Maxim Gorky

Russian writer

• Born: March 28, 1868
• Birthplace: Nizhny-Novgorod, Russia
• Died: June 18, 1936
• Place of death: Gorki, near Moscow, Soviet Union (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia)

Gorky is recognized as the inspiration for Soviet literature, influencing the development of the Soviet short story and the proletarian novel and drama. His reminiscences of both Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy give valuable, insightful observations about two older contemporaries. Equally important is his contribution to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement as one of its chief supporters and journalists. Because of his close associations with Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin, he became the official cultural spokesperson for the new government.

Early Life

Maxim Gorky (mehk-SYEEM GOHR-kee) was born in Nizhny-Novgorod, a city that once expelled him but which Joseph Stalin later renamed Gorki in honor of its most famous son. Gorky’s father, an upholsterer, died of cholera when Gorky was only four, and his mother took him with her to live with her parents, the Kashirins. From his earliest days, young Gorky suffered the harshest and most brutal experiences. The Kashirins were cantankerous, depraved, and mercenary. His life with them was a miserable nightmare. Except for his grandmother, the household radiated hostility. At times his grandfather beat him until he was unconscious. This youthful suffering implanted in him a lasting empathy for the pain and misfortunes of others.

When he was nine, his mother died, and his grandfather drove him from the household, telling him that he must go out into the world and make his own way. For fifteen years he wandered through Russia supporting himself by working in a boot shop and as an office boy, a railway porter, dishwasher on barges along the Volga, longshoreman, janitor, and laborer in a basement bakery.

While with the Kashirins, he had received his only formal education. He sought to continue to educate himself by reading voraciously and experimenting with writing. During those years, mixing with outcasts who were eking out their existence through the most degrading work, he became disillusioned with the whole social structure. Life was unfolding before him as an unending chain of hostility and cruelty. He was distressed at the sordid, unceasing struggle by so many for worthless objects. Yet through these observations, his personal experiences, and his reading he was growing mentally and gaining a greater self-assurance.

At one point, however, when only nineteen, he became so despondent that he unsuccessfully attempted suicide. For weeks he was in the hospital recuperating from a wounded lung, perforated by the bullet. This experience was the turning point in his life. He left the hospital consumed by a radical rebellion against the social order. The next year he joined a subversive Marxist group and was arrested while involved in their activities. From that point on, he was under police surveillance. In 1892, he published his first short story, “Makar Chudra,” in a local newspaper, using his pseudonym, Maxim Gorky, which means “Maxim the Bitter One.” In 1895, another story, “Chelkash,” was published by a prominent journal in St. Petersburg. Three years later an anthology of his stories appeared. Immediately the two foremost living Russian authors, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, recognized that a new young literary talent had joined their company.

Life’s Work

The publication in 1898 of the first volume of his stories, Ocherki I rasskazy (partial translation, Selected Short Stories , 1970), was a tremendous success. He had depicted characters even lower on the social scale than Fyodor Dostoevski’s city dwellers: the peasant, the worker, downtrodden tramps, factory workers, and social outcasts, living in terrible squalor and dwelling on the fringe of society. His stories concerned the most elemental passions and the struggle for survival. They were written in the language of the proletariat. The public received them with rapture, and it was natural that he should become the spokesman for the rising proletariat.

Gorky was also interested in the theater. In 1898, he had established a rustic theater in the Ukraine. He had also developed a warm relationship with Chekhov and through him was introduced to Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre, who urged him to write a drama concerning the proletariat, something completely new for his theater. The result was Na dne (1902; The Lower Depths , 1906). After radical cuts, the czarist government permitted its production, thinking it would fail. Rather, it was received with enthusiastic applause, an enthusiasm that spread throughout Europe and across the Atlantic.

Shortly after his attempted suicide in 1888, Gorky came under the influence of Mikhail Antonovich Romas, the Populist revolutionary who influenced his social and political views. Because of his involvement in subversive Marxist activities, he was arrested and imprisoned a number of times. In 1899, he became the literary editor of the Marxist newspaper Zhizn (life), in which he expressed his concerns about social injustice. After the success of The Lower Depths, he had become a national hero and was elected to the Imperial Academy of Sciences. At the request of Czar Nicholas II, the appointment was withdrawn. In objection to this insult to Gorky, both Vladimir Korolenko and Chekhov resigned from the academy. In 1905, Gorky assisted Father George Gapon in the abortive revolution for which he was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. During that year, he first met and began a lifelong friendship with Vladimir Ilich Lenin. In December, he was the moving spirit behind the barricade fighters in their armed rising in Moscow.

Gorky’s growing fame led to a triumphal tour through Europe and an enthusiastic reception in were chosen, where he had been sent to raise funds for the Bolshevik cause and to undermine the czar’s efforts to procure a loan. The United States turned on him, however, when his enemies revealed that his companion, actor Maria Fyodorovna Andreyevna, was not his wife. He retaliated by denouncing New York as “the city of the yellow devil” and by writing several articles against American capitalism. While in the United States, he also began work on his most famous novel, Mat (1906; The Mother , 1906), which, because of its excellent propaganda for socialism, was later acclaimed as the model for Socialist Realism.

In 1907, when Gorky returned to Europe because of his trouble with the czarist regime, he settled on Capri as a political émigré. Until 1913, his Villa Serafina was to be a center for revolutionary activities. Lenin and Leon Trotsky were his guests. There he trained writers and politicians sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause, used his income to further the revolutionary movement, and helped to train its leaders.

