Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  Lenin missed the mark: Gorky never forgot Russia. He seems to have been indifferent to the classical heritage of Capri. A great walker, Gorky must have visited Villa Jovis once in his seven years’ residence on the island, but if he did, he never wrote about it. He read everything he could get his hands on, but the stories and novels he wrote in Capri do not take in even a glimpse of the world beyond the frontiers of Mother Russia.

  He wrote a novel in Capri he called The Spy, better known in English as The Life of a Useless Man, which reflects the powerful influence of Dostoyevsky. The first half of the book is a suspenseful narrative about an indecisive weakling, Klimkov, an orphan from a rural village who works at a bookshop that is under the control of the tsarist secret police. The shop’s owner entraps progressive intellectuals by luring them into the back room of his shop, where he sells them radical books proscribed by the regime and then tips off the police, who supplied him with the books in the first place. Klimkov, in love with his employer’s mistress, helps her murder him; the police uncover the plot and blackmail Klimkov into working for them as a spy.

  Up to this point, the novel is firmly in the tradition of Dostoyevsky’s great “pamphlet novel” satirizing radical nihilism, translated as The Possessed, The Devils, and Demons: Gorky’s novel excites the reader’s imaginative participation as much by the play of ideas as it does with its narrative of espionage and betrayal. The Spy also bears a strong resemblance in theme and narrative technique to Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, which was published in the same year, 1907. It appears that the two writers never met in Capri, although their stays there overlapped. The similarity may be attributed entirely to Dostoyevsky’s influence on them.

  The second half of The Spy, however, makes flat reading. Gorky fails to solve the problems entailed by narrating a long novel from the point of view of a contemptible character. Now working for the imperial secret police, Klimkov time and again meets workers drawn to the radical cause, minor characters brimming with joie de vivre, who are far more lovable than his tormented colleagues in the ranks of the spies; time and again he betrays the workers, which leads to a bitter disillusionment that ends with suicide. Klimkov’s disillusionment does not build; it is simply restated. The attractive working-class characters are all very much alike, and the vicious, demoralized spies also lack vivacity. The novel was banned in Russia and only permitted to be published there in 1917, in an expurgated edition. The book was poorly received by the Bolsheviks, undoubtedly reflecting Lenin’s personal view. One may surmise that simply humanizing an imperial spy was enough to make the book appear insufficiently revolutionary.

  A second novel Gorky wrote in Capri was even more pernicious in Lenin’s eyes. The Confession takes on the theme of religion, which was one of the toughest obstacles to enlisting peasants in the Russian Revolution. In the novel, Gorky advanced a theory he called “God-building,” a hopeless attempt to find a middle ground that would unite Marxism and Christianity, by finding God in the nobility of the proletariat. The proposition was sketchy enough intellectually, and Lenin, an uncompromising atheist, hated it. In his view, the problem was deeper than the church itself; the very impulse to believe in God contributed to the enslavement of the masses. When Gorky returned to Russia after the victory of the Bolsheviks and the establishment of the Soviet Union, Lenin exiled his old friend and host, as the tsar had done, for doctrinal errors.

  The widespread disenchantment (not to say disgust) with Stalin’s regime in the postwar era made Gorky the equivalent of a nonperson in the West, and he has found few champions in the post-Soviet era. The music of the Soviet Union never suffered from an equivalent opprobrium; Prokofiev and Shostakovich continued to be performed in Western concert halls almost without interruption. We take note of the great debate about Shostakovich, ongoing and unsettled, about whether the composer was a martyr of Stalinism or a complicit participant in the regime, but his Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, for example, is a thrilling expression of triumph that any listener can take pleasure from without considering who or what is having the triumph. Likewise, Soviet poster art makes its shocking graphic impact whether or not the viewer is sympathetic to the ideology it proclaims, though it is still capable of provoking controversy. A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2016–17, was condemned by many visitors for failing to address the political objectives that the works served.

