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The Lower Depths: A Drama in Four Acts

Chapter 7: Transcriber’s Note
By Maksim Gorky
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About This Book

The four-act drama unfolds in a crowded night lodging, where an ensemble of destitute residents reveal their stories and conflicting worldviews. Conversations range from bitter realism to consoling illusions as tensions between resignation and the need for dignity shape daily life. A compassionate outsider brings gentle optimism and challenges hardened perspectives, prompting moral debates about truth, compassion, and self-deception. Stark settings, moments of dark humor, and human detail combine to examine social inequality, the search for meaning, and the fragile bonds that sustain people at society's margins.

Transcriber’s Note

This transcription is based on images digitized by the University of Connecticut and posted by the Internet Archive at:

archive.org/details/lowerdepthsdrama00gork

In general, this transcription attempts to retain the formatting, punctuation and spelling of the source text. The following changes were noted:

  • p. 8: I’m sick myself—poisoned with alchohol . . .—Changed “alchohol” to “alcohol”.
  • The portrait of Gorky originally between pages 26 and 27 was moved so that it appears after page 28, between Acts One and Two.
  • p. 50: SATINE [screams] The dead can’t hear . . . the dead do not feel—Scream!—Roar! . . . the deaf don’t hear!—A hand-written note in the source images changed the word “deaf” to “dead”. To verify the change, translations by David Magarshack, in The Storm and Other Russian Plays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), Edwin Hopkins (first published in the Winter 1905 issue of Poet Lore as “A Night’s Lodging”), and Laurence Irving (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912?) were checked. As a result, the line “the deaf don’t hear!” was changed to “the dead don’t hear!”
  • p. 72: You can’t escape your fate. . . . police—Abram—whistle!—Capitalized “police” for consistency.
  • p. 75: The law of life was the law of his heart. . . . and he who obeys this law, is good—The period preceding the ellipsis was deleted for consistency.