by Maxim Gorky
The general disappointment among the youth in the Government’s attitude towards both Polish liberty and peasant rights led to a stronger and more revolutionary stand on their part. Unlike the reaction that set in during the long and tyrannical reign of Nicholas I, after the outburst of the Decembrists, or the reaction that was to follow those thirty years of effort when the notes of Gorky were to sound like a clarion call to a renewed faith, the decade of the seventies rose to one of extreme and intense idealism. The generation which had gone out of Russia to gain for itself new liberties had now returned and was spread throughout the length and breadth of the vast land, making converts by the thousands where formerly there were but few. The “fathers” and “sons” though not understanding each other very fully, were nevertheless following a pretty equal tendency. Where the former had sought for new general liberties in politics and social life through education, the latter, feeling that a great deal had already been won, had decided upon propaganda of action. The movement changed from a freeing of one’s self to a freeing of the people. “To the people” became the watchword of the hour. The youth of the better classes went to live among the peasants, taught them, organized them into secret revolutionary groups for “land and liberty,” made several abortive attempts at peasant revolution, and finally, the Government growing more and more reactionary, ended in the wielding of a personal “terror” against the Government representatives, which culminated in the assassination of the Czar, Alexander II, in 1882.
The reprisals that set in, the wholesale exiling of the youth to Siberia, the internment for life in the fortresses of Peter and Paul and in Schlüsselberg for participation in the Party of the Will of the People, and the general opinion that however reactionary Alexander II was he was still much more ready for reforms than his successor Alexander III, gave rise to a fundamental disillusionment. The sacrifices of the youth had been too much. They had led themselves to be hanged and tortured only to bring in an era of still greater darkness. The people were not ready for reforms, they did not wish them. They would not have understood what to do with liberties could they have had them. There was nothing to do but sit back on one’s estate, exploit the peasants as did the grandfathers and say, “We are powerless and the peasants unworthy.”
This period was the more painful because it came fast upon one which was full of idealism and hope. The men who lived on in inertia, drinking tea and discussing vacuously the futility of life, had known a time when they had hoped and thought and planned otherwise. They had almost cynically to repudiate their former selves.
The writer who brought out most acutely the great anguish of this period was Anton Chekhov. He is now being recognized as the greatest artist of his time, who followed naturally the trend of the years he lived in. His humor, at first gentle and sorrowful, became later coarse and gross as the darkness around him deepened. His characters are inert, some eaten up by unfulfilled desires, others incapable even of recalling the faint echo of a former hope. A “Chekhov Sorrow” became a well-known definite phrase in Russian life.
It was before this Russia that Gorky made his appearance. Himself one of the people, he showed them again the face of the people. It had beauty and courage, it had qualities of strength long since forgotten. The effect was electrical. Gorky was hailed as one upon whom the cloak of Tolstoi was to fall, for better than Tolstoi, he did not appear as a leader of the people, but as one who disclosed the people en masse.
Gorky’s appearance in the cultured and literary world of Russia suffering from the “Chekhov Sorrow” has an analogy in my mind to the sudden appearance of Peter Karpovitch in the fortress of Schlüsselberg. There sat the men and women for almost twenty years, cut off from all outside communication, wondering when and how their work would be carried on. One by one they had died off and only a handful remained to question if the youth would ever awake to strong purposes again. Then suddenly, in the year 1902, the big gates opened, and the student Peter Karpovitch entered. Without connection with any revolutionary group, by an instinctive feeling of the pulse of the time, he made his strike against the increasing reaction, shooting the Minister of Education, Bogolyepov, in February, 1901, for the wholesale exiling of the students into the military on the lines employed by Nicholas I.
