Maxim Gorky’s brain is kept in a preserving jar at the Moscow Institute of Neurology. It weighs 1,420 grams, and slices of it have been examined under the microscope for traces of genius.
In the late afternoon of 18 June 1936, only a few hours after the passing of ‘this brilliant littérateur and selfless friend of the workingman’, both hemispheres were lifted from his skull and handed over to Soviet science. A white-coated laboratory assistant immediately set about making plaster casts. ‘And so the size and pattern of the grooves and meanders has been preserved for all time,’ Pravda reported.
The same evening, the Kremlin’s official sculptor was called in to make Gorky’s death mask. For more than sixty-five years that relic has been lying on the little table beside his pristinely made-up bed. It stares at you hollow-eyed, the moustache neatly combed, the lips bearing just the hint of a smile.
On orders from Stalin himself, Gorky’s residence on Malaya Nikitskaya was sealed that very day: in accordance with the letter of the Party leader’s instructions, not a single umbrella stand was to be moved.
I had passed the Gorky House many times before without noticing the mosaic flowers on the facade. But now that I had come to satisfy my curiosity about the writer’s home, I paid closer attention. It was a cold and dank October day. The pavement glistened with rain, and with every gust of wind a lime tree scattered bunches of autumn leaves like pamphlets in the air. In a literary guide to the capital, I had read that the Gorky House was built in 1900 under commission from Stepan Ryabushinsky, a God-fearing merchant who, at the tender age of twenty-six, was already among Moscow’s twenty richest inhabitants. An art-lover and collector of religious icons, Ryabushinshky had opted for a villa in art nouveau style, an angular colossus with a minimum of ostentation on the outside.
Beneath a pillared balcony, a cast-iron grille hid the entrance from view. Visitors to the ‘Gorky House Museum’ were shown around to the servants’ entrance, where a creaky wooden landing led to the cloakroom. It was as cold inside as it was out, but the babushka behind the counter insisted that I leave my coat with her – she undoubtedly lived off the tips.
Cardboard arrows pinned to the walls showed the way into the house itself. I entered an impressively high hallway, where a staircase of natural stone cascaded like a frozen waterfall.
‘Young man!’ An attendant sitting beside an electric radiator called me to order. Had I perhaps overlooked the box of rental slippers? I squatted down to tie the felt pads to the soles of my shoes, allowing me to polish the parquet rather than dirty it.
From the staircase I coasted into the parlour. The elegant curves of the wooden door frames were sumptuous, if not quite baroque. Two entwined serpents held a gas lamp aloft.
How, I wondered, could a ‘proletarian writer’ like Gorky have felt at home amid such furnishings?
Opposite the library a set of double doors opened onto the space assigned to Pyotr, Gorky’s private secretary, whose daily labour it was to sort through mountains of incoming and outgoing post. Passing an umbrella stand, I found myself in Gorky’s spacious office. The room was dominated by a huge desk covered with a mat of green felt, a sort of billiard table without the cushions. His spectacles and fountain pen still lay beneath a reading lamp; the coat hanging on the rack was Gorky’s own.
So this was where the restless Alexey Peshkov had found refuge at last. After countless wanderings it was as Maxim Gorky – ‘The Bitter One’ – that he had come home to Moscow, where Stalin brooded over him like a foster-father.
Judging from the photos on the sideboard, the Father of the Country had been a frequent visitor. In one picture he sits beside Gorky on a leather divan which – now behind a barrier of ornamental braid – is still there to be admired. The writer is wearing an arty Uzbek skullcap and plucking at his bristly moustache. Stalin has his legs crossed. His boots gleam.
In a letter to a French writer-friend, Gorky remarked: ‘I am blamed for being on the side of the Bolsheviks, who renounce freedom. Yes, I am on their side, and precisely because I am for the freedom of all honest workers, and against the freedom of parasites and charlatans.’
It was only natural that my own voyage through Soviet letters should begin with Gorky. In his 1948 handbook, Ten Centuries of Russian Literature, Johan Daisne, chief librarian of the city of Ghent, characterised him as ‘the heart and soul of all of Soviet literature’. Gorky was not only president of the powerful Union of Soviet Writers set up by Stalin in the 1930s, but actually held membership card number 1. By means of bursaries and travel grants he kept the nation’s literary talent moving, while at the same time subjecting it to the filter of his criticism. ‘One can rightfully claim that virtually all Soviet writers owed something, often a great deal, sometimes everything, to him […] they were discovered, or trained, by him,’ Daisne writes.
Konstantin Paustovsky spoke of a unique ‘Gorky feeling’: the sensation that the old man was permanently present in his life. He wrote: ‘People like Gorky constitute an epoch of their very own.’
It was shortly before leaving Amsterdam that I had first encountered his work, when a friend handed me a Penguin paperback. ‘Read it on the plane to Moscow,’ he counselled. ‘It will be a good warm-up.’ It was My Childhood, the first volume of Gorky’s autobiography: a book which starts with an unforgettable anecdote about frogs.
Alexey is a mere toddler. His father is lying on the floor of their home in a white robe, his toes spread strangely, copper coins on his eyelids. The boy’s mother sits beside the body, weeping and combing her husband’s hair. That afternoon, clutching his grandmother’s hand (‘she was all black and soft’), Alexey stands in the rain beside an open grave at the riverside. As the casket containing his father, felled by cholera, is lowered, he hears a croaking. There are frogs in the muddy grave; twisting their way out from beneath the pine planks, they hop up against the walls but fall back again and again, along with the clods under which the gravediggers are burying his father’s coffin.
