ONE WRITER SEES THREE

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21412, 2 March 1935, Page 15

ONE WRITER SEES THREE

Gorky's Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev. The Hogurth Press. 191 pp. (7/6 net.) Gorky does not, of Tolstoy and Chekhov, give a biographical record or even a personal description. He interprets his men, occasionally by recounting an incident in their intercourse, sometimes by relating their writings to their lives, more often by an analogy which is both poetical and enlightening: Reading Anton Chekhov's stories, one feels oneself in a melancholy day of late autumn, when the air is transparent and the outline of naked trees, narrow houses, greyish people is sharp. Gorky had so fine a sensibility that he appreciated the most secret motives of his friends, and so strong a sympathy that he could expose Without belittling their weaknesses and follies. Even the extravagances of Tolstoy and Chekhov were the excesses of acute or violent feeling. The pages describing Chekhov's gracious, subtle manner of reassuring conversation are brilliant. Glimpses of Gorky's self are moving and unconscious. Thus, the dream he described to Tolstoy:

A snowy plain, smooth like a sheet of paper; no hillock, no tree, no bush anywhere, only—barely visible—a few rods poked out from under the snow. And across the snow of this dead desert from horizon to horizon there stretched a yellow strip of a hardly distinguishable road, and over the road there marched slowly a pair of grey felt top-boots—empty. A convincing passage tells of an escapade of Gorky's boyhood when, seeking an exaltation of the senses, he lay between the rails and allowed a train to rush past over his shuddering body. The reminiscences of Leonid Andreev are more lively and factual. That turbulent personality drew Gorky into strange situations, dialectical and actual. The man and his works—he lived and talked his experiences and his writings—are presented with such swift force that the impression is left of an imminent, inescapable personality. The translations are the work of S. S. Koteliansky with Leonard Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. (All three series of reminiscences have been published before). The craftsmanship is unusually good; the choice of pictures is also good, especially that photograph which represents the youthful Tolstoy, ardent and sure, yet with an expression of brooding uneasiness.