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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 voices of
what is called our modern religion have come from countries
which are not only simple, but may even be called barbaric.
A nation like Norway has a great realistic drama without
having ever had either a great classical drama or a great
romantic drama. A nation like Russia makes us feel its modern
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 most grim
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
which ought first of all to be registered as a mere fact;
long before we attempt to explain why things contradict
themselves, we ought, if we are honest men and good critics,
to register the preliminary truth 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 exhausted that even the vigorous
expression of that exhaustion is difficult for every one
except the most robust.

vi INTRODUCTION

It may be that all the nations are tired; and it may be that
only the 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 Gorky in Russia are the only people left who have
so much faith that they can really believe in scepticism. It
may be that they are the only people left who have so much
animal spirits that they can really feast 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
believe them 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 edge of the circle of
our European civilization, have a certain primal melancholy
which belongs to them through all the ages. It is highly
probable that this sadness, which to us is modern, is to
them eternal. It is highly probable that what we have
solemnly and suddenly discovered in scientific text-books
and philosophical magazines they absorbed and experienced
thousands of years ago, when they offered human sacrifice
in 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 could hardly have written his hideous essay on
women except in a country which had once been full of slavery
and the service of fiends. It may be that these moderns are
tricking us altogether, and are hiding in their current
scientific jargon things that they knew before science or
civilization were.

vii INTRODUCTION

They say that they are determinists; but the truth is,
probably, that they are still worshipping the Norns. They
say that they describe scenes which are sickening and
dehumanizing in the name of art or in the name of truth; but
it may be that they do it in the name of some deity
indescribable, whom they propitiated with blood and terror
before the beginning of history.

This hypothesis, like the hypothesis mentioned before it,
is highly disputable, and is at best a suggestion. But there
is one broad truth in the matter which may in any case be
considered as established. A country like Russia has far
more inherent capacity for producing revolution in
revolutionists than any country of the type of England or
America. Communities highly civilized and largely urban tend
to a thing which is now called evolution, the most cautious
and the most conservative of all social influences. The
loyal Russian obeys the Czar because he remembers the Czar
and the Czar's importance. The disloyal Russian frets
against the Czar because he also remembers the Czar, and
makes a note of the necessity of knifing him. But the loyal
Englishman obeys the upper classes because he has forgotten
that they are there. Their operation has become to him like
daylight, or gravitation, or any of the forces of nature.
And there are no disloyal Englishmen; there are no English
revolutionists, because the oligarchic management of England
is so complete as to be invisible. The thing which can once
get itself forgotten can make itself omnipotent.

viii INTRODUCTION

Gorky is preeminently Russian, in that he is a revolutionist;
not because most Russians are revolutionists (for I imagine
that they are not), but because most Russians--indeed, nearly
all Russian--are in that attitude of mind which makes
revolution possible, and which makes religion possible, an
attitude of primary and dogmatic assertion. To be a
revolutionist it is first necessary to be a revelationist.
It is necessary to believe in the sufficiency of some theory
of the universe or the State. But in countries that have
come under the influence of what is called the evolutionary
idea, there has been no dramatic righting of wrongs, and
(unless the evolutionary idea loses its hold) there never
will be. These countries have no revolution, they have to
put up with an inferior and largely fictitious thing which
they call progress.

The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many
other Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact
between a simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very
old, and a rebelliousness which we in the West feel to he
very new. We cannot in our graduated and polite civilization
quite make head or tail of the Russian anarch; we can only
feel in a vague way that his tale is the tale of the Missing
Link, and that his head is the head of the superman. We hear
his lonely cry of anger. But we cannot be quite certain
whether his protest is the protest of the first anarchist
against government, or whether it is the protest of the last
savage against civilization. The cruelty of ages and of
political cynicism or necessity has done much to burden the
race of which Gorky writes; but time has left them one thing
which it has not left to the people in Poplar or West Ham.

ix INTRODUCTION

It has left them, apparently, the clear and childlike power
of seeing the cruelty which encompasses them. Gorky is a
tramp, a man of the people, and also a critic, and a bitter
one. In the West poor men, when they become articulate in
literature, are always sentimentalists and nearly always
optimists.

