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Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) - born on March 16 (New Style March 28) 1868 - pseudonym Gorky means "bitter", originally Aleksei Maximovich Peshkov |
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Russian short story writer, novelist, autobiographer and
essayist, whose life was deeply interwoven with the tumultuous
revolutionary period of his own country. Maxim Gorky ended his long career as
the preeminent spokesman for culture under the Soviet regime of Joseph
Stalin. He formulated the central principles of Socialist Realism,
which became doctrine in Soviet literature. Laughable even to tears are the long strings of dockyard men, dragging after them tens of thousands of pounds of bread and pitching them into the iron bellies of the vessels in order to earn a few pounds of that very same bread for their own stomachs—people, unfortunately, not made of iron and feeling the pangs of hunger. These hustled, sweated crowds, stupefied by weariness and by the racket and heat, and these powerful machines, made by these selfsame people, basking, sleek and unruffled, in the sunshine—machines which, in the first instance, are set in motion not by steam, but by the muscles and blood of their makers—in such a juxtaposition there was a whole epic of cold and cruel irony. (from 'Chelkash', in Chelkash and Other Stories, translated from the Russian of Maxim Gorky, Alfred A. Knopf, MCMXV, pp. 4-5) Aleksei Peshkov (Maxim Gorky, also written Maksim Gor'kii)
was born in Nizhnii Novgorod, the son of a journeyman upholster. Later
the ancient city was named 'Gorky' in his honour, and in Moscow one of
the leading thoroughfares was named Gorky Street. Gorky lost his
parents at an early age – his father died of cholera and his mother
died of tuberculosis. The scene of his mother, wailing and mourning
over her dead husband, opens his book of memoir, My Childhood:
"Her hair, which was always coiled so neatly above her head, with her
large, gaily trimmed cap, was tumbled about her bare shoulders, fell
over her face, and part of it which remained plaited, trailed across my
father's sleeping face. Although I had been in the room a long time she
had not once looked at me; she could do nothing but dress my father's
hair, sobbing and choking with tears the while." (Ibid., The Century Co., 1915, p. 5) Orphaned at the age of 11, he experienced the deprivations of
a poverty. The most important person in Gorky's life in those years was
his grandmother, whose fondness for literature and compassion for the
downtrodden influenced him deeply. Otherwise his relationships to his
family members were strained, even violent. Gorky stabbed his
stepfather, who regularly beat him. Gorky received little education but
he was endowed with an astonishing memory. He left home at the age of
12, and followed from one profession to another. On a Volga steamer, he
learned to read. In 1883 he was a worker in a biscuit factory, then a
porter, baker's boy, fruit seller, railway employee, clerk to an
advocate, and in 1891 an operative in a salt mill. Later Gorky used
later material from his wandering years in his books. Possibly Gorky wittnessed the pogrom which took place in the
Volga region in the 1880s. His first person account, 'Pogrom,' was
included in the anthology Pomoshch' evreiam, postradavshim ot neurozhaia (1901, Aid to the Jews Suffering from Famine). Gorky's concern for the plight of the Jews differed greatly from the views of Dostoevsky, who had proclaimed the reign of the Jews in The Diary of a Writer:
". . . and what is going to happen in the future is known to the Jews
themselves: their reign, their complete reign is approaching! We are
approaching the complete triumph of ideas before which
sentiments of humanity, thirst for truth, Christian and national
feelings, and even those of national dignity, must bow." (Ibid., translated and annotated by Boris Brasol, with a new introduction by Joseph Frank, 1985, Peregrine Smith, 1985, p. 650) In 1884 Gorky failed
to enter Kazan University, and in the late 1880s he was arrested for
revolutionary activities. At the age of 19 he attempted suicide but
survived when the bullet missed his heart. After travels through Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Crimea
Tiflis (late Tbilisi), Gorky published his first literary piece, 'Makar
Chudra' (1892), a short story. 'Chelkash,' about a harbour
thief, gained an immediate success. He started to contribute to newspapers,
and his first book, the 3-volume Sketches and Stories
(1898-1899), established his reputation as a writer. The gypsies, hobos, and down-and-outs were looked at with
sympathy and optimism. He
also started to analyze more deeply the plight of these people in a
broad, social context. In these early stories Gorky skillfully mixed
