The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1833-1916, 1903-08-09
MAXIM GORKY'S "NACHTASYL. "
THE PLAY THE LAST WORD IN
DRAMATIC NATURALIST.
The Russian Writer a Man of Genius and
Ignorant OF the Fundamental Rules OF
the Theatre-Pity and Terror Aroused
By Ills PIay--The Berlin Production.

Nur AWu hV''pt fN"'A"a'a
BY Ills PIay--The Berlin Production.
De protalndis dd lie cidmdris
After witnessing performance OF Maxim
Gorky's "Nachtasyl'--"'T Night Refuge"
not without shudder, that there are
depths within depths, abysms beneath
abysms still UNEMPLOYED by the dramatic
adventurer. The late Emil lola posed in
his life time as the father Of naturalism in
literature; but he might have gone to school
to learn the alphabet of his art at the knees
of the young man from Mini Novgorod,
Maxim Gorky. That Anarchist Of letters
has taught US lessons OF the bitterest I'M
port, Gorky the Bitter One. We know now
that lola was only incorporating in the
gorgeous rags Of Romantician with a
vocabulary borrowed from Chateaubrland,
Victor Hugo and Flaubert; we know, too,
that despite the drgOt of IL Assommolr,
the book is as romantic as "a Bouguereau
canvas-the formula is the same: highly
glazed surfaces SNUG sentiment ard pretty
coloring. The difference is that while lola
painted low life like born Romantic, Bou-
gerueau selected forhis subjects the nymphs
SO " WIG pNtl VI 'ltt7H'N hhho''S'>'
To the night of his unfortunate death lola
believed himself naturalist, though his
books never escaped the faint ofmelodrama
The natural iSm of the Russians is in u
different KEY Gogol, the inimiable Gogol,
wrote Dead Souls, and Russia had con
ouered the kingdom once ruled by Fielding
If Chateuubriand was the father OF modern
French prose, as Goethe asserted, from
Gogol stemmed all the great modern Rus
slams Dost oiewsky Turgenev, Strhendrin,
Tolsto OF, Gorky; and the last seems nearer
the first than either Turgenev or Tolstoi
He il hardly ten years old artstically. yet
his name is known from Siberia to the
Sandwich Islands. He is read more in u
day than kipling is in year, and, COM
pared to Kipling, he is as flint to chalk, a
man carved from the hardest granite.
revolutionary, nasmuch az he de-
lberately disowns in his most character
istic work-all the devices of literature, Of
rhetoric, Of literary architecture, he is at
his worst in prolonged narrative, such as
"Foma Gordyeef." And when he philoso-
phizes he is bore OF no mean order
II il in the short tale with a simple setting
that Gorky knows how to stir us. A strip
of sea beach, the sky hot azure, the water
green as grass, two or three men and
women, and we are given tragedy in min
iature Or the steppes, sullen and brown,
stretch before us to the setting sun; a few
tramps talk at random, night falls. Misery
hudCles close We have felt the very pulse
beat of life-and such livesl A wretched
outcast, starved. wet as dog in the rain-for
he Ia but dog in the rain-meets woman
as miserable and as degraded as himself.
They manage to steal some mouldy bread
and sleep one night in a Cask. 1t is but the
recital OF one night. They drift apart in
the morning, never to meet again. Why
should they care? Drab and monotonous,
their soiled lives need be viewed but for a
moment to see them in their entirety. Yet
Gorky--for he is his own heSo-contIives to
sound undertones in this SINISTER music
-snuy-sppeais- Inst ncFivety he lays bare
the souls of the men and women he dissects;
souls as of muddy flame. dreary sigh
escapes their lips as they drag their poor
carcases from place to place. Life has
drugged them with sorrow. Why move
at all? Why live at all? Why were they
born? Why do they die? Existence is
reduced to a few primary movements;
eat, sleep; il vodka can be secured, then
drink it to the point Of oblivion, for the
sole blessing In this vale of tears is oblivion.
II may be seen that, compared o Gorkys
rank. unsavory, but sincere notation Of facts,
Thomas de Quncey's charming narrative
of his youthful woes in Oxford street
stony hearted mother"and his walks
and talks with Anne, the noctambulist Is,
an idyll. Gorky transfers TO his pages the
odors Of a starving, sweating humanity its
drunkenness, its explosion of rage. cultural
cries Of Joy and its all too terrible nnmalism.
We turn our heads the other way when his
women curse and rave Walt Whitman,
Moncure Conway said twenty-five years
ago. brought the sop pail into the drawing
room; but for Gorky there is no drawing
room. Life is only dung heap.
George Moore in one of his peregrina-
tons found book on the Paris quavs that
finally quenched his ardor for naturalism.
II remember Alright, it was by Petrus Borel,
once called lycanthrope because of his
wolfsh hatred of humanity. For years
have searched for the last word in dramatic
naturalism. and in Gorky's "Nachtasyl"
have found IT, / heard it first In Berlin at
the Kleines Theater, and later in Vienna at
the Deusohes Volkstheater Gorky, HIM
self lyoanthrope, pessimist, despiser of
his fellow men, has assembled In this almost
indescribable and unspeakable melange
for it is not playa set of men and women
whose very lives smell to heaven: the setting
recalls one of his stories about ruined lives
whose name escapes me. The action deals
with the cloings OF n half dozen tramps and
thieves, who have taken refuge in an old,
tumbledown den, a regular nest for jail
birds
An utter absence of theatricalism and a
naIvete in dramatic construction proclaim
Gorky a man of genius and one quite ig-
norant Of the fundamental rules OF the
theatre. His four acts might be compressed
into two, or. better still, into one. Only the
fatigue and gloom engendered would in
terfere with this scheme, for there ia far too
much talk, far too little movement Gorky.
like most uneducated men Of power. loves
to moralize, to discuss life and Its meanings.
He Is at times veritably sophomore in this
respect. Long speeches are put into the
mouths OF his characters, who forthwith
spout the most dreary commonplaces about
destiny, luck, birth and death.
The atranuth of fha Dlav Haa in ira nras