Act 2 — Gambling scene (Act II. of "The Doss-house")
Frances A. (Frances Alice) Welby translation
Despite its agonies and martyrdoms, however, there is one marvellously inspiring feature about this novel,—its gorgeous descriptions of Nature, rich in life and colour. "Foma Gordeyev" is the romance of life on the Volga.
With what intimacy, familiarity, and heart-felt emotion Gorki here describes and sees! The great River, with its diversified characteristics, its ominous events, mingles with the life of Man, and flows on past us.…
It is this characteristic union of the Human-All-Too-Human with his impressions of Nature in so many of Gorki's works, that makes them at the outset desirable and readable to a large proportion of his public. Much of his description of life beyond the social pale would be repulsive if it were not for this interpretative nature-painting. Especially would this be the case in "Malva." This robust, free-loving, and free-living maiden attracts us by her vigorous participation in Nature, when, for instance, she leaps into the water, and sports in the element like a fish.
Gorki's countless wanderings through the Russian Steppes, his sojourns by the southern shores of the Russian Seas, are intimately interwoven with the course of Nature, and have given him poetic insight and motives which are ignored by other authors, who have grown up in the University, the Bureau, or the Coffee-houses of large towns. His life of poverty has made him rich. He has evolved some significant prose-poems from the life of Nature, and the contest of her forces. While the sketch, "Spring Voices," is a satire, bristling with tangible darts and stings, "The Bursting of the Dam" expresses the full force that rages and battles in a stormy sea. The unemancipated workers construct steep, rocky dams that jut out into the free, unbridled sea. The waves that so long rolled on merrily, without fell intent, are now confined, and beat against the hard, cold, sullen rocks. The winds and tempests join in a colossal attack upon the unyielding barriers, and the rocks are shivered in fragments.