On the way home, the little boy asks his grandmother: ‘Will the frogs be able to get out?’
‘No, they don’t stand a ghost of a chance, God help them!’
The story of the frog burial was the first I read of Gorky. Misery and misfortune follow in such hopeless succession that it is hard for the reader to imagine that this urchin will later have more laurels heaped upon him than any living writer before or since.
When Alexey is eleven, his hysterical, tubercular mother dies too. On the docks of Nizhni Novgorod he supports himself by manhandling cargo and stealing timber. One night in 1887, after losing his job as galley boy on the Volga steamer Goodness, the 19-year-old shoots himself in the chest. Although aimed at his heart, the bullet pierces only his left lung.
In the end, of course, the story of the orphan Alexey Peshkov is one of rags to riches – very much a Russian dream as well. Less than twenty years after attempting suicide he finds himself on the upper deck of the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse as thousands of pennant-waving sympathisers along the Hudson welcome him to the New World. ‘Riot of Enthusiasm Greets Maxim Gorky’ was the next morning’s headline in the New York Times. ‘He is a socialist, not an anarchist, and will raise funds for revolution.’ His reception was given additional lustre with a banquet, and a speech by Mark Twain.
There, on the far side of the Atlantic, Gorky – by then world-famous for his vagabond stories – writes four anti-American pamphlets and a novel, The Mother. According to Daisne, The Mother is ‘a glorious work’, the birth of something entirely new in Russian literature: ‘The introduction of the grass-roots revolutionary, as opposed to the genteel rebel already familiar from Tolstoy.’
In his eyes, Gorky had ‘at last’ achieved an amalgam of realism and idealism: ‘The moaning and groaning is gone; the brisk, heroic tone of the new socialism has dawned.’ Lenin considered The Mother ‘a useful tool’.
In the blurb of my edition, Gorky’s best-read novel was lauded as ‘the unsurpassed document of social idealism’. The book begins like this:
Every day the factory whistle bellowed forth its shrill, roaring, trembling noises into the smoke-begrimed and greasy atmosphere of the working men’s suburb; and obedient to the summons of the power of steam, people poured out of little grey houses into the street. With sombre faces they hastened forward like frightened insects, their muscles stiff from lack of sleep.
The Mother served as model for what would become the Soviet school of writing. It was universally considered to be the first ‘socialist-realist’ novel, the prototype for a genre which Stalin, assisted by Gorky and his Union of Soviet Writers, would impose as a mandatory template in the 1930s.
Unlike My Childhood, The Mother is written in the style of the pamphleteer. The union activist Pavel Vlasov and his heroic mother are both straightforward characters; their struggle against the exploitation of the workers allows room for not a smidgen of doubt.
But what fascinated me most was that Maxim Gorky himself was infinitely more complex than his heroes. He was a self-made writer, an autodidact who had attended primary school for only a few years. In 1892, at the age of twenty-four, he’d lived among the vagrants of southern Russia and recorded their stories – working under the pen name ‘The Bitter One’ from the outset. His raw, unadorned realism was received with overwhelming enthusiasm, considered more authentic and closer to the bone than the socially engaged prose of the tennis-playing Count Tolstoy.
In a Russian society already rife with dissatisfaction with the authoritarian tsar, Gorky’s dialogues in the idiom of the outcast struck a nerve. Intoxicated by his national and international success, he then tried his hand at writing didactic drama and heroic, revolutionary verse such as ‘The Song of the Stormy Petrel’. With his slicked-back hair, pallid features and blue eyes he was becoming a living icon, and before the century was out he had achieved a reputation on a par with the writing physician Anton Chekhov.
Gorky, however, was more impetuous than his contemporaries. Still newly married to Yekaterina, an 18-year-old proofreader at the Samara Gazeta, he fell for the charms of the actress Maria Andreyeva, the leading lady in his play Night Asylum. The play’s premiere at Moscow’s Art Theatre in 1902 caused a scandal. ‘How it saddens us to live in a society that waxes enthusiastic for the stench, depravity and perversity of revolutionary sedition,’ the critic for The Messenger wrote.
From now on, whether he is in the Crimea, in Nizhni Novgorod or Petrograd, Gorky is shadowed by the Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police. In 1905, that tumultuous year of the revolution-that-was-not-to-be, he is the hero of strikers and mutineers. On the very evening of ‘Bloody Sunday’, when the Imperial Guard opens fire on a demonstration outside the Winter Palace and the fleeing factory workers fall in the snow like wounded rabbits, Gorky and his associates issue an appeal to popular revolt. ‘We call upon all citizens of Russia to commence immediately with the struggle against the autocracy, in brotherhood and with iron determination,’ their pamphlet reads. In a letter to Yekaterina, with whom – despite his assorted romances – he continues to be very close, he writes: ‘And so, my beloved, began the Russian Revolution. I extend to you my sincere congratulations. Lives have been lost, but do not let that discourage you… blood is the only thing that can change the colour of history.’
Two days later Gorky is tossed into the dungeons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, opposite the Winter Palace. Scientists and artists all over Europe, from Marie Curie to Auguste Rodin, demand his unconditional release. To relieve some of the pressure, the tsar has him set free on bail, and not long afterwards the enfeebled ruler announces a special amnesty for revolutionaries in exile – self-imposed or otherwise. And so it happens that Gorky in that same year meets with Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on Russian soil. This prematurely balding lawyer, who has assumed the Party name ‘Lenin’, is a hot-tempered fellow with, as Gorky notes, an ‘ironic’ look in his eye. Their first meeting is an uneasy one, but the famous author decides to fund Lenin’s splinter party. From this point on their friendship will be marked by a mutual fondness, but also by irritation.
