Books: Tolstoy Plain

REMINISCENCES (213 pp.) — Maxim Gorky—Translated by S. S. Koteliansky, Leonard Woolf and others — Dover ($2.75).

The grey old man was surely "the sounding bell of this world," wrote Russian Novelist Maxim Gorky. "Surely he is great and holy, [although] sometimes he seems to be conceited and intolerant, like a Volga preacher." Sometimes it was "painfully unpleasant" to hear his comments on women: "a string of indecent words . . . unspeakably vulgar. . . . He is really a whole orchestra, but not all the horns are playing in unison. ... It...