large town on the Volga; that his father was a merchant, or an
artisan, his mother a remarkable peasant woman, who died soon
after the birth of her son, and that the boy, orphaned when only
nine, was brought up in a family of his father's relatives. The
childhood of Górky must have been anything but happy, for
one day he ran away and entered into service on a Volga River
steamer. Later he lived and wandered on foot with the tramps in
South Russia, and during these wanderings he wrote a number of
short stories which were published in a newspaper of Northern
Caucasia. The stories proved to be remarkably fine, and when a
collection of all that he had hitherto written was published in 1900,
in four small volumes, the whole of a large edition was sold in a
very short time, and the name of Górky took its place—to
speak of living novelists only—by the side of those of
Korolénko and Tchéhoff, immediately after the
name of Leo Tolstóy. In Western Europe and America his
reputation was made with the same rapidity, as soon as a couple of
his sketches were translated into French and German, and
retranslated into English. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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