Gorky’s fund-raising for Lenin’s Bolsheviks takes him as far afield as America. But in February 1917, as soon as the hated tsar is actually deposed, he changes his mind and the intrepid revolutionary begins to distance himself from Lenin and his coterie. In a letter to Yekaterina, he gives vent to his feelings: ‘They are absolute idiots, these Bolsheviks. They walk down the street chanting: “Down with the ten bourgeois ministers.” What do you make of that!? There are only eight of them!’
Russia, now in the throes of a world war, is adrift. In the elegant streets of Petrograd, Gorky witnesses looting, vandalism and a lynching in the market square – ‘animal instincts’ which he believes Lenin encourages in his followers. The Bolsheviks see no reason to rein in the greedy paupers; consequently, everything refined and noble about the imperial city is being laid to waste. In his own newspaper, New Life, Gorky warns against the ‘Asiatic’ barbarism of the Russian peasants, which seems poised to overthrow the civilised ‘European’ culture of the cities. Had Rome not also been laid waste by barbarians? If this continues, he foresees ‘the return of the Middle Ages’, or worse: ‘a civil war’. Of Lenin, Gorky writes: ‘He does not know the people, he has never lived among them; he has only learned from books how to stir them up.’
On 25 October, a few days after the Bolsheviks finally seize power, the headline above Gorky’s main editorial reads: CIVILISATION IN DANGER! To curb the iconoclasm of the masses, he organises nightly vigils by intellectuals at palaces and monuments. But night after night, ‘citizen soldiers’ with fixed bayonets raid the courtyards of the rich. To the annoyance of the militiamen in their red armbands, Gorky takes in dozens of refugees: writers and poets fallen from favour, a strikingly beautiful baroness by the name of Benckendorff, even a grand duke actually related to the Romanovs.
Gorky launches broadsides at Lenin and Trotsky, calling them ‘firebrands carrying out a cruel experiment on the Russian people’.
‘Gorky welcomes the Revolution,’ Trotsky retorts, ‘like the chicken-hearted curator of an art museum.’
Gorky’s next volley, in his newspaper column: ‘Lenin and Trotsky have not the faintest idea what freedom is.’
Trotsky, livid now: ‘He is a counter-revolutionary.’
Alienated from his political associates, the popular author feels like a loner and an outcast – just like in the old days. The humanist who once, weeping with shame, pressed a banknote into the hand of a youthful prostitute, wonders aloud whether he is rapidly descending into misanthropy. ‘I should set up my own party,’ he writes to Yekaterina in March 1918. ‘But I wouldn’t know what to call it. It’s a party with only one member: me.’
That month Trotsky signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans, but peace immediately gives way to another war: this time within Russia, between the Reds and the Whites. Wasting no time, the Bolsheviks immediately impose the rule of ‘wartime communism’: stern decrees place factories under workers’ control, while villages are to be run by ‘committees of the poor’. Chaos and scarcity become pandemic, and the White armies make advances. During the famine in Petrograd and other major cities, Gorky is placed in charge of a government publishing house and a cultural foundation. For 15-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich he arranges ‘artistic relief’, thereby allowing the boy to stay on at the conservatory. He helps Isaak Babel – wearing his ‘foreign-made suit that fits him like a bag of potatoes’ – to survive with a ‘literary travel grant’, while gaunt Professor Pavlov, winner of the Nobel Prize for his research into conditioned reflexes, receives supplementary ‘academic rations’.
Gorky himself, however, continues to cross swords with suspicious People’s Commissioners, and meets growing bureaucratic obstruction. In 1921, when reports come in that the poet Alexander Blok desperately needs to travel to Finland for medical care (‘He has scurvy; if he remains here he will surely die’) but has been refused a visa, Gorky travels to Moscow to complain personally to Lenin. On his way back to Petrograd with the exit visa, however, he hears that Blok has died a few days earlier. In his anger, Gorky incautiously remarks that Lenin is a fantasiser, ‘a thinking guillotine’. However unassailable the writer imagines himself to be, such criticism cannot go unchecked.
Lenin casts about for appropriate measures. Finally he approaches Yekaterina, with the observation that her husband is a particularly highly strung individual. ‘He is, after all, an artist… Wouldn’t it be better for him to leave us for a time, to undergo treatment and find a little rest, and to view the situation anew from some distance?’
And indeed, Gorky is in sad shape. His perforated lung causes him increasing discomfort, he rattles and coughs incessantly. Even the young Babel is struck by the ‘sparsity of his person’. In Yekaterina’s presence, Lenin scolds him (‘You’re spitting blood and you still haven’t left!’) and exhorts him to find a cure: ‘Go abroad, to Italy or Davos.’ Gorky will always look back on that as a threat: ‘If you don’t go, we’ll throw you out of the country.’
Gorky spends most of the 1920s with a view of a smoking Vesuvius. He has been diagnosed as tubercular, and the Mediterranean climate, in combination with camphor injections, keeps his chest pains tolerable. His books, perennial bestsellers throughout Europe, relieve him of all financial cares. After a brief stay at a German sanatorium, he moves – without Yekaterina, but with a considerable entourage – to an shaded villa in Sorrento, not far from Naples.