  It is ironic that Gorky should now languish in comparative neglect, apart from The Lower Depths, an enduring staple in world theater, for he was not a Soviet writer. Born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, in 1868, he was orphaned at the age of eleven and ran away from his grandmother’s home. He spent his adolescent years as a hobo, associating with the vicious, hard-drinking tramps who would populate his early fiction and plays. In 1892, he adopted the pen name Gorky, which means “bitter,” to express his anger at the wretched conditions endured by the Russian working class, which had not improved materially since the tsar abolished serfdom, in 1861. Gorky’s junior by two years, Lenin at that time was an obscure legal clerk in Samara, at the beginning of his own intellectual progress toward socialism. Gorky’s first book, a collection of short stories and essays published in 1898, had an immediate and spectacular success. Barely in his twenties, Gorky was embraced by Chekhov and Tolstoy, who proclaimed him the voice of the rising generation of Russian literature.

  If the principal source for the life of Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen is a gossipy roman à clef by a writer who made his name as an apologist for pederasty, and that for many periods of Romaine Brooks’s life the unedited manuscript of a flawed memoir, which may have passages of pure invention, in the case of Maxim Gorky the reader confronts a challenge closer to that of studying the life of Tiberius, which is hopelessly complicated because every document in the record is governed by a political agenda. Gorky’s pre-Soviet writings presented no problems to the Bolshevik censors, nor did his memoirs of his youth, which conclude before he met Lenin, but interpreting Days with Lenin and other works published after the rise of Stalin poses a problem similar to that of disentangling reliable information about imperial lives from the vilifications of the neo-republican historians. Moreover, in Gorky’s case the false scents thrown across the trail, what would come to be known as disinformation, were the author’s own work.

  In some passages of Days with Lenin, the party-line propaganda is so heavy-handed that one may surmise that the clumsiness is deliberate, to enable the knowledgeable reader to recognize its inauthenticity as an authorial expression. When Gorky describes his conflict with Lenin over the role of the intelligentsia, after he has summarized his own beliefs, which culminated in the creation of his science academy in Capri, he concludes, “So I thought in 1917—and was mistaken. This page of my reminiscences should be torn out. But ‘what has been written by the pen cannot be cut down by the ax’; and ‘we learn by our mistakes’ as V. Ilyitch [Lenin] often repeated.” It is also possible that Gorky reached this conclusion himself, for the rationale for the Free Association for the Development and Spread of Positive Science had a shaky intellectual basis. However, his confession of ideological error and quotations from the apotheosized leader of the revolution are obviously intended to establish his conformity with Stalin’s recently fabricated doctrine of Marxism-Leninism.

  Gorky’s voice is heard more clearly in this address to the reader, in the narrative of his dispute with Lenin about the tactics of the revolution, which is just as relevant more than a century after the First World War as it was when the book was new:

  I challenge anyone to say frankly how far he approves of, and how far he is revolted by, the hypocrisy of the moralists who talk about the bloodthirstiness of the Russian Revolution, when they not only showed no pity for the people who were exterminated during the four years of the infamous Pan-European War, but by all possible means fanned the flame of this abominable war to “the victorious end.” Today the “civilized” nations are ruined, ex
hausted, decaying, and vulgar petty bourgeois philistinism, which is common to all races, reigns triumphant.

  Considering the lives and works of Maxim Gorky and his comrades in the context of Capri forces us to confront a problem that spans Augustus’s frolics with the boys at the Greek gymnasium and the theatrical fetes of Baron Fersen and Marchesa Casati: the dreams of freedom and beauty of most foreign visitors to Capri were paid for with inherited wealth and protected by aristocratic position. There were exceptions: Norman Douglas, who was paid seventy pounds for South Wind and never got a penny more in royalties, lived by the fruit of his labors (with, it is true, many a free lunch laid on by his rich friends), but most of the artists and writers who found what they were seeking in Capri never faced a day of want. Fersen could write fiction and poetry that found few readers and publish Akademos in a lavish production thanks to his fat steel shares. Romaine Brooks is a partial exception: her independent spirit was evident in her impoverished early life, but the perfectionism of her mature career as a painter was enabled by her grandfather’s millions.

