ALEXEI MAXIMOVICH PESHKOV, better known by his pen-name, Maxim Gorky, was born in 1868 in the City of Nizhny Novgorod, now renamed after him. During his life Gorky – significantly meaning ‘bitter’ – acquired a greater reputation than any other Russian writer, and more copies of his works are sold today in Soviet Russia than of even Tolstoy’s or Dostoyevsky’s. He is the great, central figure in twentieth-century Russian literature, and has become a Soviet ‘institution’, his authority and reputation unassailable. My Childhood is amongst his finest works, and is one of the most moving descriptions of boyhood ever written.
Gorky’s early writings were like a fresh current of air in the stuffy literary atmosphere which prevailed at the turn of the century. His first stories, such as Makar Chudra (1892) and Chelkash (1895), are romanticized tales of gipsies, legendary heroes and wandering fishermen. Later he turned to tramps, social outcasts and the men who ‘dwell along the fringe’. These stories were rapturously welcomed by a reading public whose appetite was somewhat jaded by the humdrum, pedestrian, naturalistic writings of the Populist School, and which was tiring even of the delicate and subtle nuances of Chekhov. With the rise of industry, writers were now describing town life instead of vegetable existence in the country. Gorky took as his subject downtrodden tramps and factory workers and the terrible squalor in which they lived. With this preoccupation with the common man, the town artisan, it was natural that Gorky should also become the great spokesman for the rising industrial proletariat and, for a major part of his life, a leading figure in the revolutionary movement, championing the cause, and often getting himself into serious trouble when he spoke out strongly against its excesses.
Few writers can have had such a wide experience of life – and this was indeed life in the raw. Childhood, which describes the first eight years of the author’s life, begins with the funeral of Gorky’s father, who had been a paperhanger and upholsterer, and had contracted cholera while working in Astrakhan. He had been unable to bear life with the mercenary, quarrelsome and depraved Kashirins (his wife’s family), and had taken his wife and small son Maxim away from their terrible house in Nizhny. After his father’s death Gorky returned with his mother and grandmother to his maternal grandfather’s house, for much of the time a veritable living hell, where, in Gorky’s words, everyone was ‘choked by a fog of mutual hostility’. His grandfather had once been a fairly prosperous barge-hauler and had subsequently set up some dye-works in Nizhny. But he went bankrupt, rashly lending some money which was never returned. The young, impressionable Gorky was initiated into this world of cruelty, greed and bestiality at the tender age of five. He could not understand why people behaved like animals, and he tells us in Childhood that this hard life implanted in him a lasting preoccupation with the sufferings and misfortunes of others.
At the end of Childhood, after his mother’s death, he is bluntly told by his grandfather that he must ‘go out into the world’, that there is no place for him in the house any more. Left to fend for himself, Gorky worked in barges and ships along the Volga, in a bakery, in an icon-maker’s shop, enduring misery and poverty, but mixing with people who were trying desperately to eke out a living by doing the most degrading work. In his famous story Twenty-Six Men and a Girl, he describes what it was like working in a bakery for fourteen hours a day. In Among the People, he describes trying to study at night after a day of dreadful drudgery. Driven to despair by the hopelessness of life, he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide and lay for weeks in hospital with a perforated lung.
In his early literary attempts, Gorky received encouragement and advice from a lawyer, Nicholas Lanin, and the established author Korolenko. After wandering like a tramp in the south for three years, he went to Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, where he wrote his first story, Makar Chudra, which appeared in a local daily, The Caucasus. After his return north to Nizhny, where Lanin and Korolenko had obtained a job for him on another newspaper, many of these early romantic stories appeared in the daily press, and fame was quick to come. Soon afterwards his play, The Lower Depths, was a triumphant success at the Moscow Arts Theatre, and was produced all over Europe.
He had now become active in the revolutionary movement, having met young Marxist socialists for the first time during his stay in Kazan, and in 1905 he was arrested by the Tsarist Government, but released following a petition signed by many famous statesmen and writers. The next year he made his disastrous visit to New York, where he was enthusiastically received until his enemies made it known that his female companion was not in fact his legal wife. He fled into the country from New York, which he called the City of the Yellow Devil, and wrote a series of savage attacks on American capitalism. While he was in the States he wrote his novel Mother, whose principal characters were based on the revolutionaries Zalomov and his mother, who had taken a large part in the strike and demonstrations at Sormovo in 1902. This novel, which became a best-seller, was really the first comprehensive portrait of the Russian socialist movement.