Guests and visitors alike are struck by how relaxed Gorky seems. He does not dress smartly as the Italians do, but casually, like a visitor to the seaside. He appears more often in a vest than in a dinner jacket and, though punctual as ever, the writer rarely becomes wound up. Gorky (nicknamed ‘Juka’) is the paterfamilias, surrounded by his mistress ‘Titka’ (in full: Baroness Maria Benckendorff-Budberg), his son Maxim, daughter-in-law Nadezhda, his granddaughters Marfa and Darya, and Pyotr, his personal secretary.
Gorky is trying to buckle down to an epic novel (The Life of Klim Samgin) about the role of the Russian intelligentsia in the build-up to the Revolution. He writes in longhand, with frantic strokes of the pen, never using a typewriter, and chain-smoking cigarettes. He also corresponds with Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells, Knut Hamsun, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland and other kindred spirits. The incoming post is translated into Russian in the dining room – on the same table where Titka serves pelmeni, Russian ravioli, in the afternoon.
Though vilified by the Russian émigré community, Gorky himself is the archetypal Russian in exile, tossed to and fro between nostalgia and nausea. In a Paris publication of the ‘White’ press he reads: ‘And which post did Maxim Gorky occupy under the Bolsheviks? Exactly, yes, that of chief corruptor of the intelligentsia.’ But the ‘Reds’ lambast him regularly as well. What galls him most is a comment by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the much-lauded Soviet poet whose Left Front literary movement is now rapidly gaining popularity. Mayakovsky has proven to be an innovator, giving form to proletarian art by fusing Futurism with a great awe for the achievements of Communism. Concerning Gorky, he says: ‘He is a corpse. Of no value to Russian literature whatsoever.’
But Mayakovsky is mistaken. When, after a drawn-out paralysis, Lenin dies in January 1924 and is laid to rest like a Soviet saint in Red Square, it is Gorky’s obituary that impresses most. ‘Lenin’s superhuman will has not vanished from the face of the earth,’ he writes in Pravda. ‘It has entered into the people.’
Joseph Stalin, the Georgian cobbler’s son who has connived his way to power, refuses to write Gorky off. The Kremlin’s new strategist has longer-term plans for this particular writer. When he sees a political cartoon in which Gorky is depicted as the Baron of Sorrento, he calls the cartoonist a ‘scoundrel’. In his view, Gorky has a role to play as the figurehead and watchdog of Soviet literature – on condition that he can be seduced into returning to the motherland. What that requires, Stalin feels, is a covert operation. He summons Comrade Genrikh Yagoda, head of his secret police, and assigns him the task of luring Gorky back to Moscow.
By means of douceurs (Gorky suddenly receives lavish advances on as-yet-unpublished books) and an avalanche of fan mail (personally penned by a select group of secret service men), Yagoda begins reeling in his prey. Gorky is swamped with letters from ‘simple’ readers at factories and farms, sometimes containing only a single exclamation: ‘How can you prefer fascist Italy to our socialist Russia?’
Always possessed of a strong nostalgic bent, Gorky begins to adopt an increasingly mild view of the Soviet regime. But when he hears that Lenin’s widow is drafting an index of banned books, including not only the Bible and the Koran but also the works of Plato, Dante and Tolstoy, he threatens to renounce his Soviet citizenship. ‘I am a bad Marxist,’ he writes to a colleague in Moscow in September 1927. ‘I am congenitally incapable of understanding how one can idealise the masses, a nation or a class.’ Copies of Gorky’s letters are filed away chronologically in his dossier at the Lubyanka, the secret police headquarters in Moscow. Indeed, the fact that Gorky smelled a rat, that he suspected that some of his Russian fan letters were forgeries, can be seen in one such letter written six months later. In it he relates that he has been named honorary president of a home for ‘socially hazardous children’ somewhere in the Ukraine. ‘The thing is, though, I write to those children and in reply to each of my letters I receive twenty-two in return. That is precisely the number of supervisors of the various commissariats. Remarkable, isn’t it?’
But curiosity and homesickness win out, and shortly after his sixtieth birthday Gorky leaves to visit his native country. On 20 May 1928 he boards the train at Naples, off to see what has become of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during his absence.
*
The square in front of Belorussky Station – where today a noisy stream of cars squeezes its way past the granite statue of Gorky – is packed from the early morning hours. Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites have come out to see with their own eyes the return of the Soviet Union’s prodigal son. The masses have forgiven him, the People’s Commissariat for Culture proclaims, for his seven years of self-imposed exile. In fact: ‘The triumphant proletariat enveloped him ecstatically in a gigantic embrace.’ With total disregard for the man’s feeble constitution, the crowd lifts Gorky to its shoulders, shakes him and pounds him on the back like a championship wrestler. To Yekaterina in Nizhni Novgorod he writes: ‘When I go out I have to wear make-up and a false beard; that’s the only way for me to see anything of Moscow.’
Socialists and non-socialists around the world wait with bated breath for news of Gorky’s reconnaissance mission. From him they hope to hear whether the Soviet government is truly worthy of allegiance. The best indicator, and at the same time that shrouded in greatest controversy, is the question: how does the revolutionary regime treat its dissenters, its apostates and its opponents?
