Maxim Gorky comes to my mind rather often as of late. One of his famous lines irks me ever more: “Man—it has a proud ring!” To me, it is rather the opposite (“A Vile Ring,” August 11, 2008). I just searched for the line on the Wide World Web, and I found it without much difficulty. It comes from one of Gorky’s best-known plays, “The Lower Depths” (1902). But it is spoken by a character named Satin. The name rings a bell, to be sure. In the play, he is a drunken thief and a riotous rebel. Gorky is usually praised for giving such a memorable line to a lowly character of this ilk, but I am starting to wonder. Perhaps he was poking fun at the intellectual circles of his time, which were leaning toward socialist ideas well before the October Revolution. If that was the case, he must have relished the misbegotten appreciation of the line in Lenin’s time, and especially in Stalin’s time. Born in 1868, Gorky died as late as 1936, only ten years before I was born. Perhaps we will never know, but the line could be sheer sarcasm on his part. Thus I feel like relenting in my ire toward the Russian author. And Satin is my witness. A perfect witness, too.