This advance guard of the Russian Revolution was tall and handsome, with the traditional heroic, figure of the Little Russian. He came to the men of the past in all his strength and beauty as a symbol of the new era. Upon his footsteps followed fast Bolmashev, the executor of Sipiagin, who this time committed his act under the direction of an organized group, the Social Revolutionaries. In two years Russia was aflame. The Governor General of Finland, Bobrikoff, was shot in June, 1904. This was followed in a few weeks by the assassination of Von Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergei, by general labor strikes, by the demonstration in Petrograd in front of the Winter Palace which led to the terrible massacre of Bloody Sunday on January 22, 1905, by the mutinies in the Black Sea fleet and in Kronstadt, and by the nation-wide general strike in every branch of industry and life in October, 1905. Finally a Constitution and the Duma were granted to the people. The herald of the new order to the old was the tall handsome youth whose strange footsteps were heard suddenly and unexpectedly one March morning treading the hitherto silent corridors of the fortress.
Thus, as Karpovitch to the prisoners in Schlüsselberg, came Gorky to Russia at large.
He was marvelously fitted to dispel the disappointment that was felt about the people. Himself one of the people, he had merely to disclose himself to prove again their courage and nobility. The life of Gorky has been particularly tragic and particularly Russian. He was born in a dyer’s shop in Nizhni-Novgorad in 1869. His real name is Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, and it is significant that when he came to write he signed himself “Maxim Gorky”—“Maxim, the Bitter.” His father died when he was four and he was totally orphaned at seven. His childhood was spent in the care of his maternal grandfather, who was extremely religious and a miser. The foundation of the bitterness he was to feel was thus laid early, for the life of the lonely child with the harsh, unsympathetic old man, can be well imagined, though the peculiarly Russian setting can be had only by reading his recent book, My Childhood. At the death of his mother he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and at eleven he decided that he had had enough of home ties and left Nizhni-Novgorad for good. He started tramping and after various vicissitudes found himself a helper to a cook on one of the Volga boats. This man had been at one time a noncommissioned officer and he carried his past culture with him in the form of a trunk full of books. It was a queer assortment, from Gogol to school manuals and popular novels, and Gorky dipped liberally into it. The result was that a craving for real learning arose in him, which would have come no doubt to the imaginative youth at this age even without the aid of that haphazard library. He left the Volga steamer and tramped to the University of Kazan, thinking that learning would be free to any one who wished it. He was bitterly disappointed, for the University demanded fees, and so instead of registering as a student he was forced to take a job as a bakery helper. This work he did for two years and it seems to have made a deep impression upon him, for there is scarcely a story of his where the hero does not spend two years baking bread in some filthy cellar among flour dust and general filth.
He left the bakeshop to wander with those tramps and “ex-men” whose poet he was later to be. The life held suffering which ate deep into the vitals of his being—hunger, privations, nights with the police for vagabondage; and finally so great became this conflict between the beauty and goodness for which his nature craved and the constant evil around him, that in 1889 at the age of twenty-one he sent a bullet through his chest. Like many of the Russian youth, whose passionate natures make impossible the compromise between their inherent idealism and the sordidness and brutality of actual existence, he had decided to be done with the mockery. Fortunately the bullet did not kill and he took up his life of vagab
ondage again. In 1892 he is once more in Nizhni-Novgorad, actually holding the respectable post of a lawyer’s clerk. The lawyer, a man called Lanin, seems to have taken a great interest in the intelligent young man who discussed “cursed” questions and had a “live and energetic soul.” He threw opportunities for study in his way, but Gorky’s free and untamed youth, coupled with the taste of the “mother earth” he grew to love so, made it impossible for him to lead the well-ordered life of a professional clerk, and in a city, at that. He left Lanin, for he did not “feel at home with these intelligent people,” he said, and tramped to the Caucasus, making a detour on the way from the Volga, through the Don district, into Bessarabia and Southern Crimea.
