Her Lover

Maxims Gorky’s story is about a male student whose poor, illiterate neighbor, Teresa, asks him to write a letter to her boyfriend back home. Soon after, she asks him to write a letter, as a young man, to his girlfriend, Teresa. The student then realizes that Teresa has created the boyfriend, and her relationship with him, out of loneliness and despair. In my revision, the communications technology is updated; that is, a laptop and Facebook replace pen and paper, and Gorky’s story begins to sound a lot like what Internet users know as sock puppetry, and/or catfishing.