Russian émigrés in Paris and the northern Chinese city of Harbin insist that the Bolsheviks have imposed a reign of terror. These expatriates have been living out of their steamer trunks for years, fuming with impatience for the moment when their seized and plundered possessions will be returned to them. In 1925, the collective émigré community had published an exposé dealing with the secret police under the ruthless leadership of ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzhinsky: In the Talons of the Cheka. Included in it was a letter from a White Guard member banished to the subarctic Solovet-sky Islands in 1921: ‘We, eight hundred men, are now 250 versts from Arkhangelsk. We have nothing to eat, we are cold, and we do not believe that any of us will return from here alive. If at all possible, please send help. Farewell. Your son, E.’
Nobody at this point denies that the archipelago had served during the civil war as a dumping ground for human cargo, a place where prisoners of war were set ashore without rations. But apologists claim that in the 1920s this place of banishment just below the Arctic Circle was transformed into a humane, self-supporting ‘re-education facility’. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, contemporary communists in Europe and America emphasise, transgressors receive fairer treatment than the victims of ‘class justice’ in the capitalist world. The comrades run a respectable penal system: they actually go to the trouble of ‘re-educating’ the anti-social, to make of them better, less selfish individuals.
‘Brainwashing’ is their opponents’ verdict. Among these facilities, the Special Purpose Camp (SLON) on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea is the most controversial. The convicts, most of them political prisoners, have been sent here for violating the Soviet constitution, which forbids agitation against the Soviet system, and will serve an average sentence of three years’ ‘rehabilitation’. They include artists and intellectuals but also anarchists, obscurantists and monarchists.
Then, the unexpected happens: during a second tour of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1929, Stalin grants Gorky, as the first and only outsider, permission to inspect the Special Purpose Camp. He arrives one sunny day in June, dressed in a beige suit. Standing beside him at the rail of the steamship Gleb Boky is a young woman in leather trousers: his daughter-in-law, Nadezhda.
While the waters are navigable, a passenger ship leaves for the Solovetsky Islands each day from behind the fish market at Belo-morsk. One morning in the autumn of 2000 I climbed its gangplank in the company of a noisy group of Muscovites who had signed up with a travel agency for ‘Gulag tourism’. An offshore wind had blown up, but the White Sea remained calm. Our ferry listed a few degrees nonetheless, a defect for which the captain compensated by reclining against the wall of his wheelhouse. Despite the Muscovites’ toasts he proved man enough to stay on course, and three hours later there was land in sight.
The hermitage of Solovetsky was the first object visible from a distance. I was already familiar with its contours, albeit in stylised form: the monastery is depicted in purple ink on the new 500-rouble note. The fortifications of the citadel and the onion-shaped steeples rising from it have become a symbol in post-Communist Russia. This, for six centuries, was the prime place of pilgrimage for Russian Orthodox penitents. At the same time, because of its remoteness, it served as a refuge for monks fallen from grace, a sanctuary ringed each winter by a ruff of drifting ice and covered by a blanket of snow.
As soon as we put ashore at Prosperity Bay, my travelling companions, cameras purring and clicking, stormed the massive walls of the monastery. I decided to explore the island first. Leaving the dock and the fishing cutters behind, I made my way past a rescue service supply shed and a sandy knoll covered in beach grass, dotted with meteorological equipment. Just past the village centre the asphalt came to an abrupt end; the island’s 1,340 inhabitants, it seemed, chose to live huddled together.
As I stepped onto the sandy path I was overtaken by a motorcycle and sidecar; ‘Ural’ was the make. The driver pointed to the vacant sidecar and offered his services as taxi driver. Above the roar I asked whether he could take me to the Hill of Axes. He nodded, and I climbed in.
On my tourist map, the Hill of Axes – the highest point of all six of the Solovetsky Islands – had been bestowed with two stars: one for ‘picturesque views’, the other for ‘historical monument’.
After half an hour’s rattling along beside a monotonous row of trees, Igor – for that was the driver’s name – dropped me at the foot of a hill covered in pine and maple. He charged by the hour, he said; it was up to me how long I stuck it out up there.
Breathing in the piny air, I followed a spiral path that wound its way around the hillside like something from the Brothers Grimm. Halfway through this climb, Gorky and his hosts had paused for a moment; little else is known about his three-day visit to Solovki, but there is a photo of him climbing the Hill of Axes. We see the writer leaning on his walking stick, shoulders hunched. One of the camp guards is carrying a spray of spring blossoms. The guard is smiling.
Around the bend the maples parted, and a recently replastered house of God loomed up: the Church of the Beheading. It was a square little building with high windows. Sitting on top of the onion-shaped roof I saw a Soviet-era beacon. I thought that by now I had seen the whole gamut of Bolshevik methods for desecrating churches, synagogues and mosques. Common uses were as granary or stable (in the countryside), or as planetarium or museum of atheism (in the cities). I also knew of tabernacles that served as shoe factories, storage places for insecticides, police stations, gyms or prisons. A church turned lighthouse, however, was a new one on me.
In a little meadow higher than the treetops, a goat stood ruminating. Her beard swayed as rhythmically as a metronome as she stared unblinkingly across a landscape of glittering, pine-fringed lakes with the White Sea in the distance. In my guidebook I had read that the Solovetsky Islands (with a combined area of 300 square kilometres) contain no fewer than 562 freshwater lakes, ‘which, due to their sheltered location, form a favourite stopover for countless migratory birds’.
It was hard to picture the Church of the Beheading ever being used as isolation unit and torture chamber. Accounts of horror from the time of the SLON, however, said that jazz musicians, Esperantists, satirists and all manner of other ‘enemies of the people’ had been tortured to death on this consecrated ground. On the hill’s eastern slope, the story went, they were lashed to tree trunks and rolled down a flight of 365 steps.
