SOURCE: Gorky, Maxim. “Maxim Gorky.” In Broken Image: Foreign Critiques of America, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn, pp. 172-88. New York: Random House, 1972.

In the following excerpt, originally published by Gorky in 1906, the Russian author reflects on his impressions of America following his expulsion from his own home country.

Everywhere is toil, everything is caught up in its whirlwind, everybody obeys the will of some mysterious power hostile to man and to nature. A machine, a cold, unseen, unreasoning machine, in which man is but an insignificant screw!

—Maxim Gorky, “The City of Mammon,” Appleton's Magazine, (New York), Volume 8 (1906), pp. 177-82

The failure of the Russian Revolution of 1905 sent many people into exile and frustration. Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), a famous writer with ties to some of the more extreme revolutionaries, wrote of the pain he suffered in being pushed out of his native land. “If a tooth could...