CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN
By MAXIM GORKY
Translated from the Russian by J. M. SHIRAZI and Others
Introduction by G. K. CHESTERTON
THE MODERN LIBRARY
PUBLISHERSNEW YORK
Copyright, 1918, by
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
Manufactured in the United States of America
for The Modern Library, Inc., by H. Wolff
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . V
Creatures That Once were Men . . . . 13
Twenty-Six Men and a Girl . . . . .104
Chelkash . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125
My Fellow-Traveller . . . . . . . .178
On a Raft . . . . . . . . . . . . .229
INTRODUCTION
By G. K. CHESTERTON
It is certainly a curious fact that so many of the voicesof what is called our modern religion have come from countrieswhich are not only simple, but may even be called barbaric.A nation like Norway has a great realistic drama withouthaving ever had either a great classical drama or a greatromantic drama. A nation like Russia makes us feel itsmodern fiction when we have never felt its ancient fiction.It has produced its Gissing without producing its Scott.Everything that is most sad and scientific, everything that is mostgrim and analytical, everything that can truly be called most modern,everything that can without unreasonableness be called most morbid,comes from these fresh and untried and unexhausted nationalities.Out of these infant peoples come the oldest voices of the earth.
This contradiction, like many other contradictions, is one whichought first of all to be registered as a mere fact; long before weattempt to explain why things contradict themselves, we ought,if we are honest men and good critics, to register the preliminarytruth that things do contradict themselves. In this case,as I say, there are many possible and suggestive explanations.It may be, to take an example, that our modern Europe is so exhaustedthat even the vigorous expression of that exhaustion is difficultfor every one except the most robust.
It may be that all the nations are tired; and it may be that onlythe boldest and breeziest are not too tired to say that they are tired.It may be that a man like Ibsen in Norway or a man like Gorkyin Russia are the only people left who have so much faith that theycan really believe in scepticism. It may be that they are the onlypeople left who have so much animal spirits that they can reallyfeast high and drink deep at the ancient banquet of pessimism.This is one of the possible hypotheses or explanations in the matter:that all Europe feels these things and that only have strength to believethem also. Many other explanations might, however, also be offered.It might be suggested that half-barbaric countries, like Russia or Norway,which have always lain, to say the least of it, on the extreme edgeof the circle of our European civilization, have a certain primalmelancholy which belongs to them through all the ages. It is highlyprobable that this sadness, which to us is modern, is to them eternal.It is highly probable that what we have solemnly and suddenly discoveredin scientific text-books and philosophical magazines they absorbedand experienced thousands of years ago, when they offered human sacrificein black and cruel forests and cried to their gods in the dark.Their agnosticism is perhaps merely paganism; their paganism,as in old times, is merely devil-worship. Certainly, Schopenhauer couldhardly have written his hideous essay on women except in a countrywhich had once been full of slavery and the service of fien