  Gorky and Lenin came to Capri in the course of their pursuit of freedom of a more basic sort, and on a global scale, but in one important respect their lives there were not significantly different from those of Fersen and Brooks. Gorky was a self-made man, and while his tastes were not luxurious, he never let his sympathy for the workers’ struggle get in the way of a comfortable style of living. In 1909, seeking more spacious quarters for the ceaseless influx of houseguests, he moved into Villa Behring, an imposing pink pile that towers above the village. It was previously the home of Emil von Behring, the German bacteriologist who won the first Nobel Prize in Medicine, in 1901, for his discovery of an antitoxin for diphtheria. It was there, on the villa’s elegant terrace overlooking the Gulf of Naples, that Gorky and Lenin played their chess games. It was just the sort of paradox that inspired Orwell to write, in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

  * * *

  NOT ALL OF Gorky’s regular visitors in Capri were revolutionists. Ivan Bunin, one of Gorky’s closest friends despite his opposition to the Russian Revolution, visited him in Capri for three consecutive winters (1912–14). The two writers eventually fell out over politics, but Gorky’s warm feelings for Bunin personally and his admiration of his work never diminished (another proof, perhaps, that Gorky was ill-suited to the Soviets’ doctrinaire strictures). Bunin, the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, was a man of the world, as much at home writing about French schoolgirls and a suicide in Algeria as about Russians of any class. Born to wealth, he received a classical education and began his career as a poet, winning his first Pushkin Prize in 1903, when he was thirty-three. Yet he is better known as a writer of short fiction. In his stories, Bunin is a realist in the same sense that Flaubert is: his social observation has a startling, razor-sharp precision and never flinches, yet it is expressed in supple, delicate prose that aspires to the state of poetry. The Gentleman from San Francisco, and Other Stories, a slim volume of Bunin’s stories published in 1922 by the Hogarth Press (which also published Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy), might take the lead position on a critic’s list of neglected masterpieces of twentieth-century literature.

  The title story, in its translation by Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky and D. H. Lawrence, may be perfect. It is superbly Flaubertian: every sentence tells, and every sentence is perfectly formed, or near enough; one must creep through the pages with a magnifying glass to find a word that might be cut or changed. Bunin wrote the story in 1915, inspired, he said, by seeing the cover of Mann’s Death in Venice in a bookshop. His working title was “Death in Capri,” and the story takes as its theme, literally, “See Capri and die.” The nameless gentleman from San Francisco, a captain of industry (the industry, too, is nameless), sails to Europe with his wife and daughter in search of culture and an illustrious son-in-law. After a rough passage to Capri, he checks into his hotel (the Quisisana, also not identified by name), dresses for dinner, and has a fatal stroke while waiting for his family in the reading room, which throws the hotel into an uproar. The story ends with his bloated corpse, in a makeshift coffin constructed from crates used for soda-water bottles, stowed in the deepest hold of the same ship that had just brought him to Europe, on its homeward journey.

  Bunin’s observation of Americans in Europe has both the deadly accuracy and the humanistic generosity of middle Henry James; as a meditation on death and human vanity, it resembles Death in Venice (which Bunin presumably read at some point after he saw the book in a shop window); and its verbal picture painting possesses the luminous precision of northern Baroque genre painting. Tolstoy lays on a rich mass of detail in his fictional worlds, but in Bunin’s story the reader never has a sense of reading a catalogue of physical features. Rather, details accrete in spiraling complex sentences that seem to grow organically around the subject. In this description of a transatlantic cruise ship, Bunin creates a diptych of the class struggle that dispels even the faintest aroma of ideology by putting all human striving into a naturalistic context:

