Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  Maxim Gorky is dying. The only copy of Pravda that does not carry daily news of his impending death is his own; the authorities have tactfully censored it, just for him.

  Following his return from exile, eight years ago, Gorky has overcome any previous misgivings he had about Stalin. ‘I must tell you in all honesty that the party is truly your brain, your strength, your actual leader – a leader that the Western proletariat, to its great regret and misfortune, does not yet have!’ he tells workers in the industrial town of Sormovo.

  Aged sixty-eight, he is the most decorated writer in the Soviet Union, but he has had to work for it. ‘Long live Stalin, the man with an immense heart and mind!’ he exclaimed last year. He sees virtue in turning a blind eye. ‘You are used to keeping quiet about things you find revolting,’ he writes dismissively to one reproachful exile.87 ‘As for me, not only do I feel I have a right to keep quiet about them, but I even regard that ability as one of my best qualities. Immoral, you say? ... The fact is that I have a sincere and implacable hatred of truth when it is an abomination and a lie for 90 per cent of the population.’

  In the realm of the arts, he sought to promote a new, improved optimism. Visiting an exhibition in 1933, he declared, ‘Our painters must not be afraid of a certain idealisation of Soviet reality ... I’d like to see more children’s faces, more smiles, more spontaneous joy.’

  In return, Stalin has given Gorky as much spontaneous joy as he could possibly need, awarding him every prize known to Soviet authors, and many more besides, among them the Order of Lenin, the highest civilian distinction in the USSR. He has even had the film Our Gorky produced in his honour. Gorky has a mansion in Moscow, a dacha a few miles from it, and a palatial villa in the Crimea. He is president of the Union of Soviet Writers. In Moscow, a literary institute has been founded in his name, Tverskaya Street has been renamed Gorky Street, and the city of his birth, Nizhni Novgorod, has been renamed Gorky.88 Just under a year ago, Gorky paid a visit to Gorky in a ship named Maxim Gorky. Who could ask for anything more?

  While the fellow idealists of his youth disappeared into jail, Gorky was writing Stalin letters urging him to commission Socialist Realist writers to ‘rewrite the world’s books anew’. ‘What was going on inside him?’ wonders his former colleague Victor Serge, many years later.

  Every morning, the dying writer is visited by his friend Genrikh Yagoda on his way to the Lubianka, where he serves as head of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. Yagoda, the mastermind of the gulags, has supplied Gorky with a secretary and a doctor, both of whom are, naturally, agents of the NKVD.

  In early June, Gorky receives his chummy card from Stalin, who adds that he’d like to drop round with some old friends. ‘Let them come – if they can get here in time,’ says Gorky.

  Stalin arrives at his bedside with Molotov and Voroshilov89 in tow. The doctors have given Gorky an injection of camphor to ensure he stays awake. Stalin immediately takes charge. ‘Why are there so many people here?’ he asks. He points at Gorky’s mistress Baroness Moura Budberg, dressed all in black. ‘Who’s that sitting beside Alexei Maximovich? A nun, is she? The only thing she lacks is a candle in her hands!’ He shoos them away. ‘Get them all out of here!’ He is determined, once again, to force through the triumph of optimism. ‘Why is there such a funeral mood here? A healthy person might die in such an atmosphere!’ He spots Yagoda in the dining room. ‘And what’s that creature hanging around here for? Get rid of him!’

  Once the others have departed, Gorky attempts to discuss literature with Stalin, who is an unexpectedly bookish man.90 But Stalin hushes him, calls for some wine, and toasts Gorky. The two men embrace.

  The next day, Stalin drops by again. The doctors tells him that Gorky is too ill to see him, so he leaves him a note. ‘Alexei Maximovich,’ he writes, ‘we visited you at two in the morning. Your pulse was they say 82. The doctors did not allow us to come in to you. We submitted. Hello from all of us, a big hello. Stalin.’ Molotov and Voroshilov add their signatures. Of all the Get Well cards in history, this must surely be the most sinister.

  Gorky dies in the morning of June 18th. His doctors list the causes as TB, pneumonia and heart failure. He is given a full state funeral, with orchestras and troops. Stalin leads the mourning, wearing a black armband.

  Twenty months later, Yagoda is put on trial on a multitude of charges, including high treason, espionage, conspiracy and acts of terrorism. Listed among the offences is the murder of Maxim Gorky. Gorky’s doctors and his secretary are also charged with his murder. At their trial, they all confess to the crime. The doctors declare that they conspired to make Gorky catch a cold in his garden in the Crimea. The state prosecutor describes the defendants as ‘stinking piles of human garbage’.