It is no exaggeration to say that these people of whom Gorky
writes in such a story as "Creatures that once were Men"
are to the Western mind children. They have, indeed, been
tortured and broken by experience and sin. But this has only
sufficed to make them sad children or naughty children or
bewildered children. They have absolutely no trace of that
quality upon which secure government rests so largely in
Western Europe, the quality of being soothed by long words
as if by an incantation. They do not call hunger "economic
pressure"; they call it hunger. They do not call rich men
"examples of capitalistic concentration," they call them
rich men. And this note of plainness and of something nobly
prosaic is as characteristic of Gorky, in some ways the most
modern, and sophisticated of Russian authors, as it is of
Tolstoy or any of the Tolstoyan type of mind. The very
title of this story strike the note of this sudden and simple
vision. The philanthropist writing long letters to the Daily
Telegraph says, of men living in a slum, that "their
degeneration is of such a kind as almost to pass the limits
of the semblance of humanity," and we read the whole thing
with a tepid assent as we should read phrases about the
virtues of Queen Victoria or the dignity of the House of
Commons.

x INTRODUCTION

The Russian novelist, when he describes a dosshouse, says,
"Creatures that once were Men." And we are arrested, and
regard the facts as a kind of terrible fairy tale. This story
is a test case of the Russian manner, for it is in itself a
study of decay, a study of failure, and a study of old age.
And yet the author is forced to write even of staleness
freshly; and though he is treating of the world as seen
by eyes darkened or blood-shot with evil experience, his
own eyes look out upon the scene with a clarity that is almost
babyish. Through all runs that curious Russian sense that
every man is only a man, which, if the Russians ever are a
democracy, will make them the most democratic democracy that
the world has ever seen. Take this passage, for instance,
from the austere conclusion of "Creatures that once were Men":

Petunikoff smiled the smile of the conqueror and went back
into the dosshouse, but suddenly he stopped and trembled.
At the door facing him stood an old man with a stick in his
hand and a large bag on his back, a horrible old man in rags
and tatters, which covered his bony figure. He bent under
the weight of his burden, and lowered his head on his breast,
as if he wished to attack the merchant.

"What are you? Who are you?" shouted Petunikoff.

"A man . . ." he answered, In a hoarse voice. This hoarseness
pleased and tranquillized Petunikoff, he even smiled.

"A man! And are there really men like you?" Stepping aside,
he let the old man pass. He went, saying slowly:

"Men are of various kinds . . . as God wills . . . There are
worse than me . . . still worse. . .
Yes. . . ."

xi INTRODUCTION

Here, in the very act of describing a kind of a fall from
humanity, Gorky expresses a sense of the strangeness and
essential value of the human being which is far too commonly
absent altogether from such complex civilizations as our own.
To no Westerner, I am afraid, would it occur, when asked
what he was, to say, "A man." He would be a plasterer who
had walked from Reading, or an iron-puddler who had been
thrown out of work in Lancashire, or a University man who
would be really most grateful for the loan of five shillings,
or the son of a lieutenant-general living in Brighton, who
would not have made such an application if he had not known
that he was talking to another gentleman. With us it is not
a question of men being of various kinds; with us the kinds
are almost different animals. But in spite of all Gorky's
superficial scepticism and brutality, it is to him the fall
from humanity, or the apparent fall from humanity, which is
not merely great and lamentable, but essential and even
mystical. The line between man and the beasts is one of the
transcendental essentials of every religion; and it is, like
most of the transcendental things of religion, identical
with the main sentiments of the man of common sense. We feel
this gulf when theologies say that it cannot be crossed. But
we feel it quite as much (and that with a primal shudder)
when philosophers or fanciful writers suggest that it might
be crossed. And if any man wishes to discover whether or no
he has really learned to regard the line between man and
brute as merely relative and evolutionary, let him say again
to himself those frightful words, "Creatures that once were Men."

G. K. CHESTERTON.

CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

PART I

In front of you is the main street, with two rows of
miserable-looking huts with shuttered windows and old walls
pressing on each other and leaning forward. The roofs of
these time-worn habitations are full of holes, and have been
patched here and there with laths; from underneath them
project mildewed beams, which are shaded by the dusty-leaved
elder-trees and crooked white willow--pitiable flora of
those suburbs inhabited by the poor.

The dull green time-stained panes of the windows look upon
each other with the cowardly glances of cheats. Through the
street and toward the adjacent mountain runs the sinuous
path, winding through the deep ditches filled with
rain-water. Here and there are piled heaps of dust and other
rubbish--either refuse or else put there purposely to keep
the rain-water from flooding the houses. On the top of the
mountain, among green gardens with dense foliage, beautiful
stone houses lie hidden; the belfries of the churches rise
proudly toward the sky, and their gilded crosses shine beneath
the rays of the sun. During the rainy weather the
neighboring town pours its water into this main road, which,
at other times, is full of its dust, and all these miserable
houses seem, as it were, thrown by some powerful hand into
that heap of dust, rubbish, and rainwater.

14 CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

They cling to the ground beneath the high mountain, exposed
to the sun, surrounded by decaying refuse, and their sodden
appearance impresses one with the same feeling as would the
half-rotten trunk of an old tree.

