Maksim Gorky
Maksim Gorky, also spelled Maxim
Gorki, pseudonym of Aleksey Maksimovich
Peshkov (b. March 16 [March 28, New
Style], 1868, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia—d.
June 14, 1936), Russian short-story
writer and novelist who first attracted
attention with his naturalistic and
sympathetic stories of tramps and social
outcasts and later wrote other stories,
novels, and plays, including his famous
The Lower Depths.
Early life.
Gorky’s earliest years were spent in
Astrakhan, where his father, a former
upholsterer, became a shipping agent.
When the boy was five his father died;
Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to
live with his maternal grandparents, who
brought him up after his mother
remarried. The grandfather was a dyer
whose business deteriorated and who
treated Gorky harshly. From his
grandmother he received most of what
little kindness he experienced as a
child.
Gorky knew the Russian working-class
background intimately, for his
grandfather afforded him only a few
months of formal schooling, sending him
out into the world to earn his living at
the age of eight. His jobs included,
among many others, work as assistant in
a shoemaker’s shop, as errand boy for an
icon painter, and as dishwasher on a
Volga steamer, where the cook introduced
him to reading—soon to become his main
passion in life. Frequently beaten by
his employers, nearly always hungry and
ill clothed, he came to know the seamy
side of Russian life as few other
Russian authors before or since. The
bitterness of these early experiences
later led him to choose the word gorky
(“bitter”) as his pseudonym.
His late adolescence and early
manhood were spent in Kazan, where he
worked as a baker, docker, and night
watchman. There he first learned about
Russian revolutionary ideas from
representatives of the Populist
movement, whose tendency to idealize the
Russian peasant he later rejected.
Oppressed by the misery of his
surroundings, he attempted suicide by
shooting himself. Leaving Kazan at the
age of 21, he became a tramp, doing odd
jobs of all kinds during extensive
wanderings through southern Russia.
First stories.
In Tbilisi (Tiflis) Gorky began to
publish stories in the provincial press,
of which the first was “Makar Chudra”
(1892), followed by a series of similar
wild Romantic legends and allegories of
only documentary interest. But with the
publication of “Chelkash” (1895) in a
leading St. Petersburg journal, he began
a success story as spectacular as any in
the history of Russian literature.
“Chelkash,” one of his outstanding
works, is the story of a colourful
harbour thief in which elements of
Romanticism and realism are mingled. It
began Gorky’s celebrated “tramp period,”
during which he described the social
dregs of Russia. He expressed sympathy
and self-identification with the
strength and determination of the
individual hobo or criminal, characters
previously described more objectively.
“Dvadtsat shest i odna” (1899;
“Twenty-Six Men and a Girl”), describing
the sweated labour conditions in a
bakery, is often regarded as his best
short story. So great was the success of
these works that Gorky’s reputation
quickly soared, and he began to be
spoken of almost as an equal of Leo
Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov.
Plays and novels.
Next Gorky wrote a series of plays
and novels, all less excellent than his
best earlier stories. The first novel,
Foma Gordeyev (1899), illustrates his
admiration for strength of body and will
in the masterful barge owner and rising
capitalist Ignat Gordeyev, who is
contrasted with his relatively feeble
and intellectual son Foma, a “seeker
after the meaning of life,” as are many
of Gorky’s other characters. From this
point, the rise of Russian capitalism
became one of Gorky’s main fictional
interests. Other novels of the period
are Troye (1900; Three of Them), Ispoved
(1908; A Confession), Gorodok Okurov
(1909; “Okurov City”), and Zhizn Matveya
Kozhemyakina (1910; “The Life of Matvey
Kozhemyakin”). These are all to some
extent failures because of Gorky’s
inability to sustain a powerful
narrative, and also because of a
tendency to overload his work with
irrelevant discussions about the meaning
of life. Mat (1906; Mother) is probably
the least successful of the novels, yet
it has considerable interest as Gorky’s
only long work devoted to the Russian
revolutionary movement. It was made into
a notable silent film by Vsevolod
Pudovkin (1926) and dramatized by
Bertolt Brecht in Die Mutter (1930–31).