romantic exoticism and realism. Occasionally he glorified the rebels
among his outcasts of Russian society. In his early writing career Gorky became friends with Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Vladimir Lenin. Encouraged by Chekhov, he composed his most famous play, The Lower Depths (1902), which took much of the material from his stories of outcasts, but did not have any single predominant figure. It was performed at the Moscow Art Theater under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky. The Lower Depths enjoyed a huge success, and was soon played in Western Europe and the United States. Gorky was literary editor of Zhizn from 1899 and editor of Znanie publishing house in St. Petersburg from 1900. Foma Gordeyev (1899), his first novel, dealt with the new merchat class in Russia. The short story Dvadsat' shest' i odna (1899, Twenty-six Men and a Girl) told about the loss of illusions, a theme which Gorky explored in a number of subsequent tales. The joy in the lives of the bakers in the story is the 16-year old Tanya, who works in the same building. "Generally we spoke about women in such a way, that sometimes it was loathsome to us ourselves to hear our rude, shameless talk. . . . But about Tanya we never let fall an evil word; none of us ever ventured so much as to lay a hand on her, even too free a jest a jest she never heard from us." (Twenty-six Men and a Girl, and Other Stories, translated from the Russian by Emily Jakowleff & Dora B. Montefiore, with an introduction by Edward Garnett, Books for Libraries Press, 1969, p. 8) A handsome ex-soldier, one of the master bakers, boasts of his success with women. He is challenged to seduce Tanya. When Tanya succumbs, she is mocked by the men, who have lost the only bright spot in the darkness. Tanya curses them and walks away, and is never again seen in the basement. Known as a writer with a mission, Gorky was put under close
watch in his hometown. He became involved in a secret printing press
and was
temporarily exiled to Arzamas, central Russia in 1902. In the same year
he was elected to the Russian Academy, but election was declared
invalid by the government and several members of the Academy resigned
in protest.
Because of his political activism, Gorky was constantly in trouble with
the tsarists authorities. He joined the Social Democratic party's left
wing, headed by Lenin. To
raise money to Russian revolutionaries, Gorky
went to the United States in 1906. However, he was compelled to leave
his hotel, not because of his political opinions, but because he
traveled with Mlle. Andreieva, with whom he was not legally married. At
that time, he had not obtained divorce from his first wife, Ekaterina
Pavlovna, with whom he had two children. The American author Mark Twain
expressed his support to Gorky at a dinner party, saying, "My
sympathies are with the Russian revolution, of course. It goes without
saying. I hope it will succeed, and now that I have talked with you I
take heart to believe it will." (Mark Twain's Letters: Vol. II, arranged with comment by Albert Bigelow Paine, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1917, p. 795) In his reply,
Gorky spoke of the importance of financial assistance to the
revolution, that was not over. While staying on Staten Island at the
home of John Martin, a rich
Fabian socialist, he learned that his five-year-old daughter had died
in Russia. During his ill-fated mission to raise funds for the
Bolshevik cause, Gorky
wrote in the Adirondack Mountains greater part of his classic novel, The
Mother,
which came out in 1906-1907. The work was first published in English
and later translated into Russian. Its heroine, Pelageia Nilovna, adopts the cause of socialism in a religious spirit after her son's arrest as a political activist. Pelageia's husband is a drunkard and her only consolation is her religious faith. Pelageia's husband dies, and her son Pavel changes from a thug to socialist role model and starts to bring his revolutionary friends to the house. Pavel is arrested on May day for carrying a forbidden banner. While continuing to believe in Christ's words, she joins revolutionaries, and is betrayed by a police spy. Gorky based her character on a real person, Anna Zalomova, who had travelled the country distributing revolutionary pamphlets after her son had been arrested during a demonstration. The novel, considered the pioneer of socialist realism, was later dramatized by Bertolt Brecht. Vsevolod Pudovkin's film from 1926 largely contributed to the popularity of the novel. After
helping the main organizer of a worker's march to
escape
from Russia, Gorky found himself once again in jail. He also had to
leave Russia, going to Finland and then to Germany. While in Finland,
he met Lenin; it was their second meeting. Over the years, the "author
of the workers" had become rather important in Lenin's life. In 1906
