It is sufficient to read a few of Górkiy’s short stories, for instance, _Málva_, or _Tchelkásh_, or _The Ex-Men_, or _Twenty-Six Men and One Girl_, to realise at once the causes of his rapidly won popularity. The men and women he describes are not heroes: they are the most ordinary tramps or slum-dwellers; and what he writes are not novels in the proper sense of the word, but merely sketches of life. And yet, in the literature of all nations, including the short stories of Guy de Maupassant and Bret Harte, there are few things in which such a fine analysis of complicated and struggling human feelings is given, such interesting, original, and new characters are so well depicted, and human psychology is so admirably interwoven with a background of nature--a calm sea, menacing waves, or endless, sunburnt prairies. In the first-named story you really _see_ the promontory that juts out into “the laughing waters,” that promontory upon which the fisherman has pitched his hut; and you understand why Málva, the woman who loves him and comes to see him every Sunday, loves that spot as much as she does the fisherman himself. And then at every page you are struck by the quite unexpected variety of fine touches with which the love of that strange and complicated nature, Málva, is depicted, or by the unforeseen aspects under which both the ex-peasant fisherman and his peasant-son appear in the short space of a few days. The variety of strokes, refined and brutal, tender and terribly harsh, with which Górkiy pictures human feelings is such that in comparison with his heroes the heroes and heroines of our best novelists seem so simple--so simplified--just like a flower in European decorative art in comparison with a real flower.