The New Republic has a very interesting book review of a new translation of Maxim Gorky’s biographical writings and other materials, which provides a fresh perspective on the Russian Revolution through the eyes of a literary titan.

Gorky may have been his own greatest character, but the story of the character Gorky is one of the most disappointing and upsetting in modern literature. It is, in fact, the sort of story against which Gorky himself protested all his life: a story of disillusionment and “low truths,” of a revolution wildly off its course. (…) Whereas Tolstoy’s work, especially War and Peace, is shot through with protest against the idea of the “great man,” Gorky’s life and work record an ongoing search for just such a figure–a “Man with a capital M,” as he called Lenin. “I think that such men are possible only in Russia,” Gorky wrote, “whose history and way of life always remind me of Sodom and Gomorrah.” In his literary portraits, Gorky is so drawn to his subjects that his admiration at times verges on chameleonic impersonation. In one uncanny photograph from 1920, Lenin stands in front while the much taller Gorky, in an identical suit and with his head shaved, leans diffidently to one side behind his idol, like an uncertain, elongated mirror image. The scene is right out of Zelig–Gorky the remora, the parrot, the perpetual acolyte. (…)