Gorky also wrote a series of plays, the
most famous of which is Na dne (1902;
The Lower Depths). A dramatic rendering
of the kind of flophouse character that
Gorky had already used so extensively in
his stories, it still enjoys great
success abroad and in Russia. He also
wrote Meshchane (1902; The Petty
Bourgeois, or The Smug Citizen), a play
that glorifies the hero-intellectual who
has revolutionary tendencies but also
that explores the disruptions
revolutionaries can wreak on everyday
life.
Marxist activity.
Between 1899 and 1906 Gorky lived
mainly in St. Petersburg, where he
became a Marxist, supporting the Social
Democratic Party. After the split in
that party in 1903, Gorky went with its
Bolshevik wing. But he was often at odds
with the Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin.
Nor did Gorky ever, formally, become a
member of Lenin’s party, though his
enormous earnings, which he largely gave
to party funds, were one of that
organization’s main sources of income.
In 1901 the Marxist review Zhizn
(“Life”) was suppressed for publishing a
short revolutionary poem by Gorky,
“Pesnya o burevestnike” (“Song of the
Stormy Petrel”). Gorky was arrested but
released shortly afterward and went to
the Crimea, having developed
tuberculosis. In 1902 he was elected a
member of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, but his election was soon
withdrawn for political reasons, an
event that led to the resignations of
Chekhov and the writer V.G. Korolenko
from the academy. Gorky took a prominent
part in the Russian Revolution of 1905,
was arrested in the following year, and
was again quickly released, partly as
the result of protests from abroad. He
toured America in the company of his
mistress, an event that led to his
partial ostracism there and to a
consequent reaction on his part against
the United States as expressed in
stories about New York City, Gorod
zhyoltogo dyavola (1906; “The City of
the Yellow Devil”).
Leo Tolstoy and Gorky
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Anton Chekhov and
Gorky
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Stalin and Gorky
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Exile and revolution.
On leaving Russia in 1906, Gorky
spent seven years as a political exile,
living mainly in his villa on Capri in
Italy. Politically, Gorky was a nuisance
to his fellow Marxists because of his
insistence on remaining independent, but
his great influence was a powerful
asset, which from their point of view
outweighed such minor defects. He
returned to Russia in 1913, and during
World War I he agreed with the
Bolsheviks in opposing Russia’s
participation in the war. He opposed the
Bolshevik seizure of power during the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and went on
to attack the victorious Lenin’s
dictatorial methods in his newspaper
Novaya zhizn (“New Life”) until July
1918, when his protests were silenced by
censorship on Lenin’s orders. Living in
Petrograd, Gorky tried to help those who
were not outright enemies of the Soviet
government. Gorky often assisted
imprisoned scholars and writers, helping
them survive hunger and cold. His
efforts, however, were thwarted by
figures such as Lenin and Grigory
Zinovyev, a close ally of Lenin’s who
was the head of the Petrograd
Bolsheviks. In 1921 Lenin sent Gorky
into exile under the pretext of Gorky’s
needing specialized medical treatment
abroad.
Last period.
In the decade ending in 1923 Gorky’s
greatest masterpiece appeared. This is
the autobiographical trilogy Detstvo
(1913–14; My Childhood), V lyudyakh
(1915–16; In the World), and Moi
universitety (1923; My Universities).
The title of the last volume is sardonic
because Gorky’s only university had been
that of life, and his wish to study at
Kazan University had been frustrated.
This trilogy is one of the finest
autobiographies in Russian. It describes
Gorky’s childhood and early manhood and
reveals him as an acute observer of
detail, with a flair for describing his
own family, his numerous employers, and
a panorama of minor but memorable
figures. The trilogy contains many
messages, which Gorky now tended to
imply rather than preach openly:
protests against motiveless cruelty,
continued emphasis on the importance of
toughness and self-reliance, and musings
on the value of hard work.
Gorky finished his trilogy abroad,
where he also wrote the stories
published in Rasskazy 1922–1924 (1925;
“Stories 1922–24”), which are among his
best work. From 1924 he lived at a villa
in Sorrento, Italy, to which he invited
many Russian artists and writers who
stayed for lengthy periods. Gorky’s
health was poor, and he was
disillusioned by postrevolutionary life
in Russia, but in 1928 he yielded to
pressures to return, and the lavish
official celebration there of his 60th
birthday was beyond anything he could
have expected. In the following year he
returned to the U.S.S.R. permanently and
lived there until his death. His return
coincided with the establishment of
Stalin’s ascendancy, and Gorky became a
prop of Stalinist political orthodoxy.
