Foma Gordyeff
(The Man Who Was Afraid)

by Maxim Gorky




Translated by Herman Bernstein




INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

OUT of the darkest depths of life, where vice and crime and
misery abound, comes the Byron of the twentieth century, the poet
of the vagabond and the proletariat, Maxim Gorky. Not like the
beggar, humbly imploring for a crust in the name of the Lord, nor
like the jeweller displaying his precious stones to dazzle and
tempt the eye, he comes to the world,--nay, in accents of
Tyrtaeus this commoner of Nizhni Novgorod spurs on his troops of
freedom-loving heroes to conquer, as it were, the placid, self-
satisfied literatures of to-day, and bring new life to pale,
bloodless frames.

Like Byron's impassioned utterances, "borne on the tones of a
wild and quite artless melody," is Gorky's mad, unbridled,
powerful voice, as he sings of the "madness of the brave," of the
barefooted dreamers, who are proud of their idleness, who possess