Books: Pyeshkov's Part III

OTHER FIRES—Maxim Gorki—Appleton ($3).

Best-known Russians today are Dzhugashvili, Bronstein and Pyeshkov—but not by those names. Stalin, Trotsky and Maxim Gorki are the famed pseudonyms they have adopted. Least potent but most popular of the three is Gorki, Red Russia's Grand Old Man of Letters. Long before the Revolution, when it was still in the lower depths, he hitched his wagon to the Red star; as the star rose, so rose Gorki. His birthplace, Nizhni-Novgorod (chief navigation centre on the Volga River famed for its annual fair and now the site of a state...