THE CONFESSION _A NOVEL_ BY MAXIM GORKY TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY ROSE STRUNSKY WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE TRANSLATOR NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS 1916 INTRODUCTION To me Gorky has never suffered from that change it has become so fashionable for young Russia to mourn. "Since he has begun to give us doctrines, he has lost all his art," they say and shake their heads, "We can get all the doctrines we want from the platform of the Social Democratic party or from the theorists of the Social Revolutionaries--why go to Gorky? Or if it is a philosophy of life that we seek, have we not always Tolstoi, who is greater, truer and has more consummate art? Why does he not write again a _Foma Gordyeeff_, or an _Orloff and His Wife_, or a _Konovaloff_!" I re-read _Foma Gordyeeff, Orloff and His Wife, Konovaloff_ and so on, and read also _Mother, The Spy, In Prison_, and the little fables with a purpose so sadly decried, and I see nothing there but the old Gorky writing as usual from the by-ways of life as he passes along on the road. The road has lengthened and widened in the twenty-five years of his wandering, that is all. Russia has changed and grown and passed through deepstirring experiences from the year 1890, when Gorky first published his immortal story of _Makar Chudra_, to her present moment of titanic struggle in the World War--the beginning of the year 1916. Russia's changes were Gorky's changes. He first flung his type of hero, the people from the lowest of the low--water-rats, tramps, petty thieves--into a discouraged, disappointed and hopeless Russia. It was a Russia that had almost decided that there were no more people, that they were without courage, that the misery and degradation in which they lived was there because of their own inefficiency, their lack of idealism, their incapacity to grasp an idea and to strike and fight for it. The Russia that thought this and the Russia that Gorky awakened from its torpor by introducing to it again the people it had almost learned to scorn, showing them with a capacity of understanding ideas, with deep emotions and great courage, was the Russia that had settled back in bitter disappointment after the sad failure of the Revolutionary movement of the eighties.