After some searching I at last found the steps: a ramshackle wooden structure now half rotted away. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK a sign warned. Just as I was about to test the strength of the old handrail, I heard footsteps on the dark soil behind me. A fuzzy figure was approaching: loose hairs waving from a greyish bun, a woollen shawl draped over the shoulders, knitted leg warmers. This, without a doubt, was the lighthouse-keeper.
I wished her a good day and asked whether there was any truth to the claim that prisoners had been tied to logs and rolled down these steps.
‘That’s what they say, yes.’
‘And who – if I may ask – are “they”?’
The lighthouse-keeper uprooted the pin to which her goat was tethered and pushed it back into the ground with her heel a few metres further away. ‘As far as I know, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He wrote about it.’
‘But the handrails? Wouldn’t a log get caught in them?’
‘Yes, but they say those were added later.’
‘“They”?’
‘Alexander Solzhenitsyn.’ The lighthouse-keeper stood up straight, one hand clutching her lower back. ‘Anything else you’d like to know?’
I shook my head and thanked her.
‘Then that will be six roubles.’
‘Six roubles?’
‘Admission.’
Forty years after the fact, in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn described Gorky’s trip to Solovki as a tragic event. In accordance with good Russian tradition, he said, the writer had been led around a ‘Potemkin village’, a carefully constructed facade. The term itself dates from 1787, the year in which Catherine the Great’s former lover, Count Potemkin, erected clapboard facades along the road to make the passing tsarina think that her coach was travelling through prosperous territories.
Gorky, Solzhenitsyn wrote, had been shown a Potemkin penal colony. In the little meadow behind the Church of the Beheading, he reported, the writer had found prisoners leafing cosily through the Party newspaper. Weeks before the arrival of the distinguished guest, the camp command was abuzz; the sickbay had to be disinfected, the prisoners received new uniforms, and an ‘allée’ of hastily planted silver firs was laid out. The welcome banquet was to feature herring and spring onions. Everything, in other words, was done to ensure that Gorky and his daughter-in-law would see nothing of the camp’s real regime. The guards, however, had underestimated the convicts’ ingenuity; when the newspapers were passed out to them, they held them upside down as a sign of protest. ‘Gorky walked over to one of them and, without a word, turned the newspaper the right way up,’ Solzhenitsyn records. On his tour of inspection he had failed to ask critical questions, and after his visit – in the guestbook specially bound for the occasion – he praised the camp command: ‘I am incapable of expressing my impressions in the space of a few words. I have no desire – and it would, in fact, be an embarrassment – to fall back on clichés with which to praise the keen-eyed and dauntless guardians of the Revolution, who are at the same time bold creators of culture.’
Reason enough perhaps for Solzhenitsyn to condemn ‘Gorky’s dismal behaviour’ unconditionally. But had the writer, I wondered, actually turned such a blind eye? His critical capacities would no doubt have been dulled by his eagerness to discover that Solovki was a ‘humane prison island’. But, on the other hand, how could Solzhenitsyn be so sure? Gorky’s inspection took place two decades before his own sojourn in the Gulag. Was it not possible that, in 1929, the Soviet penitentiary system had yet to degenerate into cruelty?
In the sidecar on the way back I asked Igor what I had hoped to ask the lighthouse-keeper: to what did the Church of the Beheading owe its name?
A smile slid across his tense features. Making a chop-chop motion with his free hand, he shouted: ‘John the Baptist! Get it?’
Later that afternoon, from the monastery courtyard, I saw the Muscovites again. They were up in the highest ramparts, their video cameras panning the grounds. Below, the nuns were busily hoeing the gardens and never looked up. My travelling companions were being shown around by Oleg Filipov, a St Petersburg historian and ‘Gulag expert’ who had come to live at the Solovetsky monastery. Filipov was a shy, serious man. Whenever he spoke his spectacles slid down the bridge of his nose, and he had developed the habit of pushing them back up with lightning speed. The guide led us to a dungeon, where a monk in a long robe was standing behind an antique cash register. ‘Admission: 8 roubles. Former prisoners and next of kin: NO CHARGE’ was written in magic marker on a piece of cardboard.
Behind the iron-studded door was an exhibition describing the history of the SLON era. Hanging on the wall of the dimly lit space was a photograph of workers busily replacing the orthodox crosses on the steeples with the five-pointed star. Oleg Filipov told us that the monks had at first been left alone, allowed to pray and meditate in peace as long as they refrained from singing or the ringing of bells.
In the 1920s, the convicts too were allowed a certain degree of intellectual freedom. The actors among them set up a theatre company (the refectory beside the Church of the Transfiguration was converted into an auditorium with 750 seats) and musicians organised a chamber orchestra (with fifteen members and a conductor). The Special Purpose Camp even had its own newspaper, the Solovki Crocodile, edited and printed by the prisoners themselves.
I assumed there had been an obvious ‘Potemkin’ element to the prisoners’ creative endeavours. But it turned out I was wrong. Without a moment’s hesitation, Filipov rattled off the scientific achievements of the SLON population. The agronomists, he said, had experimented with improving plant strains in the monastery garden. Meteorologists had studied the Northern Lights, ornithologists the islands’ rich bird population. In addition to the thirty academic studies completed at Solovki, the convicted theologian Pavel Florensky also discovered how to obtain iodine from agar agar, a gelatinous seaweed extract. ‘Thanks to Father Florensky, there is an agar agar factory on the island to this very day,’ Filipov said.
But what about the atrocities, I asked.