Correspondence published in the 1990s
between Gorky and Stalin and between
Gorky and Genrikh Yagoda, the head of
the Soviet secret police, shows that
Gorky gradually lost all illusions that
freedom would prevail in the U.S.S.R.,
and he consequently adjusted to the
rules of the new way of life. He was now
more than ever the undisputed leader of
Soviet writers, and, when the Soviet
Writers’ Union was founded in 1934, he
became its first president. At the same
time, he helped to found the literary
method of Socialist Realism, which was
imposed on all Soviet writers and which
obliged them—in effect—to become
outright political propagandists.
Gorky remained active as a writer,
but almost all his later fiction is
concerned with the period before 1917.
In Delo Artamonovykh (1925; The
Artamonov Business), one of his best
novels, he showed his continued interest
in the rise and fall of prerevolutionary
Russian capitalism. From 1925 until the
end of his life, Gorky worked on the
novel Zhizn Klima Samgina (“The Life of
Klim Samgin”). Though he completed four
volumes that appeared between 1927 and
1937 (translated into English as
Bystander, The Magnet, Other Fires, and
The Specter), the novel was to remain
unfinished. It depicts in detail 40
years of Russian life as seen through
the eyes of a man inwardly destroyed by
the events of the decades preceding and
following the turn of the 20th century.
There were also more plays—Yegor
Bulychov i drugiye (1932; “Yegor
Bulychov and Others”) and Dostigayev i
drugiye (1933; “Dostigayev and
Others”)—but the most generally admired
work is a set of reminiscences of
Russian writers—Vospominaniya o Tolstom
(1919; Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich
Tolstoy) and O pisatelyakh (1928; “About
Writers”). The memoir of Tolstoy is so
lively and free from the hagiographic
approach traditional in Russian studies
of their leading authors that it has
sometimes been acclaimed as Gorky’s
masterpiece. Almost equally impressive
is Gorky’s study of Chekhov. He also
wrote pamphlets on topical events and
problems in which he glorified some of
the most brutal aspects of Stalinism.
Some mystery attaches to Gorky’s
death, which occurred suddenly in 1936
while he was under medical treatment.
Whether his death was natural or not is
unknown, but it came to figure in the
trial of Nikolay I. Bukharin and others
in 1938, at which it was claimed that
Gorky had been the victim of an
anti-Soviet plot by the “Bloc of
Rightists and Trotskyites.” The former
police chief Genrikh Yagoda, who was
among the defendants, confessed to
having ordered his death. Some Western
authorities have suggested that Gorky
was done to death on Stalin’s orders,
having finally become sickened by the
excesses of Stalinist Russia, but there
is little evidence of this except that
it was characteristic of Stalin to frame
others on the charge of accomplishing
his own misdeeds.
Viktor Govorov.
A.M.Gorky
Reads on October 11, 1931 to J.V.Stalin, V.M.Molotov and K.E.Voroshilov
His Fairy Tale "A Girl and Death"
Assessment.
After his death Gorky was canonized
as the patron saint of Soviet letters.
His reputation abroad has also remained
high, but it is doubtful whether
posterity will deal with him so kindly.
His success was partly due, both in the
Soviet Union and to a lesser extent
abroad, to political accident. Though
technically of lower-middle-class
origin, he lived in such poverty as a
child and young man that he is often
considered the greatest “proletarian” in
Russian literature. This circumstance,
coinciding with the rise of
working-class movements all over the
world, helped to give Gorky an immense
literary reputation, which his works do
not wholly merit.
Gorky’s literary style, though
gradually improving through the years,
retained its original defects of
excessive striving for effect, of
working on the reader’s nerves by the
piling up of emotive adjectives, and of
tending to overstate. Among Gorky’s
other defects, in addition to his
weakness for philosophical digressions,
is a certain coarseness of emotional
grain. But his eye for physical detail,
his talent for making his characters
live, and his unrivaled knowledge of the
Russian “lower depths” are weighty items
on the credit side. Gorky was the only
Soviet writer whose work embraced the
prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary
period so exhaustively, and, though he
by no means stands with Chekhov,
Tolstoy, and others in the front rank of
Russian writers, he remains one of the
more important literary figures of his
age.
Ronald Francis Hingley
