"The Symbolist Contamination of Gor'kii's 'Realistic' Style," in Slavic Review, Vol. 47, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 227-38.

In the following essay, Brown argues that Gorky's stories bear closer affinities to modernist/symbolist literature than to the realist works with which they are typically associated.

I am concerned in this paper with investigating the complex relationship of Maksim Gor'kii with the literature of his day, including the so-called realists, but particularly with the decadents, the symbolists, and other writers generally thought of as alien to Russian realism, whether critical or socialist. The stereotype of Gor'kii still dominant in some quarters presents him as walled off from "decadent" and "bourgeois" literary styles and from the carriers of such "contamination." But Gor'kii was much more complex and more interesting than we have supposed, and he functioned during much of his career as part of a literary world in which "symbolism," rather loosely defined...