  Outside, the ocean heaved in black mountains; the snow storm hissed furiously in the clogged cordage; the steamer trembled in every fiber as she surmounted these watery hills and struggled with the storm, plowing through the moving masses which every now and then reared in front of her, foam-crested. The siren, choked by the fog, groaned in mortal anguish. The watchmen in the look-out towers froze with cold and went mad with their superhuman straining of attention. As the gloomy and sultry depths of the inferno, as the ninth circle, was the submerged womb of the steamer, where gigantic furnaces roared and dully giggled, devouring with their red-hot maws mountains of coal cast hoarsely in by men naked to the waist, bathed in their own corrosive dirty sweat, and lurid with the purple-red reflection of flame. But in the refreshment bar, men jauntily put their feet up on the tables, showing their patent-leather pumps, and sipped cognac or other liqueurs, and swam in waves of fragrant smoke as they chatted in well-bred manner.

  The story’s action in Capri spans less than twenty-four hours, but Bunin hits many of the high points. When the gentleman and his family arrive in the Piazzetta, its likeness to an opera set is remarked, inevitable because it is so very apt. Tiberius has a brief star turn, bringing with him a hint of the author’s feelings about events in Russia, and beyond: “On that island two thousand years ago lived a man entangled in his own infamous and strange acts, one whose rule for some reason extended over millions of people, and who, having lost his head through the absurdity of such power, committed deeds which have established him forever in the memory of mankind; mankind which in the mass now rules the world just as hideously and incomprehensibly as he ruled it then.”

  In his sketch of the island’s foreign residents, Bunin takes an oblique, affectionate dig at his compatriots, “a few Russians who had settled in Capri, untidy and absent-minded owing to their bookish thoughts, spectacled, bearded, half-buried in the upturned collars of their thick woolen overcoats.” Bunin’s theme is philosophical, the tragic destiny of human life, viewed in comic terms. He was influenced by Hindu religious texts, and his story illustrates the doctrine of the illusoriness of phenomenal reality. On the transatlantic voyage, the passengers included “an exquisite loving couple, whom everybody watched curiously because of their unconcealed happiness: he danced only with her, and sang, with great skill, only to her accompaniment, and everything about them seemed so charming! and only the captain knew that this couple had been engaged by the steamship company to play at love for a good salary.” In Capri, Giovanni Spadaro, the fisherman who befriended Lenin, makes a cameo appearance as “the tall old boatman Lorenzo, thorough debauchee and handsome figure, famous all over Italy, model for many a picture,” who is paid by the village to stand around and strike picturesque poses, puffing on his clay pipe, his scarlet bonnet slipping over one ear.

  By the time of his death, in 1953, Bunin’s reputation had
begun its decline into relative obscurity. Like Rilke, he isolated himself from history, a declaration of intellectual independence that might have been more acceptable in the Bohemian-Austrian poet than in a Russian writer who was nurtured by the tsarist regime. Bunin was a classicist, almost purely so, as much isolated from contemporary currents in literature as he was from worldly affairs. In an autobiographical note, he once explained his lack of a wide readership, despite an early, resounding success with the critics:

  I took no part in politics and, in my works, never touched upon questions connected with politics. I belonged to no particular literary school, called myself neither decadent nor symbolist nor romantic nor naturalist, donned no mask of any kind, and hung out no flamboyant flag. Yet during these last stormy decades in Russia, the fate of a writer frequently depended upon such questions as: Is he an opponent of the existing form of government? Has he come from “the people”? Has he been in prison, in exile? Or, does he take part in the literary hubbub, in the “literary revolution”?

  Bunin was never jailed or exiled. He did not settle anywhere for long but was rather on a nearly constant tour of the Mediterranean world, from the Levant to North Africa. He was Russian, but Russianness did not define him. Being agnostic about the revolution was not really an option, either in his time or in our own. In the (approximately) post-Communist era, we make an impossible demand on twentieth-century Russian writers: they cannot be tsarist, yet neither can they be Stalinists, which leaves a vaporous middle terrain that offers uncertain refuge.