  The secretary and one doctor are executed; another doctor, Pletnev, is given a twenty-five-year prison sentence. In 1948, he tells a fellow prisoner that Stalin himself killed Gorky with a box of poisoned candy. ‘We doctors kept quiet,’ he adds. According to him, Stalin was worried that Gorky was planning to tell the world that his show trials were a sham. In 1963, ten years after Stalin’s death and twenty-seven years after her husband’s, Gorky’s widow backs up his chilling claim.

  MAXIM GORKY

  IS IN TWO MINDS ABOUT

  LEO TOLSTOY

  21 Ulitsa Lva Tolstogo, Moscow

  January 13th 1900

  Aged thirty-one, Maxim Gorky, the bright-eyed author and Marxist activist, eager for revolution, permanently clad in a black peasant’s smock, finally manages to meet his hero, Count Leo Tolstoy.

  He first tried to meet him eleven years ago, when he was still a struggling railway worker. He travelled five hundred miles on foot, hitching lifts on freight trains, only to be told that Tolstoy was not at home. He then went a further 124 miles to Moscow, to find Tolstoy too ill to receive visitors. He returned home in a cattle truck, spending thirty-four hours with eight cows.

  But now that Gorky has made a name for himself,91 Tolstoy’s curiosity is piqued, and he invites him to his home. Gorky’s first impression of the seventy-two-year-old is one often heard in encounters with the illustrious: how small he is! ‘I’d pictured him quite differently – taller and bigger-boned. But he turned out to be a small old man.’

  It is only when Tolstoy speaks that his grandeur reveals itself. ‘Everything he said was simple and profound.’ On the other hand, the great man is not always consistent. ‘When it comes down to it, he’s a complete orchestra in himself, it’s just that not all the trumpets are playing in tune. And this is also very good, for it’s very human, i.e. typical of a man. In essence, it’s terribly stupid to call a man a genius. It’s totally incomprehensible what a genius is. It’s far simpler and clearer to say “Leo Tolstoy.”’

  The disciple and his master sit and talk for three hours or more in Tolstoy’s study. Tolstoy is everything Gorky has hoped – simple, gentle, tactful, profound – but also, in a funny way, everything he would rather he wasn’t. ‘There were times when it was hard and unpleasant to listen to him. I never liked what he had to say about women; in that area he was excessively crude. There was something artificial about it, something at the same time insincere and very personal. It was as if he’d been hurt once in a way that he could neither forget nor forgive.’

  Gorky is disconcerted by how Tolstoy can be at the same time both more and less than he had imagined. ‘I do not consider him a miracle of nature in any respect. When you look at him it’s terribly nice to feel that one is also a man, to realise that a man can be Leo Tolstoy.’

  Tolstoy talks about two of Gorky’s short stories, but Gorky is upset by his tone. Tolstoy is vehement that chastity is not natural in a healthy young girl: ‘If the girl is over fifteen and healthy, she wants to be hugged and squeezed. Her mind fears what it doesn’t yet know or understand – that is what people mean when they talk about chastity and modesty. But her flesh already knows that what is incomprehensible is nevertheless inevitable and legitimate, and that it
demands fulfilment, her mind’s fears notwithstanding. You describe Varenka Olesova as being healthy, but her feelings are anaemic and that is false!’

  Tolstoy then starts talking about the girl in Gorky’s story ‘Twenty-six Men and a Girl’. He utters ‘a stream of “indecent” words with a casualness that struck me as unseemly and even somewhat offensive’. But Gorky says nothing, and suddenly Tolstoy changes the subject, becoming kind and considerate, asking him about his life, his education, and his reading.

  Their talk turns to other writers. Tolstoy likes Veltman. ‘He’s good, isn’t he? Lively, exact, no exaggeration. At times he’s better than Gogol. He knew Balzac. Whereas Gogol imitated Marlinsky.’ Gorky notes that Tolstoy, like so many authors, would rather talk about his fellow authors’ personalities than their works.

  For some days after this meeting, Gorky bubbles with enthusiasm. ‘Everything that was said, his manner of speaking, of sitting and watching you. It was all of a piece, powerful and beautiful,’ he tells his friend Anton Chekhov. But as time passes, he begins to count more flaws in Tolstoy’s character. Wasn’t he a little condescending? To put his lowborn guest at his ease, didn’t he talk in a bogusly folksy manner?

