"Extraordinarily Russian, not just in its subject matter, its pictures of the revolution, its description of encounters with Tolstoy, Chekhov and Blok, but in the way it conveys so authentically the brute size of the country, its harshness, its speech-habits, its popular myths and songs. Gorky handles the form of the sentence like a spade. He digs and turns the soil of his own experience and there is a marvellous frosty immediacy to his prose"-The Times