‘They happened,’ the guide remarked, ‘but only later. It may seem to you like a paradox: music, theatre, scientific research, and then suddenly wham! Torture, executions… But that’s how it went with you in Germany, too. After all, didn’t the land of Heine and Goethe produce Hitler as well?’
I was about to object that I was not a German, but before I could speak the horseshoe of visitors moved to a display case dedicated to Maxim Gorky, containing dog-eared copies of his books taken from the SLON library and a pen-and-ink portrait in which he looked irritated.
Our guide read aloud a line by Gorky from the magazine Our Achievements: ‘And that is why there can be but one, undeniable conclusion: camps like that on Solovki are necessary.’ The sentence elicited a chorus of hisses from the Muscovites.
What I wanted to know was whether Gorky had actually been misled in June 1929. Was there any truth to the anecdote about the upside-down newspapers behind the Church of the Beheading? Filipov shoved his spectacles back in place. ‘That’s apocryphal. Solzhenitsyn wrote that.’
I asked him about the earliest documented tortures and executions.
‘Patience, have patience,’ the guide said. ‘We’re getting to that. Three months after Gorky’s visit, a former White Army colonel organised an escape. It failed, and in retaliation he and thirty-three of his fellow prisoners were executed in October 1929.’
After Gorky’s return to Sorrento from his special tour of Solovki, Stalin – by way of a final charm offensive – begins a personal correspondence with the writer. In his own handwriting, the Soviet leader keeps him up to date on the collectivisation of agricultural land, but is careful to omit details about the mass executions of kulaks (farmers possessing more than two cows, or a zinc roof) and the rapid spread of famine. He has progress reports sent to Italy concerning the acceleration of production under the First Five-Year Plan, with separate dossiers ‘dealing with saboteurs within the highest echelons of the engineering world’, including transcripts of interrogations in which the suspects admit their guilt. Via secret-police chief Yagoda, Gorky’s private secretary receives four thousand dollars in cash for the purchase of a car.
On his eventual return to Moscow the following spring, Gorky finds waiting for him the millionaire’s mansion on Malaya Nikitskaya, abandoned by business tycoon Stepan Ryabushinsky when fleeing the Bolsheviks. Like a loving father, Stalin comes to visit Gorky regularly. On one of those occasions Gorky reads aloud his poem ‘A Girl and Death’, which moves his guest to seize the book of poems and scribble across the page: ‘Better than Goethe’s Faust! (Love conquers Death) J. Stalin.’
Meanwhile, Gorky’s classics such as Night Asylum become part of the standard Russian canon. On orders from the authorities, The Mother is translated into sixty-one languages, including those of the Yakuts and Kalmuks, Soviet minorities who had had no written language before the Revolution. Stalin personally awards to Gorky the country’s highest civilian decoration – the Order of Lenin – and makes him a member of the Academy of Sciences. The Cinematographic Service is commissioned to make the film Our Gorky, while a state commission begins preparations for the national Gorky festival in 1932, in honour of the fortieth anniversary of his literary debut. During those celebrations the public gardens along the Moskva are also given a new name: ‘Gorky Park’. The Moscow Literature Institute is rechristened after him as well, as is a six-engined aeroplane, a double-decked Volga pleasure cruiser and a mountain in Central Asia. The most prestigious street in Moscow, Tverskaya, is renamed in his honor, and hundreds of headmasters, factory supervisors and chairmen of collective farms have busts of Gorky installed at their gates to fulfil their civic duty of participating in the nationwide Gorky homage.
Only the rechristening of the Moscow Art Theatre elicits cautious protest from the editor-in-chief of Izvestia, the government mouthpiece on literary policy. ‘But after all, Comrade Stalin, the Art Theatre is more closely allied with Anton Chekhov.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Stalin replies. ‘Gorky is a vain man. We must bind him to the Party with cables of steel.’
By way of a bonus, he decrees that the name of the city of Nizhni Novgorod be changed to Gorky in all forthcoming editions of the country’s maps and atlases.
Somewhat cowed by this cult of personality, Gorky tells a friend: ‘Today, for the first time, I wrote “Gorky” on an envelope, rather than “Nizhni Novgorod”. All in all, it is embarrassing and unpleasant.’
In April 1932, just as Gorky decides to settle in Moscow for good, Stalin disbands all existing writers’ clubs. ‘An end must be put to sectarianism in letters,’ he tells the Politburo. ‘The social content of our literature must be lifted to a higher plane.’ The precise implementation of the decree ‘Concerning the Restructuring of Literary Organisations’ he leaves to Maxim Gorky himself.
Meanwhile, on his own initiative, Gorky had already begun searching for a label that would reflect the common, revolutionary character of Soviet writing. In 1928 he had urged Moscow’s writers’ guild to work harmoniously in the socialist spirit, by linking realism (read: the changing Soviet reality) with the prospect of a beckoning future. ‘Romantic realism’ the new movement was dubbed, but it did not catch on. The younger generation of Soviet writers viewed Gorky as a relative outsider who had missed out on the experimental years of the 1920s. If anyone among them commanded extreme respect, it was Vladimir Mayakovsky. This poet-communist, less than half Gorky’s age, considered it his calling to create a socialist art form that was, by definition, future-oriented and therefore radically innovative. Like a rebellious evangelist (he became known as ‘the Thirteenth Apostle’), he preached a gospel of revolution, a hundred times fresher and more progressive than Gorky in both form and style. ‘On everything that has gone before, I stamp Nihil,’ the impassioned Mayakovsky had cried out in a poem in 1914.