Gorky
settled in Capri, where he stayed until 1913 when the Russian Duma
passed an amnesty act to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Romanov
dynasty. With Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Bogdanov, a prominent
Bolshevik philosopher, he founded in Capri a "Party school" which was
to train "permanent cadres of Party leaders from working class". Gorky
lectured in the history of Russian literature. Lenin strongly opposed
the school and established his own in Paris. At that time Gorky was
more close to Bogdanov, who advocated the revision Marxism along the
lines of a "religion of socialism", than to Lenin, who ridiculed
Bogdanov's theories. Lenin visited his villa in 1908, he fished there and played chess, becoming childishly angry when he lost a game to Bogdanov. Gorky was disgusted by Lenin's smug Marxism and after reading only a few pages from his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism he threw it on the wall. In the controversial novel The Confession (1908), which rapidly fell after the Revolution into relative obscurity, Gorky coined the term "God-building", by which he combined religion with Marxism. In 1913 Gorky returned to Russia, and helped to found the
first Workers' and Peasants' University, the Petrograd Theater, and the
World Literature Publishing House. The first part of his acclaimed
autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood (1913-14),
was followed by In
the World (1916), and My Universities (1922), which was
written in a different style. In these works the author looked through
the observant eyes of Alyosha Peshkov his development and life in a
Volga River town. When the war broke out, Gorky ridiculed the
enthusiastic atmosphere and broke off all relations with his adopted
son, Zinovy Peshkov, who joined the army. First the author also
rejected Lenin's hard-line policy: "The workers must not allow
adventurers and lunatics to hold the proletariat accountable for
shameful, senseless, and bloody crimes; it is not Lenin who will pay
for those crimes but the proletariat itself," he argued in November of
1917. "Lenin's power arrests and
imprisons everyone who does not share his ideas, as the Romanovs' power
used to do." (Gorky by Henri Troyat, translated by Lowell Bair, Crown Publishers, 1989, p. 135) After the Russian revolution
Gorky
enjoyed protected status, although in 1918 his protests against
Bolsheviks dictatorial methods were silenced by Lenin's order. Following
the arrest of Anna Akhmatova's former husband Nikolai Gumilyov in 1921,
Gorky rushed to Moscow to ask Lenin for a pardon for
his old friend. His intervention came too late, Gumilyov had been shot
without trial. Gorky's refusal to help Marina Tsvetaeva severed his friendship with Boris Pasternak. Dissatisfaction with the communist regime and its treatment of
intellectuals lead to Gorky's voluntary exile
during the 1920s. Lenin had also recommended, that he
would feel better abroad. "To an old man any place that's warm is
homeland,"
Gorky famously stated. He spent three years at various German and Czech
spas,
and was editor of Dialogue in Berlin (1923-25). On Capri in the
1920s, Gorky wrote his best novel, The Artamov Business
(1925),
dealing with three generations of a pre-revolutionary merchant family.
Gorky's essay 'V.I.Lenin' was composed immediately after Lenin's death.
The author expressed his great admiration for the Revolution leader and
gave a close-up account of their discussions in Paris and Capri. According to Gorky, Lenin was a kind of mentor to him:
""You're a curious persona," he jested one day. "You seem to be a good
realist in literature, but a romanticist where people are concerned.
You
think everybody is a victim of history, don't you? We know history and
say to the victims: 'overthrow the altars, shatter the
temples, and drive the gods away!' Yet you would like to convince me
that a militant party of the working class is obliged to make the
intellectuals comfortable, first and foremost."" (Lenin and Gorky: Letters, Reminiscences, Articles, an abridged translation of the Russian collection, V. I. Lenin and A. M. Gorky, Letters, Reminiscences, Articles . . . Progress Publishers, 1973 p. 294) In
1924-25 Gorky lived in Sorrento, but persuaded by Stalin,
he returned in 1931 to Russia, where he settled in Moscow with his
wife. As a sign of Gorky's literary stature, the Stalin
renamed the writer's hometown Nizhnii Novgorod in honor of
the author. Gorky founded a number of journals and
became head of the Writers' Union – his photograph in the congress hall
was nearly as large as Stalin's. Gorky's speech at the First Congress
of the Union of Soviet Writers, which opened in Moscow on August17,
1934, lasted about three hours and led to establishing the new doctrine
of "socialist
realism." The term was coined in 1932, possibly even by Stalin himself.
