which prompted him to look back on his love manners.

      When one day «in the bluish light of the moon» she learned of the pure romantic fold of his soul, she stated with tears and deep regret that she had made a mistake and now understood that «she is not what he needs, not that!» And this cannot be corrected, since she has long since ceased to be a girl.

      Gorky’s romantic dream also included the desire to arouse in his beloved woman «a thirst for freedom, beauty.» He tried to express this idea in the story Old Lady Izergil and, when he saw that the «closest» to him woman «firmly asleep», interrupted reading and thought… Gorky realized that even his powerful, like a bell, love is unable to change, or rather, to return what she herself considered irretrievably lost: «the dream of heavenly bliss of love.»

      It seems unlikely the restrained and ironic attitude of the young Gorky to his wife’s coquetry, her «striving to shake up men» and the gossip spread about her, depicted in the story of his first love, which is peculiar rather to the view of an already aged author, but it vividly highlights his main suffering – that she could tell another his deepest «feelings, thoughts and conjectures, which you tell only to the woman you love and will not tell anyone else». He also began to feel that the love that had been the support of his innermost life path – literary creativity – was now, in its non-ideal incarnation, knocking him down; this absolute love could not absorb or transform what was rejected, and they, «after a little silent sadness,» parted.

      In this autobiographical story we can also find a third component of Gorky’s feelings of love – a «romantic dream» associated with the peculiarity of his nature, manifested in the unbearableness of human suffering, especially when it is associated with violence and insults, which «threw him out of life». For Gorky, this was an internal «litmus test», a tuning fork of kinship of souls. When he discovered deep-rooted spiritual callousness in his loved ones, something broke off in his own soul, and he became cold to them. He cites the case of how his first love exposed her inability to share compassion for a one-eyed old Jewish man who had been humiliatingly beaten by a policeman, imagining a picture of inhuman abuse painted with «anguish and anger» and concluding that her husband was too impressionable and had «bad nerves.» To this we can add that, according to the testimony of the daughter of Gorky’s second common-law wife, Maria Andreyeva, a sharp «divergence of political opinions» regarding the rejection of repression and bloody massacre of the Bolsheviks against their apparent and fictitious political enemies, was one of the reasons for the breakup of passionately begun, cemented by friendship and joint work sixteen-year relationship.

      At the conclusion of the story Gorky, respectfully calling Olga Kamenskaya а glorious, «real woman», explains how this was expressed. A real woman of Gorky liked it when he, «barely touching the skin of her face with his fingers, smoothed out the slightly noticeable wrinkles under her lovely eyes»; «loved her body and, naked, standing in front of the mirror, admired»; was «restlessly cheerful by nature, witty, flexible, like a snake»; never once complained about the difficult conditions of life; «could sew beautifully» and dress up; was original in her interest in people, believing that «suddenly there is something stored there that is not visible to anyone, never shown, only I alone – and I am the first – will see it».

      In the story On First Love Gorky also touches on the rather acute issue of the appropriateness of «talking about love», on which, as a rule, extremely opposite points of view are expressed. Gorky’s «Parisienne» was burdened by the verbosity of her Russian admirers, and «taught» him not to philosophize too