Literature

The poem is in fact by the Armenian writer Atom Yarjanian (1878–1915) who wrote under the pseudonym Siamanto. "Thirst" is taken from Siamanto's collection of poems Bloody News from My Friend, which was written in response to the Adana Massacre of April 1909 and published in 1911. Presumably Gorky had obtained an English translation, possibly from Alice Stone Blackwell's anthology Armenian Poems: Rendered into English Verse (Boston: Atlantic Publishing Company, 1917), p. 161, one of the few English texts in which it was available at the time. The poem is copied word-for-word with the exception of several identifiable orthographic errors.