  The two men meet again on a number of occasions, and they get along fine, but Gorky is unable to sustain his initial adoration. They disagree on important issues: Tolstoy preaches non-violence, while Gorky is prepared for violent revolution; Gorky trusts the workers, Tolstoy the peasants; Tolstoy believes in people living free, as brothers; Gorky thinks this wishy-washy, and wants workers’ control; Tolstoy is Christian, Gorky atheist. ‘Why don’t you believe in God?’ demands Tolstoy.

  ‘I don’t have faith.’

  ‘That’s not true; you’re a believer by nature, and you can’t do without God. If you don’t believe, it’s out of stubbornness, and out of resentment that the world isn’t as you’d like it to be.’

  Gorky stares at Tolstoy. ‘And though I don’t believe in God, I looked at him, I don’t know why, with great wariness, and a little fear too. I looked at him and I thought, “This man is like God.”’

  A year after this first meeting, Gorky is arrested for revolutionary activities, but Tolstoy intercedes on his behalf, and he is released from prison.

  For the rest of his life, Gorky remains in two minds about Tolstoy, prefacing his abuse with praise, and his praise with abuse. He exhibits the disciple’s opposing needs: to revere and to surpass. ‘Count Leo Tolstoy is an artistic genius, perhaps our Shakespeare,’ he writes, two years before Tolstoy’s death,92 before immediately backtracking: ‘but although I admire him, I do not like him. He is an insincere man; inordinately enamoured of himself, he sees and knows nothing except himself. His humility is hypocritical and his desire for suffering is repulsive. Such a desire comes from a sick, perverted mind, but in this case the arrogant Tolstoy wants to be put in prison only to strengthen his authority ... No, that man is foreign to me, in spite of his great beauty.’

  LEO TOLSTOY

  RUMBLES, AND IS RUMBLED BY

  PYOTR IL’ICH TCHAIKOVSKY

  Moscow Conservatory, Bolshaya Nikitskaya

  December 1876

  The fear of being found out afflicts even the greatest; or perhaps the greatest most of all.

  Tchaikovsky is upstairs at the Moscow Conservatory when he hears that Leo Tolstoy is downstairs. Apparently he is refusing to leave until he has made his acquaintance.

  But Tchaikovsky is reluctant to go down. In the past, whenever he has encountered one of his heroes, ‘I invariably just felt disillusioned, saddened, and worn out afterwards.’ He worries, too, that Tolstoy will see through him. ‘It seemed to me that this supreme student of human nature would, with one glance, be able to penetrate into all the recesses of my soul.’ But there is no way out, so, reluctantly, he goes downstairs to greet him.

  As they shake hands, Tchaikovsky is ‘overcome by fear and a sense of awkwardness ... I said that I was awfully glad, that I was ever so grateful – well, in short, a whole string of inevitable but false words.’

  ‘I would like to get to know you better,’ says Tolstoy. ‘I would like to talk to you about music.’

  ‘And then and there, after our first handshake,’ recalls Tchaikovsky, ‘he expounded his musical opinions to me.’

  Alas, Tolstoy’s musical opinions clash with Tchaikovsky’s. Tolstoy considers Beethoven untalented. ‘What a fine start!’ thinks Tchaikovsky, taken aback by the way in which Tolstoy, ‘this writer of genius, this great student of human nature’, should be so crass in person as to say ‘in a tone of complete certainty, something quite stupid and offensive for any musician’.93

  He is uncertain how to react. ‘Argue? Well, yes, I did start arguing with him ... Properly speaking, I should have read him a whole lecture! Perhaps someone else in my place would have done that. All I did, though, was to supress my inner sufferings and continue to act out this comedy, i.e. I pretended to be an earnest and good-humoured fellow.’ But secretly, he thinks that ‘bringing down to the level of one’s ignorance a genius who has been recognised as such by all, is typical of narrow-minded people’.

  At least his key fear has not been realised: Tolstoy hasn’t penetrated the inner recesses of his soul. Though in his writings Tolstoy seems to have reached the highest summit of human wisdom, in person he demonstrates ‘very little of that all-knowingness which I had been afraid of’.

