hypocrisy of the Bolsheviks who hastened to appropriate Korolenko's legacy for their propagandistic purposes. Mark Aldanov, for one, declared the excessive flow of official 'tributes', including the Lunacharsky's obituary, Demyan Bedny's poetic dedication and Grigory Zinoviev's speech a collective act of abuse, "desecrating his pure grave." Criticism Mark Aldanov, who considered Korolenko the founder of his own new school of literature, a 'fine landscape painter' and in this respect a precursor to Ivan Bunin, was still ambivalent about Korolenko's literary legacy as a whole, describing him as an "uneven writer who authored some true masterpieces alongside dismally weak stories, one of his most famous ones, 'Chyudnaya', among them." While praising his style of writing, "devoid of modernist ornamentations," as well as "very simple, seemingly ordinary spoken language almost completely free from the hackneyed jargon of intelligentsia," Aldanov argued: "He was too gentle a man, who admired and respected the people too much to grow into a great writer," noting: "his stories are full of thieves, gamblers and murderers, with not a single evil man among them." Aykhenvald who lauded Korolenko's role as a purveyor of humanism in Russia, was less complimentary to his stories which he found, 'overcrowded', lacking in space. "There is no cosmos, no air, in fact, almost nothing except for lots and lots of people, all worried by their worldly problems, totally foreign to the notion of their mysterious unity with the great Universe," argued the critic, who described Korolenko's literary world as 'confined quartes' where 'horizons [were] narrow and well outlined' and everything was "portrayed in vague and simple lines." In fact, the author's humanism as such is "overbearing and in the end feels as if [the author] tries to exert some kind of violence over the reader's free will," according to the biographer. For Aychenvald, Korolenko is too "rational when observing human suffering; apparently seeing rational reasons behind it, he is invariably convinced that there must be some panacea for it, which will bring all pain to the end." For all his shortcomings, though, Korolenko, according to Aykhenvald, "remains one of the most attractive figures in the contemporary Russian literature," quick to enchant the reader with "his touchingly soft romanticism and tender melancholy gently lightening a dim world where misguided, orphaned souls and charming images of children roam." Ongoing influence Korolenko is generally considered to be a major Russian writer of the late 19th century