Creatures That Once Were Men

This early novella by the great Russian author, Maxim Gorky, paints a portrait of life amidst the lowest depths of Russian society. A world in which men, crushed by the brutality of their social existence, undergo a bestial transformation of their humanity by embracing depravity, addiction, and wanton destruction and violence. Gorky's cutting realist prose transforms a simple story about man's inhumanity to his fellow man into a biting commentary on the social and economic conditions that produce these "creatures who once were men."