Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) is one of the key figures of the literary turn of the 19th–20th centuries and of Soviet literature, a writer, publicist, and public figure. The founder of the method of socialist realism. With his first stories, Gorky, obsessed with the dream of 'other people', introduced into Russian literature the image of the half-real, half-imagined noble tramp, who by 1902 had mutated into the inhabitant of a flophouse. The play 'The Lower Depths' is undoubtedly one of the peaks of Gorky's work. The main theme of the play 'The Lower Depths' is truth and lies.

In the play, the old man Luka, with his quiet and eternal truths, is set against the loud raisonneur Satin, who, according to Marxist criticism, embodies the awakening of proletarian consciousness.

Throughout his entire creative biography, like the 'cunning Luka', Gorky himself tried to 'breathe a golden dream over humanity' — 'the dream of the socialist revolution as a panacea for all human suffering' (V. Khodasevich). And even his own 'Untimely Thoughts' did not, it seems, sober him up.

In addition to the play 'The Lower Depths', the present edition includes the play 'The Philistines', as well as V. Khodasevich's essay 'Gorky'.