At the end of the main street, as if thrown out of the town,
stood a two-storied house, which had been rented from
Petunikoff, a merchant and resident of the town. It was in
comparatively good order, being farther from the mountain,
while near it were the open fields, and about half-a-mile
away the river ran its winding course.

This large old house had the most dismal aspect amid its
surroundings. The walls bent outward, and there was hardly
a pane of glass in any of the windows, except some of the
fragments, which looked like the water of the marshes--dull
green. The spaces of wall between the windows were covered
with spots, as if time were trying to write there in
hieroglyphics the history of the old house, and the tottering
roof added still more to its pitiable condition. It seemed as
if the whole building bent toward the ground, to await the
last stroke of that fate which should transform it into a
chaos of rotting remains, and finally into dust.

The gates were open, one-half of them displaced and lying on
the ground at the entrance, while between its bars had grown
the grass, which also covered the large and empty court-yard.
In the depths of this yard stood a low, iron-roofed,
smoke-begrimed building. The house itself was of course
unoccupied, but this shed, formerly a blacksmith's forge,
was now turned into a "dosshouse," kept by a retired captain
named Aristid Fomich Kuvalda.

15 CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

In the interior of the dosshouse was a long, wide and grimy
board, measuring some 28 by 70 feet. The room was lighted
on one side by four small square windows, and on the other
by a wide door. The unpainted brick walls were black with
smoke, and the ceiling, which was built of timber, was almost
black. In the middle stood a large stove, the furnace of which
served as its foundation, and around this stove and along the
walls were also long, wide boards, which served as beds for
the lodgers. The walls smelt of smoke, the earthen floor of
dampness, and the long, wide board of rotting rags.

The place of the proprietor was on the top of the stove,
while the boards surrounding it were intended for those who
were on good terms with the owner, and who were honored by
his friendship. During the day the captain passed most of his
time sitting on a kind of bench, made by himself by placing
bricks against the wall of the court-yard, or else in the
eating-house of Egor Yavilovitch, which was opposite the
house, where he took all his meals and where he also drank
vodki.

Before renting this house, Aristid Kuvalda had kept a registry
office for servants in the town. If we look further back into
his former life, we shall find that he once owned printing
works, and previous to this, in his own words, he "just lived!
And lived well too, Devil take it, and like one who knew how!"

He was a tall, broad-shouldered man of fifty, with a
raw-looking face, swollen with drunkenness, and with a
dirty yellowish beard.

16 CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

His eyes were large and gray, with an insolent expression of
happiness. He spoke in a bass voice and with a sort of
grumbling sound in his throat, and he almost always held
between his teeth a German china pipe with a long bowl. When
he was angry the nostrils of his big, crooked red nose swelled,
and his lips trembled, exposing to view two rows of large and
wolf-like yellow teeth. He had long arms, was lame, and always
dressed in an old officer's uniform, with a dirty, greasy cap
with a red band, a hat without a brim, and ragged felt boots
which reached almost to his knees. In the morning, as a rule,
he had a heavy drunken headache, and in the evening he caroused.
However much he drank, he was never drunk, and so was always
merry.

In the evenings he received lodgers, sitting on his brick-made
bench with his pipe in his mouth.

"Whom have we here?" he would ask the ragged and tattered object
approaching him, who had probably been chucked out of the town
for drunkenness, or perhaps for some other reason not quite so
simple. And after the man had answered him, he would say, "Let
me see legal papers in confirmation of your lies." And if there
were such papers they were shown. The captain would then put
them in his bosom, seldom taking any interest in them, and would
say: "Everything is in order. Two kopecks for the night, ten
kopecks for the week, and thirty kopecks for the month. Go and
get a place for yourself, and see that it is not other people's,
or else they will blow you up. The people that live here are
particular."

17 CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

"Don't you sell tea, bread, or anything to eat?"

"I trade only in walls and roofs, for which I pay to the
swindling proprietor of this hole--Judas Petunikoff, merchant
of the second guild--five roubles a month," explained Kuvalda
in a business-like tone. "Only those come to me who are not
accustomed to comfort and luxuries. . .but if you are
accustomed to eat every day, then there is the eating-house
opposite. But it would be better for you if you left off that
habit. You see you are not a gentleman. What do you eat? You
eat yourself!"

For such speeches, delivered in a strictly business-like manner,
and always with smiling eyes, and also for the attention he paid
to his lodgers, the captain was very popular among the poor of
the town. It very often happened that a former client of his
would appear, not in rags, but in something more respectable and
with a slightly happier face.

"Good-day, your honor, and how do you do?"