His verses appeal to the People’s Commissar for Culture, but not to the Party-faithful Association of Proletarian Writers. A feud with jealous colleagues, combined with an impossible love for the 18-year-old daughter of a Parisian émigré, hastens Mayakvosky’s demise. In 1929 he asks permission to travel to France to marry her but is denied an exit visa. Six months later, after completing a final ode to the Five-Year Plan, Mayakovsky puts a bullet through his heart. ‘It’s not the best way,’ he writes in his suicide note. ‘I don’t recommend it to others.’
The poet receives the posthumous gift of his own metro station and his own mountain, Mayakovsky Peak (6,095 metres), in the Pamirs.
With his death the Soviet Union loses its literary Pole Star – clearing the way for Gorky to assume that role himself. Despite his ailing lungs, he embarks on a flurry of activity in his Moscow merchant’s home: in the mornings he works on his novel The Life of Klim Samgin, in the afternoon he delivers speeches to young writers, and in the evening he dictates appeals to Stalin. The favours sought range from a subscription to a Western biology journal for the Lenin Library, to clemency for ‘unjustly criticised talent’.
Beside these occupations, Gorky applies himself to the task entrusted to him: the streamlining of Soviet literary culture. He hopes to introduce a new aesthetic marked by the virtues of simplicity and clarity and tailored to fit a republic of farmers and workers. ‘The more comprehensible a work of art, the more elevated it is,’ runs his credo. When colleagues use unfamiliar regionalisms, he reprimands them: ‘You are diminishing, in trite fashion, the scope of your creation.’ A book must edify; the Soviet Union has no need of Hollywood-style entertainment.
On 26 October 1932, dozens of writers present in Moscow at that moment are unexpectedly summoned to his residence. They are not told why, or the names of the other guests; all that is impressed upon them is that it would be unwise not to attend.
Gorky welcomes his guests at the foot of the cascading staircase; Pyotr takes their coats and shows them to the dining room. The writers are seated in a jumble of chairs to the right of the long table. When at last everyone is present, the door opens again and Stalin walks in. As always, the Georgian is wearing knee-high boots and a dark-green tunic. With a scraping and bumping of chairs the writers and poets rise, but Stalin gestures that there is no need for that. Those encountering the ‘Man of Steel’ for the first time are struck by his air of absolute authority. The accompanying Politburo members – Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich – move as stiffly as footmen.
‘There, on the left side, that’s where Gorky was sitting.’ A museum attendant on felt slippers had slid up silently beside me. She nodded to indicate a place beside the window, set with a plain dish, a napkin and a cup. Our knees were up against the plush rope barrier, the sideline from which we could view the historic room. No changes had been made in the intervening decades; the room still sported the same elegant wainscoting, the same artfully laid parquet.
On that evening in 1932, however, the table is loaded with wine, vodka and zakuski – Russian hors d’oeuvres. The Bechstein grand piano, which takes up easily a quarter of the room, has been slid against the wall. The curtains are drawn, the tapers in the candelabra lit. Among the chosen forty are future Nobel Prize laureate Mikhail Sholokhov (Virgin Soil Upturned, The Silent Don) and loyalists such as Fyodor Gladkov (Cement) and Valentin Katayev (Time, Forward!). Conspicuous by their absence are Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and other, less pliable spirits.
By drawing on the various writers’ memoirs, the evening’s events can be reconstructed with a certain degree of accuracy. In his word of welcome Gorky notes that the literature of the Soviet Union would, by now, fill a good-sized library. ‘Within that there are good books, but also bad ones.’ It is high time, he feels, for consultation concerning the creation of a Soviet literature that soars to the highest level, ‘a literature worthy of the approaching fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution’.
After the first vodka toast, Gorky invites the writers to take the floor. What follows is a number of speeches in carefully couched terms, in which the guests emphasise the importance of writers not withdrawing to ivory towers. Uncertain what is expected of them, the speakers weigh each word. They raise their toasts without improvisation, in the safe, ironclad formulas of tradition, to the health and limitless wisdom of their leader.
After this floundering start, Stalin, who has so far listened in silence as he puffs at his pipe, takes command. ‘Our tanks are worthless,’ he begins, ‘if the souls who must steer them are made of clay. This is why I say: the production of souls is more important than that of tanks…’
Here he pauses briefly, probably in response to looks of incomprehension. What is he trying to say?
Stalin goes on: ‘Someone here has noted that writers must not sit still, that they must be familiar with the ways of life in their own country. Man is reshaped by life itself, and those of you here must assist in reshaping his soul. That is what is important, the production of human souls. And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, to the engineers of the soul.’
The crystal goblets are emptied in one, and suddenly the tension has left the air. The writer Alexander Fadayev urges young Sholokhov to sing a song. Barely has he finished the first verse when applause breaks out, and one of the poets proposes: ‘Let us drink to the health of Comrade Stalin!’
But then, as the glasses are being refilled, Georgi Nikiforov jumps to his feet. ‘I’m sick and tired of it!’ he shouts, slurring his words. ‘This evening we have already toasted Comrade Stalin’s health one million, one hundred and seventy-four thousand times. I bet he’s sick of it, too.’
Nikiforov’s words cause everyone to freeze; the hubbub gives way to uneasy silence.
Then Stalin stands up and extends his hand. ‘Comrade,’ he says, pointing at the reckless writer. ‘You are right. Thank you very much. I am indeed sick and tired of it.’