Gorky is pre-eminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist;
not because most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine that
they are not), but because most Russians--indeed, nearly all
Russians--are in that attitude of mind which makes revolution
possible and which makes religion possible, an attitude of
primary and dogmatic assertion. To be a revolutionist it is
first necessary to be a revelationist. It is necessary to
believe in the sufficiency of some theory of the universe or the
State. But in countries that have come under the influence of
what is called the evolutionary idea, there has been no dramatic
righting of wrongs, and (unless the evolutionary idea loses its
hold) there never will be. These countries have no revolution,
they have to put up with an inferior and largely fictitious thing
which they call progress.
The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many
other Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact
between a simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old,
and a rebelliousness which we in the West feel to be very new.
We cannot in our graduated and polite civilisation quite make
head or tail of the Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague
way that his tale is the tale of the Missing Link, and that his
head is the head of the superman.
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