By revealing the causes of the October revolutionary pre-storm, M. Gorky, in light of А. А. Bogdanov’s God construction ideas, considers it AD Gospel, recognizing in it the aspiration to rearrange the world at the dawn of equality and justice. Gorky’s novel has its layer of expressive means and figures of speech, its poetics of language. The novel’s periphrastics semantics is rich, it has many-sided varieties – from synonym-substitution to periphrasis-symbol, among which the special attention is paid to the word heart within trichotomy “nominate – metaphor – symbol”.