Sixty years before the book opens, a bargeman named Ignat Gordeyev is hauling for a rich merchant on the Volga. By the second page he is on his way to a fortune, and Gorky stops to explain what kind of man makes one: people who succeed not because they are talented but because they are "incapable of spurning any means that leads to the achieving of their end, and recognize no law save their own desires".
That is the Russian bourgeoisie in its heroic decade, drawn from life by a man who had worked for it as a docker, a baker's boy and a night watchman. This is Gorky's first novel, and it is about what happens to the son.
It is honest about what it does not have. There is no working class in it to speak of, no organisation, nothing to put against the merchant Mayakin except one man's disgust - and Gorky shows, with no self-deception, exactly how far one man's disgust gets him. Mayakin is a great creation because he is given the best arguments and allowed to win them.
Published in 1899 under Nicholas II and dedicated to Chekhov, the writer Gorky was measuring himself against. The volume carries no foreword; in its place stands a long passage from Jack London, who laid the book down "sick at heart - sick for life with all its lyings and its lusts".
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1950. Translated by Margaret Wettlin, with thirty-two plates by the Kukryniksy.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