Gorky returned to Europe and settled in Capri, where his villa became the centre of a writers’ colony. Visitors in later years included Trotsky and Lenin, and the villa became a training school for socialist-minded writers and politicians.
During the First World War, Gorky had become associated with the Marxist Internationalist Group and early in 1917 had founded New Life, a daily which was devoted to the interests of left-wing socialism but which was outspoken in its criticism of Kerensky and of what was called Lenin’s ‘Communist hysteria’. He had been shocked by the bloodshed that came with the Revolution and was growing ever more cynical of the often ruthless Communist leaders and the corrupting effect that ideologies had on men in power. In one of his newspaper articles he spoke of Lenin and Trotsky as having abandoned the concept of freedom of speech and of the individual. The Bolshevik press was quick to reply, and Pravda accused him of ‘fawning on the bourgeoisie’.
Gorky was also hated by the moderate liberals for his support of the proletariat, although he fought untiringly not only for the preservation of cultural values in the swamping tide of Communism, but for the lives of writers, scholars and artists sentenced to death or exile for their ideas. He helped young writers and organized the enormous publishing enterprise known as International Literature. As a close friend of Stalin, he had an immense influence on the progress of literature and the arts in Soviet Russia and there is no doubt that he was the driving force behind the creation of a modern Soviet literature.
His attempted suicide was to affect his lungs permanently and in 1921, persuaded to go abroad by Lenin, he went to Italy, where he wrote the last part of his great autobiographical trilogy, My Universities, and The Artamanov Affair, a crime novel.
Seven years later he returned to Moscow and from then onwards he was a champion of the Soviet cause, both in his speeches and in his journalistic writings. He was proclaimed the father of Soviet literature. The cause of his death in 1936 was at first mysterious, but was later proved to have been brought about by his political enemies, with Yagoda, the former Chief of Secret Police, chiefly responsible. His doctor, Levin, was alleged to have given him camphor, and was subsequently executed, after the trial in Moscow.
Gorky was given a hero’s funeral, in Red Square, where a vast crowd assembled. Stalin and other great figures of the day were there to pay homage and to lead the tributes.
Childhood, published in 1913, is the first part of an autobiographical trilogy – brilliantly filmed by Mark Donskoy – and is one of Gorky’s greatest achievements. In the other two volumes, Among the People and My Universities, he describes his later youth.
Early on in the book Gorky tells us that painful though the truth may have been, he finds himself unable to gloss over the facts or to omit unpalatable episodes. In a famous outburst he says:
When I try to recall those vile abominations of that barbarous life in Russia, at times I find myself asking the question: is it worth while recording them? And with ever stronger conviction I find the answer is yes, because that was the real loathsome truth and to this day it is still valid.
It is that truth which must be known down to the very roots, so that by tearing them up it can be completely erased from the memory, from the soul of man, from our whole oppressive and shameful life.
Suffering for Gorky is not so much the spiritual dilemma of abstract issues that it was for Dostoyevsky: it is the ‘here and now’ of bestial, animal-like existence in industrial towns, where people go begging in the streets, taking their pickings from refuse heaps. (The adulation Gorky received for his portraits of tramps, beggars and social outcasts provoked Tolstoy into saying: ‘I knew long before Gorky that tramps have souls.’)
The young, impressionable Gorky is thrust into his grandfather’s household, where, in the author’s own words, life is one nightmare after the other. His two uncles Mikhail and Yakov quarrel openly about their father’s will, fight like wild animals and, after drinking themselves silly in the town, return to the house to smash the furniture. For what are only petty crimes, his ‘polecat-faced’, sinewy, wily grandfather beats him until he is carried unconscious to bed, where he often lies for weeks, listening to the wind moaning in the chimney and the wolves howling in the distant fields. ‘To such music,’ he tells us, ‘my soul matured.’
