Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev

Maxim Gorky

Translated by Bryan Karetnyk, with an introduction from J. M. Coetzee

Fitzcarraldo Classic No. 10 | French paperback with flaps, 208 pages
Published 25 September 2025

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In 1920, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy and it was recognized almost immediately as one of the few masterpieces of modern biography. ‘It is one of the most remarkable biographical pieces ever written,’ writes Leonard Woolf in his autobiography. ‘It makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy and his character as if one were sitting in the same room – his greatness and his littleness, his entrancing and infuriating complexity, his titanic and poetic personality, his superb humour.’ In 1934, the book was expanded to include Gorky’s memoirs of two other great Russian literary figures, Anton Chekhov and Leonid Andreyev. Almost a hundred years later, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev is reissued in a superb new translation by Bryan Karetnyk.


‘One of the most remarkable biographical pieces ever written.’
— Leonard Woolf

‘[F]ull of vivid flashes and glimpses into the soul of the Russian genius…. Gorky’s book is particularly valuable because it reveals not only Tolstoy as he saw him, but unconsciously Gorky reveals himself also.’
— New York Times

‘Portraits of three writers as the self-portrait of a fourth: Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev is a quick-handed plein-air masterpiece.’
— Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus

‘Like all the Russian writers, Gorky had a marvellous eye for the physical reality that intrudes upon thought and feeling. But where other Russians, even Tolstoy, have only one pair of eyes, Gorky is like a hundred-eyed man who sees dozens of things happening at every blink and who forgets none of them.
— V. S. Pritchett

‘Gorky’s picture comes nearer than the others to completeness, because he makes no attempt to include everything, to explain everything, or to sum up all in one consistent whole. Here there is a very bright light, here darkness and emptiness. And perhaps this is the way in which we see people in reality.’
— Virginia Woolf

‘A profound and intimate portrait of literary genius, Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev offer a rare and deeply personal glimpse into the inner lives of three towering figures of Russian literature. More than a moving tribute from one great writer to his peers, this is a rich tapestry of philosophical inquiry, psychological insight and social commentary. Gorky explores questions of faith and doubt, the bonds and rivalries between creative minds, and the turbulent backdrop of pre-revolutionary Russia. At once an ode to the beauty of Russian literature, a study in human connection and a meditation on writing life itself.’
— Lea Ypi, author of Indignity

Maxim Gorky was born in 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod. After a grim childhood and some years of wandering he began to write stories and by his thirties had become world-famous both for fiction and plays. He became involved in revolutionary activity against the tsarist regime in Russia and had a confused, difficult relationship with the Soviet dictatorship, partly living abroad and yet becoming the USSR’s most feted and widely read author. He died in 1936 under suspicious circumstances and Stalin and Molotov were among the bearers of his coffin.

Bryan Karetnyk is a translator, writer and scholar of twentieth-century Russian literature and culture. He has translated several major works by writers including Gaito Gazdanov, Boris Poplavsky and Yuri Felsen, and is the editor and principal translator of the landmark Penguin anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017). He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times and the Spectator.

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. He is the author of, inter alia, twenty works of fiction. In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Currently he lives in Australia, where he is Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

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