Coming to the Caucasus he found work in a railroad yard in Tiflis. His mind had already begun to digest the types of those tramps, Tartars and gipsies he met in his wanderings, for as early as 1890 his first story Makar Chudra made its appearance in the little paper Kafhas in Tiflis. It is a story of two thieves, written with great simplicity and naturalness. There is no doubt that Gorky had met them and had been true to the incidents related. It showed them strong, sensitive as women, with a subtle capacity of understanding each other’s emotions. In a typically Russian scene, one thief unburdens his heart to the other, telling him how he had wanted to kill him and how he had nearly done so. The other listens, sympathetic, understanding fully how that state of mind came to him, and they part in great tenderness! These are no weaklings, they are personalities held by iron chains in a Greek fatalism, and the fatality is life—Russian life. Gorky had not yet come to the point where he could lay his hand on the social enemy and say “here it is.” He saw only a great misery and natures torn in anguish, but not ruined as the generation before had supposed. Though this story itself, appearing, as it did, in a provincial paper, made no immediate name for him, his later stories, in which both canvas and treatment are exactly the same, brought him recognition forthwith.
Gorky left Tiflis and wandered back to the Volga and there, by happy chance, met the Little Russian writer, Korolenko, the author of Makar’s Dream and The Blind Musician. As editor of The Contemporary, Korolenko introduced him to “great” literature, as he put it, and in a flash he was made known to all of Russia. He continued writing in the same vein he introduced in Makar Chudra, using the strong, outcast, rebel types in Emilian Pibgai and Chalkash, which were published in 1895 under Korolenko’s editorship, and in Konovaloff, Malva, Foma Gordyeeff his first long novel, and in the innumerable other works which preceded the supposed “change” in Gorky’s manner. He showed his heroes to Russia as one shows a scene by pulling back a curtain: “this is what exists; here are men who do not conform to your laws, not because you have made outcasts of them, but because they despise you and all your smug respectability.”
But he did not say so in so many words, he merely showed this canvas. The change in Gorky is the change in Russia, which grew from a silent and brooding mood to one of talk and action. As the Russian people became more self-conscious so did he, changing from a man torn hither and thither by circumstances to one who was able to analyze life and know cause and effect. His very sudden success so early in his life made it impossible for him to keep on writing and re-writing the same themes in the same manner as he had begun. He was too great and dynamic a genius for that. To him as to most Russians the art itself is not the thing, but the self-expression and the truth. Thus when Gorky swung out from the life of tramps and wanderers into the intellectual life of Russia, he found a nation organized into various groups, analyzing the cause of Russian social and political misery, finding an economic and materialistic reason for it, and setting about to remedy it. Gorky joined one of these groups, the Social Democratic Party, was one of the signers of the petition to the Czar which demanded with an amusing Russian naïveté that the Czar grant not only economic justice to the strikers in the steel works of Petrograd, but also a constitutional assembly, universal suffrage, a direct and secret ballot, and free speech, free press and freedom of religion! For these demands and the subsequent demonstration in front of the Winter Palace which resulted in the notorious massacre of Bloody Sunday, Gorky was imprisoned in the fortress of Peter and Paul. His prominence and the fact that he was subject to tuberculosis caused a universal demand for his release. He was freed after a month and was allowed to stay in Finland and even in Petrograd for a while during the so-called days of freedom.
By this time Gorky had thrown himself entirely into the cause of the Majority Faction of the Social Democratic Party, an organization not strictly Marxian, in the sense that they did not wait for an economic development to bring about the cooperative commonwealth but believed that by mass action and general strike Russia could bring about a revolution on socialistic lines without the necessity of intermediary steps. In 1905 he left Russia and came to America, hoping to collect money for the Revolutionary cause, but his work failed entirely because of the fact that the charming and brilliant lady who came with him to America and registered as his wife was not legally so. The men of prominence, Mark Twain among them, who formed committees to help raise the funds, resigned, and Gorky’s plans failed entirely. Not only was no money for the “cause” raised, but he was received nowhere, the very hotel he stayed in asking him to leave at midnight. It was supposed that agents of the Russian Government, fearing Gorky’s too great success in America, sprung the trap and thus discredited him. At any rate, Gorky naturally left the shores of America in great disgust, and the dark days of Russian reaction having already set in, went to live in practical exile on the island of Capri, in Italy. Leonid Andreyeff, the Russian writer, and many revolutionary refugees generally stayed with him. It was from Capri that the longer novels, The Spy and this work, The Confession, were written. He was by this time living entirely in the cultured world, thinking earnestly and scientifically to the best of his ability about the political and social conditions around him.
