Gorky Collection: Untimely Thoughts

Author: Maxim Gorky
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-08-01
Features: This collection includes works of Maxim Gorky that were previously unknown to Chinese readers, and these works were only published in Russia in recent years. These works include political essays such as Two Souls and Eccentric Thoughts (excerpts), as well as letters to Lenin, Roman Rolland, Chekhovskii, Yagoda, Stalin, and others. Two Souls reflects Gorky's profound ten-year meditation on the Russian national spirit after the 1905 Revolution, serving as a perceptive yet somewhat extreme comparative essay on Eastern and Western cultures. Eccentric Thoughts was banned in the Soviet Union for 70 years and was only re-published in 1988. In this work written around the time of the October Revolution, Gorky, who had long yearned for and called for revolution, calmly analyzed the process of vulgarizing Marxism alongside the revolutionary tide, sharply criticized the crimes of temporary revolutionaries (true false revolutionaries) in destroying the rule of law, abusing violence, anding culture, and passionately called for the development of production, respect for culture, respect for science and intellectuals, promoting humanitarianism, and establishing a broad revolutionary united front.