One source of relief from all this is Gorky’s saintly grandmother. Meeting all the tribulations of life with a stoicism born from an unshakeable belief in God, she sees the Creator as a person sitting on a diamond throne in a meadow full of never-fading flowers, surrounded by his Saints. With a religious faith that is moving in its very naïvety, its childlike assurance that everything will turn out for the best and that the world is good and beautiful, she yet retains a primitive belief in ‘spirits of the hearth’, hobgoblins, and all sorts of traditional sprites. For this she is branded a heretic by Grandfather, who is fanatical in his adherence to the Orthodox catechism. Grandmother is also a rich source of folk legends and fairy tales, many of which are recited in full. Gorky must have found much material in them for his early romantic stories.
In contrast to this enormous woman with her incredibly long hair, there is small irascible Grandfather, who thinks nothing of savagely beating his wife, who inflicts monumental floggings on young Gorky, but who yet is capable of kindness and good humour. In calmer moments he tells his grandson of the hard old days when he worked along the Volga:
The sun scorched the back of your neck and your head seemed to boil like molten steel. And you, miserable wretch, bent double, your bones creaking, press on and on, till you don’t see where you’re going any more, you’re blinded by sweat, and your soul weeps and a tear rolls down your cheek.
The pages of Childhood are filled with a vast array of living people, all drawn with remarkable powers of observation: the pathetic apprentice, Tsiganok; the eccentric lodger who experiments with copper filings and acid; the cemetery watchman with his philosophizing on death and corruption, and his hair-raising stories; and the loathsome, oily army officer who becomes Gorky’s stepfather.
And all these are seen perceptively through a child’s eyes. Remarkably, Gorky can recall the actual sensations and reactions to the external world he experienced as a child. One of the first passages in the book which clearly demonstrates Gorky’s wonderful evocation of the sensations of a child is the funeral scene, when his father is being buried one rainy afternoon. His thoughts are not about his father (who has just died from cholera) but about some frogs knocked down into the grave by clods of earth as the pit is being filled in. He is terrified for their sakes: he is too young to realize the real tragedy. This is surely how a child would think, and it is this psychological truth that underlies the whole book. Taste, touch, smell – all these sensations are described in such vivid detail that we seem to be experiencing them ourselves. And, more important than these bodily sensations, Gorky portrays the terror and fear that a child can feel when alone, lying delirious in an attic bedroom, or before some cruel beating.
What is amazing in this book is the compassion and understanding Gorky shows to mankind at its lowest. We are left, not with an impression of bitterness and cynicism, but with the assurance that the author, much though he suffered as a boy, still retains strong hopes that men will grow out of their evil ways in the end.
In this respect it is very interesting to compare Tolstoy’s work of the same name. Tolstoy was an aristocrat, was brought up by governesses and foreign tutors and was never tormented by poverty or hunger. He never knew the cruelty and suffering so vividly described by Gorky. ‘Happy, happy, irrevocable days of my youth!’ Tolstoy exclaims. ‘It is impossible for me not to love and cherish all my memories. And these memories refresh, elevate my soul, and are a source for me of perfect delights.’
Tolstoy’s own trilogy was a revelation to the Russian public when it first appeared (in the journal The Contemporary during the years 1852–5), and was one of the author’s first works to attract attention. Tolstoy’s Childhood shows considerable European influence and contains little that we in the West can call intrinsically ‘Russian’. For this reason it is difficult to understand how Tolstoy could call Gorky ‘not Russian’, and claim that his thoughts ‘were not Russian’ and that everything in his writings was ‘imagined, artificial, mighty sentiments, heroic and false’.
Childhood has its faults. The descriptive passages, especially about nature, tend to be rhetorical and cliché-ridden and Gorky never forgets his moral message – the dignity and rights of the working man and the downtrodden – which at times develops into tiresome preaching. But these are minor blemishes on a book which, for all the cruelty and horror it describes, leaves the reader with a feeling that, after all, there is some hope for humanity. ‘Life is always surprising us,’ he writes, ‘not by its rich seething layer of bestial refuse – but by the bright, healthy and creative human powers of goodness that are for ever forcing their way up through it. It is those powers that awaken our indestructible hope that a brighter, better and more humane life will once again be reborn.’ Significantly, the book is dedicated to his son. With its psychological insight and depth of characterization, Gorky’s Childhood is one of the great masterpieces of its kind. It is a living autobiography of the spirit, a confession in a sense, through which Gorky comes to terms with a squalid, cruel and depraved world, where justice has no place, and where men lust after money, and will spare nothing to get it. Reading it we enter into Russian life as it really was at the turn of the century, and this is an unforgettable experience.
R.W.