> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Troyat-Gorki/130874
> BAnQ (Morin L., Le devoir, 7 févr. 1987, B-3) : https://collections.banq.qc.ca/ark:/52327/2763547

Very readable biography of Gorky. Provides lost of info on living conditions (who, when, where) but does not delve heavily into much literary criticism ( )

The problem with a book about someone like Gorky is do you go for the political history which is interesting enough; or do you go for the literary nuts and bolts. This particular book leaves you a bit dissatisfied because it only tells half the story. The book was first published in French in 1986 and one suspects a great deal more of the archive would be publically available since the advent of glasnost. ( )

Better than Troyat's diastrous bio of Dostoevsky, but nowhere near the brilliance of his bios of Flaubert and Chekhov and, to some extent, Turgenev. Pretty short and clearly pieced together from Gorky's own memoirs--i.e., not a whole lot of research--this bio leaves out a great deal of Gorky's literary life--doesn't even mention many of his works, if he struggled writing them, how his plays got produced, etc (all of a sudden we just read that he has another novel published, with virtually no word about its invention or process). Instead, most of the emphasis is one Gorky's politics and how his opposition to the tsar and then to the Revolution ultimately changed and how he became an ardent Bolshevik. In that sense, it's a decent history lesson, though many parts of the Revolution get left out as well. All in all, it's a so-so bio that doesn't succeed at doing any one thing particularly well. Frankly, you can almost feel like Troyat rushed through this just to say he wrote a bio of another Russian writer.