"The Lure of the Vagabond," in Maxim Gorky: Romantic Realist and Conservative Revolutionary, Greenwood Press, 1962, pp. 25-37.

In the following essay, Hare explores Gorky's varied depiction of the tramp figure in his early short stories.

Gorky's standpoint when he began to write his stories bears a striking affinity to Nietzsche, whom he had read in the early eighteen-nineties. His friend N. Vasiliev had translated Thus Spake Zarathustra into Russian in 1889. Indeed some of Gorky's illiterate tramps talk oddly as if they had learned to echo purple passages from Nietzsche. Yet one should not exaggerate the influence of single books and outside sources, when Gorky's own mind, with its mass of sharp half-digested impressions, was moving independently in the same direction. For these apparent points of contact were also widespread signs of the times elsewhere.

From three separate geographical extremities of Europe, three nearly contemporary imaginative writers had arisen...