![]() ![]() I thought of Gorky while reading Carmen Boullosa’s new novel, The Book of Anna, even before Gorky himself is briefly mentioned in it. In his fiction, characters are often given stage directions: “cried with jealousy in his voice,” “exclaimed admiringly,” or “laughed an indulgent laugh.” The three-volume Autobiography of Maxim Gorky, wonderfully populated with all kinds of characters, would have been more engaging if not for Gorky’s habitual emphasis on “this extraordinary Russian life,” “the misery and murky lives” of Russian people, or his own awakening: “My swelling heart almost split under pressure of many strange emotions, and I felt an encompassing, inarticulate love for all human beings and all the earth.” In another letter, Chekhov advised Gorky against his tendency to write like “a spectator in the theater who expresses his delight with so little restraint that he prevents himself and others from listening.” One wonders if Gorky ever heeded this advice. Tolstoy’s he praised you very highly and said that you were “a remarkable writer.” He likes your “The Fair” and “In the Steppe,” and does not like “Malva.” He said: “You can invent anything you like, but you can’t invent psychology, and in Gorky one comes across just psychological inventions: he describes what he has never felt.” In 1899 Anton Chekhov wrote to Maxim Gorky, an up-and-coming writer whose stories had caught his and Tolstoy’s attention: ![]()
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