Word: pyotr
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Bearlike Artamonov Sr. becomes almost lovable during his invasion of the town of Dryomov, with hia masterful bluntness, self-assurance, genuine humility, faith in work; his crude affection for his sons, his bold carnality. Pyotr, the eldest son, is no less stupid than his father except that he knows he is stupid. His endless wondering about the right and wrong of things is what undoes him. Did he kill the clerk's nasty little boy by accident, he asks himself, or in malice, or to save his own son an evil companionship. He cannot decide that and a hundred...
Author Gorky introduces characteristic figures-the hunchback brother who tries to hang himself for hopeless love, later becoming a monk, then losing his faith; women of various shapes and sizes, uniformly brainless except Pyotr's mother-in-law, who became his father's mistress; a pink-faced carpenter, a philosophizing ancient and that creature as indispensable to a Russian novel as are bobbed hair and bachelors to the Saturday Evening Post-the village idiot. But Author Gorky's powers, however fully displayed here, have produced books that were far more readable than this one. The action...