When the two great writers Gorky and Twain met on 11 April 1906, they inspired a striking headline in The New York Times: GORKY AND TWAIN PLEAD FOR REVOLUTION. Gorky had been internally exiled in Russia for his political beliefs, and was now a prominent member of Lenin’s faction within the Social Democratic Party, on whose behalf he travelled to the US to raise funds.
What was called an ‘American auxiliary movement’ to bring about freedom in Russia was launched at a 5th Avenue dinner in honour of Gorky, at which Gorky himself and Twain were the principal speakers. Said Twain: Let us hope that fighting will be postponed or averted for a while, but if it must come I am most emphatically in sympathy with the movement now on foot in Russia to make that country free’. Responded Gorky: ‘Mark Twain. . . is a man of force. He has always impressed me as a blacksmith who stands at his anvil with the fire burning and strikes hard and hits the mark every time. I come to America expecting to find true and warm sympathisers among the American people. . . Now is the time for the revolution. Now is the time for the overthrow of Czardom. Now! Now! Now! But we need the sinews of war, the blood we will give ourselves. We need money, money, money. I come to you as a beggar that Russia may be free’.
New York’s rich and poor eagerly donated to the Bolshevik cause, but this unlikely idyll of Russo-American friendship quickly ran aground on the rock of American propriety. The New York Times asked Mrs Gorky if she had acted in her husband’s plays. ‘Long ago’ she replied. ‘At present I am just my husband’s wife, nothing else, and I don’t wish to be before the public in any other capacity’. But the American public was shocked to discover that the Gorkys were not legally married. They were married by Russian custom, but that was not good enough for New York hotels. As Twain’s patrician friend William Dean Howells said (from a lofty height): ‘The next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human nature’. All talk of the Russian revolution evaporated in the heat of what was called the ‘domestic interest’ of the situation.
What Happened Next
A few days later came news of the San Francisco earthquake, and scandalised reports on the Gorkys ceased as the papers filled with news of the disaster. Gorky spent the next seven years in comfortable exile (mostly in a Capri villa of the sort later favoured by Gracie Fields) and took revenge on New York by writing a story entitled The City of the Yellow Devil. See also 1900: Winston Churchill and Winston S. Churchill discuss their names; 1920: Lenin disappoints Bertrand Russell