  Tchaikovksy persuades Nikolai Rubinstein to present a piano recital simply for Tolstoy’s benefit. When his Andante in D Major is being played, Tchaikovsky sees tears running down Tolstoy’s cheeks. ‘Probably never in my life have I been so moved by the pride of authorship as when Leo Tolstoy, sitting by me and listening to the Andante of my quartet, burst into tears,’ he writes in his diary. In a letter to his brother Modest, he is rather more bullish: ‘Before the holidays, old chap, I became great friends with the writer Count Tolstoy and I liked him very much ... and yes sir, he heard my First Quartet and during the Andante he really started crying ... I am quite a top dog now!’

  They part on the best of terms, and exchange thank-you letters. Tolstoy writes to Tchaikovsky: ‘I have never received such a cherished reward for my literary endeavours as this wonderful soirée.’ Tchaikovsky writes to Tolstoy that, ‘As for me, I cannot describe to you how happy and proud I was to see that my music could move and captivate you.’

  But their mutual admiration proves jittery. Might it be that, when the dust has settled, each man suspects he has been rumbled by the other? At the end of the month, Tolstoy sends Tchaikovsky some Russian folk songs to arrange, but Tchaikovsky considers them bogus: how surprising that the man who sets himself up as an expert in folk music should be so easily taken in! On this occasion, he is only partly able to button his lip. ‘I must tell you frankly that they have been recorded in a very clumsy manner, and they display no more than a few traces of their primitive beauty,’ he writes to Tolstoy.

  The two men never meet again, even though they have plenty of opportunities. Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest thinks Pyotr goes out of his way to avoid Tolstoy. ‘He himself told me that in spite of all the pride and joy which he felt on making this acquaintance, the beloved works of Tolstoy temporarily lost their charm for him.’ On a couple of occasions, Tchaikovsky is spotted ducking into a courtyard as he sees Tolstoy approaching along the street.

  A year later, Tchaikovsky feels even less in awe of Tolstoy. ‘You ought to be ashamed of being so enthusiastic about this disgracefully banal nonsense, camouflaged with pretensions to depth of psychological analysis!’ he writes to Modest, who has been going on about Tolstoy’s new novel, Anna Karenina.94 As the years go by, he grows increasingly irritated by Tolstoy’s preachiness. In 1886, he writes in his diary: ‘I am inwardly angry at him; I almost hate him ... all this scribbling he is doing now exudes coldness; one can sense fear and one feels vaguely that he, too, is human ... that is a being who, in the sphere of questions about the purpose and meaning of life, about God and reli
gion, is as insanely arrogant and at the same time as insignificant as any ephemeral insect which appears at noon on a hot July day and has already terminated its existence by night fall.’

  When Tolstoy hears of Tchaikovsky’s death in November 1893, he writes to his widow expressing his regret, and wondering why they never quite clicked. ‘It really is a pity, since there seems to have been some misunderstanding between us. I visited him once and invited him here but he seems to have been offended because I did not attend Evgenii Onegin.’

  But a year later, Tolstoy has lost sympathy with the man whose music once made him cry. ‘What an obvious artistic falsehood Tchaikovsky is!’ he reflects.

  PYOTR IL’ICH TCHAIKOVSKY

  EXAMINES

  SERGEI RACHMANINOFF

  Moscow Conservatory, Bolshaya Nikitskaya

  May 1888

  Twelve years later, Pyotr Il’ich Tchaikovsky is the most renowned composer in Russia. Aged forty-eight, he has just returned from months abroad, and is settling down at his country retreat to begin work on his new symphony, the 5th. But he has a keen sense of obligation, so has agreed to spend two days sitting on the Conservatory’s examining board.

  The examination begins smartly at 9 a.m. The pupils are set two tasks: to harmonise a theme by Haydn in four parts, and to write a prelude of sixteen to thirty bars, in a given key and with a specified modulation, to include pedal points on both the dominant and the tonic. They are not permitted the use of a piano. As examinations go, it is notoriously arduous, but this year it is made even more so by the presence of the great Tchaikovsky.

  One by one, the candidates hand in their work. As their teacher Arensky surveys each paper, a frown forms on his face. He is clearly dissatisfied. The last candidate to hand in his work is the fifteen-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff; over the course of the day, his prelude has become more and more complicated, defying any sort of speedy solution. Eventually, after eight hours, he manages to complete it, and hands in his two pages to Arensky. For the first time that day, he fails to frown. This gives Rachmaninoff hope.