"Plot, Pushkin: 'The Pistol Shot,' Gorky: Twenty-six Men and a Girl'," in Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story, Yale University Press, 1982, pp. 113-41.

In the following excerpt, O'Toole focuses on plot, theme, and technique in Gorky's "Twenty-six Men and a Girl," calling it "a brilliant and pessimistic revelation of the death in life of the collective consciousness."

Apart from the key role they played in the cultural life of their time, it would be hard to find two Russian writers whose lives and works contrasted more sharply than those of Pushkin and Gorky. It is intriguing, therefore, to discover in Gorky's "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" a plot structure which is almost exactly parallel to the plot structure of each half of "The Pistol Shot," written nearly seventy years earlier. . . .

It might be objected that this is a fairly standard sequence: many narratives have...