INTRODUCTION
[The following—reprinted from the Athenæum (London) of June 11th, 1920, and translated by S. Kotliansky is part of Gorky's preface to the first catalogue of "World Literature," the publishing house founded by him under the auspices of the Bolshevik government. It is reprinted here as a plea, as noble as it is typical of Gorky, for good books.
A. A. K.]
Is it necessary to speak of the necessity of a serious study of literature, or at least of a wide acquaintance with it? Literature is the heart of the world, winged with all its joys and sorrows, with all the dreams and hopes of men, with their despair and wrath, with their reverence before the beauty of nature, their fears in face of her mysteries. This heart throbs violently and eternally with the thirst of self-knowledge, as though in it all those substances and forces of nature that have created the human personality as the highest expression of their complexity and wisdom aspired to clarify the meaning and aim of life.
Literature may also be called the all-seeing eye of the world, whose glance penetrates into the deepest recesses of the human spirit. A book—so simple a thing and so familiar—is, essentially, one of the great and mysterious wonders of the world. Some one unknown to us, sometimes speaking an incomprehensible language, hundreds of miles away, has drawn on paper various combinations of a score or so of signs, which we call letters, and when we look at them, we strangers, remote from the creator of the book, mysteriously perceive the meaning of all the words, the ideas, the feelings, the images; we admire the description of the scenes of nature, take delight in the beautiful rhythm of speech, the music of the words. Moved to tears, angry, dreaming, sometimes laughing over
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