THE CONFESSION
A NOVEL
BY
MAXIM GORKY
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY
ROSE STRUNSKY
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE TRANSLATOR
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
1916
INTRODUCTION
To me Gorky has never suffered from that change it has become sofashionable for young Russia to mourn.
"Since he has begun to give us doctrines, he has lost all his art,"they say and shake their heads, "We can get all the doctrines wewant from the platform of the Social Democratic party or from thetheorists of the Social Revolutionaries—why go to Gorky? Or if it isa philosophy of life that we seek, have we not always Tolstoi, who isgreater, truer and has more consummate art? Why does he not write againa Foma Gordyeeff, or an Orloff and His Wife, or a Konovaloff!"
I re-read Foma Gordyeeff, Orloff and His Wife, Konovaloff and so on,and read also Mother, The Spy, In Prison, and the little fables witha purpose so sadly decried, and I see nothing there but the old Gorkywriting as usual from the by-ways of life as he passes along on theroad. The road has lengthened and widened in the twenty-five years ofhis wandering, that is all. Russia has changed and grown and passedthrough deepstirring experiences from the year 1890, when Gorky firstpublished his immortal story of Makar Chudra, to her present momentof titanic struggle in the World War—the beginning of the year 1916.
Russia's changes were Gorky's changes. He first flung his type of hero,the people from the lowest of the low—water-rats, tramps, pettythieves—into a discouraged, disappointed and hopeless Russia. It wasa Russia that had almost decided that there were no more people, thatthey were without courage, that the misery and degradation in whichthey lived was there because of their own inefficiency, their lack ofidealism, their incapacity to grasp an idea and to strike and fight forit.
The Russia that thought this and the Russia that Gorky awakened fromits torpor by introducing to it again the people it had almost learnedto scorn, showing them with a capacity of understanding ideas, withdeep emotions and great courage, was the Russia that had settled backin bitter disappointment after the sad failure of the Revolutionarymovement of the eighties.
Like an eddying pool, the generations in Russia have risen to thesurface, made their protest against the anachronism of autocracy anddespotism, and then subsided back again into the still and inertwaters of the nation. But each rising generation has made a wider andwider eddy, coming ever from a greater depth. Thus in 1825 it wasmerely a small group of military officers, who having learned from theNapoleonic campaigns that there were such things as constitutional lawand order, that liberty and freedom were truths to fight for, broke outin revolt in Petrograd in December of that year only to be immediatelycrushed. Five of the leaders were hanged, and the rest, intellectualsand writers among them, were sent to Siberia.
The loss of the élite of Russia, despite the names of Pushkin andLermontoff which graced that period, made great inroads in theintellectual life of the country. But in the fifties and sixties theseeming quiet was broken into by a new restlessness. This time thestudent youth, the young sons and daughters of the landlords and thenobles, became inspired by a passion for learning, for new conceptionsof education, for new liberties of the people, for the abolition ofserfdom and for a Pan-Slavism that would be democrat