The great light, the great inspiring motive power of the Russian has ever been the people. The only ray of happiness in the works of Gorky is the joy that comes to his characters when they begin to work for the people. Life is depressing, life is a quagmire, a bog wherein great and noble souls are forced to wallow, when suddenly light appears. It is in the organization for the creation of a better life. One feels just for one little instant the happiness that life can bring when this vision of the new order appears. In the novel called Three of Them, the pages lighten with relief when the little Social Democratic agitator appears, giving hope and courage, but she is swept out of the life of the unhappy men that fill the pages of that book as suddenly as she appeared and there is nothing for the hero to do but throw himself under a passing train and die for disappointment and impotence.
This was in the beginning when he himself first saw the meaning of the “Cause,” before it had become fully part of his life. Later his works changed their scene, following the exact manner in which the Russian people themselves changed their mental attitude. The background of the same Russian people, the same giants with the same courage and the same ability, was no longer a quagmire, but a battlefield. They were struggling to win their rights. Interwoven in the pages of his later work rises the new Russia of the last decade, the self-conscious, fighting Russia. In The Spy, which was written in 1908, we see the Russian not yet come into his own, still living in ignorance and disorder, but his activity is different. He is in a fight. The same change is in Mother and in the work In Prison. A new pæan is sung, it is the song of the people marching en masse. Perhaps Walt Whitman came the nearest to this same feeling of democracy, but unlike Whitman it is not of the people that Gorky sings, but it is the people themselves that are the song-makers. They are the “creators.” “In them dwells God.”
The Russian who finds Gorky’s later works too doctrinaire, too purposeful, never quarrels with him because he finds his theme at fault or the conclusions wrong, but because he thinks his art has failed. They say they have revised their opinio
n that Gorky would mean to them what Tolstoi has meant, for they still consider the latter to be more universal and truer philosopher and artist. They find it inartistic for Gorky to talk to them of what they already know. They want to hear again about the strange and beautiful types they did not know of before and to read again his beautiful lines with their exquisite descriptions of nature, which they consider unsurpassed by the greatest. However, to me Gorky’s aestheticism is too one-sided. It is the aestheticism of the primitive whom only the grandiose impresses. The soft, subtle shadings leave him untouched. There is no doubt that he loves passionately his “mother earth” with the vast, undulating steppes, the tall mountains of the Caucasus, the great dome of the sky, and the living sweep of the sea. His descriptions of these scenes glow as does a Western writer over the charms of his beloved, but we miss the charms of the beloved.
In reading Russian literature, it must always be remembered that one is reading of a people whose civilization is intrinsically different from that of the West. It is the difference between action and passivity. Professor Milvoukoff would have us believe that it is the autocratic form of government which has made the Russian live so long in inactivity, that both his reasoning powers and imaginative faculties have developed far in excess of the rest of Europe’s. It is true that the Russian is never afraid to go to the end of a thought, to fight for freedom far in excess of that already attained in the Western world, and to ask continually the fundamental questions of “Why,” and “Wherefore,” and “Where am I going,” and “Where does this lead me to?” The knife of Russian literature discloses as surely a cross-section of Russian civilization as does that of Guy de Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola and other realists of the French school disclose the French. And yet this cross-section of Russian civilization is difficult to grasp without a more intimate knowledge of both the history and the people. It is difficult for me now to remember my conceptions of Russian life as I got them from the Russian writers before my visit to Russia ten years ago. America, California, all the activities of our Western life made the characters and problems in Turgeneff, Dostoyeffsky and Gogol seem vague and unreal, made them move about in a nebulous society where one asked embarrassing personal questions and were always answered with a truth that had rudeness in it.