"Alive, in good health! Go on."

"Don't you know me?"

"I did not know you."

"Do you remember that I lived with you last winter for nearly a
month . . . when the fight with the police took place, and
three were taken away?"

"My brother, that is so. The police do come even under my
hospitable roof!"

"My God! You gave a piece of your mind to the police inspector
of this district!"

"Wouldn't you accept some small hospitality from me? When I
lived with you, you were. . . ."

18 CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

"Gratitude must be encouraged because it is seldom met with.
You seem to be a good man, and, though I don't remember you,
still I will go with you into the public-house and drink to
your success and future prospects with the greatest pleasure."

"You seem always the same . . . Are you always joking?"

"What else can one do, living among you unfortunate men?"

They went. Sometimes the Captain's former customer, uplifted
and unsettled by the entertainment, returned to the dosshouse,
and on the following morning they would again begin treating
each other till the Captain's companion would wake up to
realize that he had spent all his money in drink.

"Your honor, do you see that I have again fallen into your
hands? What shall we do now?"

"The position, no doubt, is not a very good one, but still
you need not trouble about it," reasoned the Captain. "You
must, my friend, treat everything indifferently, without
spoiling yourself by philosophy, and without asking yourself
any question. To philosophize is always foolish; to
philosophize with a drunken headache, ineffably so. Drunken
headaches require vodki, and not the remorse of conscience
or gnashing of teeth . . . save your teeth, or else you will
not be able to protect yourself. Here are twenty kopecks. Go
and buy a bottle of vodki for five kopecks, hot tripe or lungs,
one pound of bread and two cucumbers. When we have lived off
our drunken headache we will think of the condition of
affairs. . . ."

19 CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

As a rule the consideration of the "condition of affairs"
lasted some two or three days, and only when the Captain had
not a farthing left of the three roubles or five roubles given
him by his grateful customer did he say: "You came! Do you
see? Now that we have drunk everything with you, you fool,
try again to regain the path of virtue and soberness. It has
been truly said that if you do not sin, you will not repent,
and, if you do not repent, you shall not be saved. We have done
the first, and to repent is useless. Let us make direct for
salvation. Go to the river and work, and if you think you
cannot control yourself, tell the contractor, your employer,
to keep your money, or else give it to me. When you get
sufficient capital, I will get you a pair of trousers and
other things necessary to make you seem a respectable and
hard-working man, persecuted by fate. With decent-looking
trousers you can go far. Now then, be off!"

Then the client would go to the river to work as a porter,
smiling the while over the Captain's long and wise speeches.
He did not distinctly understand them, but only saw in front
of him two merry eyes, felt their encouraging influence, and
knew that in the loquacious Captain he had an arm that would
assist him in time of need.

And really it happened very often that, for a month or so,
some ticket-of-leave client, under the strict surveillance of
the Captain, had the opportunity of raising himself to a
condition better than that to which, thanks to the Captain's
cooperation, he had fallen.

20 CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

"Now, then, my friend!" said the Captain, glancing critically
at the restored client, "we have a coat and jacket. When I had
respectable trousers I lived in town like a respectable man.
But when the trousers wore out, I, too, fell off in the opinion
of my fellow-men and had to come down here from the town. Men,
my fine mannikin, judge everything by the outward appearance,
while, owing to their foolishness, the actual reality of things
is incomprehensible to them. Make a note of this on your nose,
and pay me at least half your debt. Go in peace; seek, and you
may find."

"How much do I owe you, Aristid Fomich?" asks the client, in
confusion.

"One rouble and 70 kopecks . . . Now, give me only one rouble,
or, if you like, 70 kopecks, and as for the rest, I shall wait
until you have earned more than you have now by stealing or by
hard work, it does not matter to me."

"I thank you humbly for your kindness!" says the client, touched
to the heart. "Truly you are a kind man . . .; Life has
persecuted you in vain . . . What an eagle you would have been
in your own place!"

The Captain could not live without eloquent speeches.

"What does 'in my own place' mean? No one really knows his own
place in life, and every one of us crawls into his harness. The
place of the merchant Judas Petunikoff ought to be in penal
servitude, but he still walks through the streets in daylight,
and even intends to build a factory. The place of our teacher
ought to be beside a wife and half-a-dozen children, but he is
loitering in the public-house of Vaviloff.

21 CREATURES THAT ONCE WERE MEN

"And then, there is yourself. You are going to seek a situation
as a hall porter or waiter, but I can see that you ought to be a
soldier in the army, because you are no fool, are patient and
understand discipline. Life shuffles us like cards, you see, and
it is only accidentally, and only for a time, that we fall into
our own places!"

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