g out an ideal and mystical love on Tanya,
the little embroiderer, who they believe, is as pure as an angel.
One day, a brutal soldier comes to defy them, and boasts that he
will conquer this young girl. He succeeds. Then the twenty-six
insult their fallen idol; the tragedy is not so much in the insults
that they hurl at her, as in the suffering they undergo through
having lost the illusion that was so dear to them.

Let us note, incidentally, the existence of a sort of comic spirit
in these works which relieves the tragedy of the situations. In
spite of their dark pessimism, the actors in these little dramas
have an appearance of gaiety which deceives. It is by this popular
humor that Gorky is the continuator of the work of Gogol; this is
especially noticeable in "The Fair at Goltva."

* * * * *

In studying Gorky, one is often struck by the homogeneity of the
types which he has described. Open any of his books, and you will
always meet that "restless" type, dissatisfied with the banality of
his existence, trying to get away from it, and leaning irresistibly
towards absolute liberty, far removed from social and political
obligations.

Who are these "restless" people? Toward what end are they striving?
What do they represent? First, they have an immense reserve force
which they do not know what to do with; they have got out of the
rut, the rut which they despise, but it is hard for them to create
another sort of existence for themselves. Bourgeois happiness
repulses them, while all sorts of duties are hateful to them. They
consider the people who are contented with this sort of a life as
slaves, unworthy of the name of man, and they show the same disdain
for the peasants, for the leading classes, and for the workingmen.
The simple farmer excites the scorn of the "barefoot brigade:"

"As for me," says one of them, "I don't like any peasants.... They
are all dogs! They have provincial States, and they do for them....
They tremble, they are hypocrites, but they want to live; they have
one protection: the soil.... However, we must tolerate the peasant,
for he has a certain usefulness."

"What is a peasant?" asks another. And he answers the question
himself: "The peasant is for all men a matter of food, that is to
say, an animal that can be eaten. The sun, the water, the air, and
the peasant are indispensable to man's existence...."

One might think that this hostility was the fruit of