Although
Gorky criticized the bureaucracy of the Writers'
Union, nothing changed. All the liberal proposals of the congress were
very
soon buried when the Great Terror started. Feeling that the Soviet
writers did not enthusiastically support socialism, Stalin took a
personal interest in their lives and career. Gorky's actions and statements before and after his return to Russia are controversial. He wrote positively about the Solovki prison camp in the White Sea, and praised the construction of the White-Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomor) – it has been estimated that over 100,000 prisoners died on the canal site. ". . . the conclusion, it seems to me, is clear: such camps as the Solovki, and labour communes as Bolshevo are necessary," he stated in an article published in the journal Nashi dostizhenia (Our Accomplishments). "This is the way in which the state will quickly attain one of its purposes – the abolition of prisons." (Theatre in the Solovki Prison Camp by Natalia Kuziakina, translated from the Russian by Boris M. Meerovich, Routledge, 2013, p. 90) Gorky's son Maxim Peshkov, a reputed communist, died in 1934, presumably from pneumonia. It has been claimed that he was murdered as a warning to Gorky. A potential danger to the Stalinist regime, Gorky was denied permission to leave the Soviet Union. The Life of Klim Samgin, Gorky's final novel, was about an
intellectual, who wavers between his own ambition and political
commitment. Maxim Gorky died suddenly of pneumonia in his country home, dacha,
near Moscow on June 18, 1936. In some source the cause of death was heart desease. The author was buried in a special niche in
the Kremlin wall. Stalin, who had brought with aides Gorky's urn to Red
Square, started massive Show Trials on the same year. Rumors have lived ever since that Gorky may have been assassinated on Stalin's orders. Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the Soviet secret police during the great purges of 1936-38, made a "confession" at his own trial in 1938, that he had ordered Gorky's death. According to another rumor, Gorky had been administered "heart stimulants in large quantities", and the ultimate culprits were "Rightists and Trotskyites". After KGB literary archives were opened in the 1990s, not much evidence was found to support the wildest theories. Stalin visited the writer twice during his last illness. The most probable conclusion is that Gorky's death was natural. As an essayist Gorky dealt with wide range of subjects. His underlying theme is a passionate humanistic message and political commitment to bolshevism. In Notes on the Bourgeois Mentality he accuses the bourgeoisie of self-absorption and concern only with its own comfort. On the Russian Peasantry sees peasants as resistant to the new social order. City of the Yellow Devil, written in New York, condemns American capitalism. On the other hand, Gorky early opposed Bolsheviks, criticizing their use of violence against their fellow men. Among Gorky's important essays are biographical sketches of such writers as Tolstoy, Leonid Andreev and Anton Chekhov. For further reading: Letopis' zhiznii i tvorchestva A.M. Gor'kogo (1958-59, 3 vols.); Maxim Gorky: Romatic Realist and Conservative Revolutionary by Richard Hare (1962); Gorky: His Literary Development and Influence on Soviet Intellectual Life by Irwin Weil (1966); Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorki by Dan Levin (1967); The Bridge and the Abyss: The Troubled Friendship of Maxim Gorky and V.I.Lenin by Bertram D. Wolfe (1967); Maxim Gorky by Barry P. Scherr (1988); Gorky by Henri Troyat (1989); The Early Fiction of Maxim Gorky by Andrew Barratt (1993); File on Gorky, edited by Cynthia Marsh (1993); The KGB's Literary Archive by Vitaly Shentalinsky (1995); Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography by Tova Yedlin (1999); The Murder of Maxim Gorky: A Secret Execution by Arkadi Vaksberg (2006); 'Gorky, Maxim (Aleksei Maximovich Peshkov)' by Angela Courtney, in The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to the Present, edited by Michael Sollars (2008); The Soviet Writers' Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority under Stalin by Carol Any (2020); 'Maxim Gorky as Spokesman for Proletarian Humanism' by Jutta Scherrer, in Stalin Era Intellectuals: Culture and Stalinism, edited by Elina Viljanen and Vesa Oittinen (2022); Liubovnye dramy Gorʹkogo by Elena Maĭorova (2022) - See also: Isaak Babel, Ivan Bunin. Selected works:
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