The lower depths by Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Giljarovsky: the portrait and its original

In his play “The Lower Depths” Maxim Gorky described the life of the underclass, rawing general attention to them. However a few decades before that Vladimir Gil-jarovsky wrote about slum-dwellers in his works. Despite the fact that both authors derived their materials from life, they did it in very different ways. The article analyzes who of them truly described this social phenomenon, and who better understood its causes. Mr. Giljarovsky actually created a chronicle of that time. Mr. Gorky wrote “a hymn to а man”, a philosophical parable about the life of tramps.