ABSTRACT
Gorky helped to preserve both tradition and the lives of individual writers. Soviet literature had need of Gorky, even though some of its disabilities may have arisen through him. Gorky’s huge success at the start was due to his buoyancy, his enthusiasm for life, his unashamed rhetoric. Gorky believed in man with the secure optimism of Browning, despite the degradation, brutality and squalor which he had known. Gorky understood very well the peasant turned employer in that time of violent economic change. Blok said of Gorky in 1919 that fate had ‘set him as mediator between the people and the intellectuals’. At that time Gorky was trying to get a working relation between Russian writers and the Soviet government. The legend of Maxim Gorky put on him responsibilities; and finally he became a dignitary, a guarantor of good intentions, a national hero—but no longer the man of letters alone with his conscience.
