Ryumin: On people’s right to wish to be deceived! You often speak of ‘life’. What is this: ‘life’? Whenever you talk about it I see in my mind’s eye a massive and amorphous monster that ceaselessly demands sacrifices, human sacrifices! Day after day it gobbles up a man, not leaving a single scrap, and avidly drinks his blood. Why? I don’t see any sense to it, but I know that the longer a man lives, the more he sees himself surrounded by filth, vulgarity, coarseness and smut and the more he craves beauty, clarity, purity (from ‘Summerfolk’ by M. Gorky)

In ‘Summerfolk’ a group of Russian friends spends the summer in a country dacha. They talk about the children’s education, about love, marriage, literature and life … They drink tea, brag and have fun, enjoying the sun and the water. Yet something is brewing. This group of notoriously enlightened members of the bourgeoisie, the Russian intelligentsia, is on edge. In the expectation that their lives are about to change completely, they cling to each other like grim death and fanatically defend their own precarious position.

Maxim Gorky wrote ‘Summerfolk’ or ‘Datchniki’ in 1905. The story dramatizes the lives of the Russian aristocracy and artists and their position vis-à-vis the social changes taking place at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Shalimov: I can feel it! I walk down the street and I see people with an entirely distinctive physiognomy and I feel: they will not read me, it does not appeal to them. They are strangers to me, they do not like me. They do not need me. I am old to them, and my ideas are old, too. I do not understand who they are! Who they like! Who they need! (from ‘Summerfolk’ by M. Gorky)

Shalimov: Please! You are just like everybody else! Everyone has this stupid and presumptuous conception of a writer’s life. Of how he should eat, speak, write. Why? Why should I meet higher requirements for you? Why should I play a different part? I am a perfectly normal man who works for a living. Not with my hands, but with my imagination. You live as you like. But I, because I am a writer, should live according to your wishes, to satisfy your dreams. Pardon me, Varvara Mikhaliovna, but I’ll give you back this flower. I feel I do not deserve this distinction. (from ‘Summerfolk’ by M. Gorky)