Was Gorky's The Hermit an intentional stick in the ey to Soviet authorities?

I guess the most remarkable thing about Gorky's short story The Hermit is that it was written at all, or at least written where and when it was - apparently first published in 1947 (though it's possible that this was its first pub in English?), so atypical of Soviet literature that it's pretty much sui generis. A great story or even a good story? Not even close: there's no narrative to speak of, there's only one character and he's full of contradictions, he doesn't do much but opine. and he's done some pretty despicable things in his life, and the story does not represent a turning point in his life or any great confession or realization or conflict. It's written almost like a magazine profile: the unnamed narrator comes across a 60-ish man living a hermit's life at the edge of a forest; he's badly scarred and weather-worn, but has over the years constructed a cozy little shelter where he lives alone with his thoughts. The narrator asks him a series of questions about his life, and we learn of his hard life as a sawyer, about his relentless womanizing, about his abuse of women including his wife, and most disturbingly about his sexual abuse of his daughter - he was charged but acquitted at trial - even though now looking back he says something really callous like: Of course I fooled around with her a little, who wouldn't? Pretty despicable guy, so why is the narrator so interested? In the 2nd half of the story we see that he's something like a guru or wise man or even an unfrocked priest - as on Sundays he abstains from drinking and people from near-by come to him for counsel and advice. In between these confessional sessions - none especially interesting - the hermit tells the narrator about his arrival at faith, the nuances of his belies (he believes in God but not in hell), about his bonding with a monk. Not sure totally what Gorky was getting at in this story, but the act of writing in the Soviet era about a man who'd absconded from society and from the world of work and who espoused an extreme version of Xtian values and piety, I imagine that would be a real stick in the eye to the authorities, ad that was probably Gorky's intention, even though he could always fall back on his portrayal of holy hermit's bad faith - posing as a wise man and indifferent to the harm and damage he has done to many women, including his daughter.