Some ten years after Alexei Peshkov had won fame as a writer under the name of Maxim Gorki (Maxim the Bitter), he came to New York in the spring of 1906 to raise funds for the Bolshevik movement in Russia. During the disaster that followed, I was in close contact with him and I shall set down my memories here. But before I do, it may be worth while to sketch briefly my own Russian adventures up to that time, for they throw light on the widespread interest here in the early movements to set Russia free.

In Princeton I had hungrily read in translation Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoyevski, Gogol, Gorki and other great Slav realists, and also American George Kennan's books on the early Russian revolutionists, books widely read all over our land. Then, living for two years or more on the lower East Side in New York, I became a friend and admirer of Abraham Cahan and his Yiddish socialist daily, Die Forwaerts, and through him I met many Russian Social Democrats and Social Revolutionists. When old Katharine Breshkovskaya, known and loved as “Babushka” (little grandmother), after twenty-eight years in Siberia, came to New York on a speaking campaign, Cahan gave me the first long interview.