of nations, expressed in every word, In every deed of such individuals, as seem to be bred only among the Russian people.
And with all that, Russian critics, some of them very serious and exacting, have with timid servility bowed their heads before Gorky's "barefooters" and Skitalec's "stumps" (ogarki = degraded youths).
Deliverance of thought! Unbridled nature! A protest against the bourgeois! were the watchwords of the various admiring critics. Yes, the bold words of those microcephalians of thought, feeling, and morality were admired, as well as the actions of shamelessly naked men.
Until the "barefooter" seized power, lolled In the chair of the President of the Cheka and exclaimed with the jovial voice of a drunkard:
"Let's make the earth bare and bare the man upon it!"
And It was so. The earth became bare, and upon it were ghastly pools of blood and brains beaten out from the intelligent skulls of those who but a short time before had been enraptured by the comrades of the many-coloured Malvina, and the drunken idlers who in the years 1901-1906 had so greatly Impressed the Russian youth. Gorky desired to point out the existence of those whom Russian ethnography has somehow not yet discovered, who formed "a state within the state," a number of egotistic and irresponsible groups of men in the loosely-cemented Russian society. But Gorky,