Gorky returned to Russia in December, 1913, after the czar granted amnesty to seditious writers. During the next four years, he was hard at work producing propaganda to undermine Russia’s involvement in World War I and to support the revolution that followed. After the revolution, he assisted in shaping and spreading the official philosophy. With several others in 1917, he began publishing Novaya zhizn (new life), a newspaper devoted to propaganda for socialism that was extremely popular among the Russian intelligentsia. His friendship with Lenin continued, but Gorky was growing deeply concerned about the ruthlessness of some of the Bolshevik leaders. Once he criticized Lenin’s “communist hysteria” and Lenin himself as “the mad chemist.” At this time, Lenin and Trotsky became concerned about Gorky’s more moderate approach to socialism. Finally, in 1918, the new government forced Novaya zhizn to close, and, fearing for Gorky’s safety, Lenin in 1921 encouraged him to leave Russia to recuperate from a serious lung ailment.

By 1920, Gorky was beginning to admire Lenin as a world revolutionary and to reestablish his friendship with him, but many of the Bolshevik leaders still distrusted Gorky. Much of the time from 1921 until 1928 he was abroad, primarily in Sorrento, Italy. Yet, because of his association with Lenin and later with Stalin, he had a considerable influence on the cultural and literary life of Russia during the turbulent years of the revolution and the following two decades. As early as 1919, he edited the publication of a series of masterpieces of world literature and in 1923 objected to the removal from libraries of certain Western classics that were considered counterrevolutionary. He headed a cultural committee to protect Russia’s museums and works of art and presided over commissions to improve the living conditions of artists, scholars, and writers. Many of these and others who belonged to the intelligentsia owed their survival to his intervention during the Stalin purges. He was especially encouraging to the Serapion Brothers, a fellowship of young authors, several of whom acknowledged his influence on their careers.

At Stalin’s invitation, Gorky returned to Russia in 1932 as the entire nation joined in a jubilee to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of his first publication. Numerous honors were heaped on him, including the coveted Order of Lenin. The Literary Institute of Moscow was renamed for him, as were numerous libraries, theaters, and schools. In 1934, he received the first membership in the Union of Soviet Writers and presented the opening address. He was the moving spirit behind the union’s adoption of Socialist Realism, which became the approved official method for all Soviet writers. The union used his works as the chief models for their new literary theory.

Although Gorky was at first optimistic about Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union, he became increasingly fearful of him and refused to write a laudatory eulogy about him, as he had done for Lenin. In secret, he used his influence, when possible, to moderate the brutalities of Stalin’s dictatorship. Stalin, in turn, became distrustful of Gorky and in 1935 refused to grant him permission to travel to Italy for his health. From that time on, Gorky’s freedom of movement was strictly controlled. At the time of his death on June 18, 1936, it was rumored that he was a victim of Stalin’s purges. Although this rumor has been disputed, it was seemingly verified in a treason trial in 1938. Notable figures of the state were present for the funeral in Red Square Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Nikita S. Khrushchev and his ashes were sealed in the Kremlin wall. For more than ten years, he had been at work on his most enthusiastic work, Zhizn Klima Samgina (1927-1936; The Life of Klim Samgin, 1930-1938), a four-volume epic set in Russia from the assassination of Czar Alexander II to the death of Lenin. He left it unfinished at his death.

Significance

At the time of his death, Gorky was considered the dean of Soviet literature, the writer with the greatest influence on other Russian authors. This influence outlived him and even extended beyond Russia’s borders. For example, in 1932, while developing his own dramatic style, Bertolt Brecht adapted Gorky’s The Mother for the stage. Also it is usually conceded that The Iceman Cometh (1946), which ushered in Eugene O’Neill’s last and most powerful period, was influenced by The Lower Depths. In the West, however, only a few of his creative works remain influential several short stories, such as the immortal “Dvadtsat’shest’ I odna” (1899; “Twenty-six Men and a Girl,” 1902), and The Lower Depths, which retains a significant position in the Western theatrical repertoire. His autobiographical writings and his literary portraits of his contemporaries Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Aleksandr Blok are considered his supreme achievements.

His compassion for the downtrodden and belief in their ability to win through a greater dignity and worth not only permeated his works but also motivated his revolutionary activities. This compassion and faith also stirred him to use his influence to denounce the Bolshevik excesses, to improve the lot of starving artists during the first decade of Soviet rule, and to moderate, when possible, the Stalin purges. It is likely that his continuing reputation will rest on his role in preparing for the revolution and his efforts to temper the excesses of the new regime during the aftermath of the revolution. Chekhov, who first recognized Gorky’s worth as an author, foresaw such a future reputation for Gorky and wrote: “It seems to me that a time will come when Gorky’s works will be forgotten, but he himself will hardly be forgotten in a thousand years.”

Bibliography

Berberova, Nina. Moura: The Dangerous Life of the Baroness Budberg. Translated by Marian Schwartz and Richard D. Sylvester. New York: New York Review of Books, 2005. Budberg, who lived a fascinating life in her own right, was Gorky’s mistress, and this biography of Budberg discusses Gorky and their relationship.

Borras, F. M. Maxim Gorky the Writer: An Interpretation. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1967. Analyzes Gorky’s ideas and outlook; discusses his works according to genre; studies the appeal of Gorky’s works to both the Soviet and Western mind; includes a biographical chronicle and the chronology of Gorky’s principal works.

Clark, Barrett H. “Maxim Gorky.” Intimate Portraits. Reprint. New York: Kennikat, 1970. The first chapter is a memoir of the author’s visit with Gorky in 1923. It presents Gorky’s views about his own works, Tolstoy, and American writers, including O’Neill, whom he found interesting but “a little bit too Russian.”

Clowes, Edith W. Maksim Gorky: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. The definitive bibliographical study of Gorky in English. Includes primary and secondary works with brief notes on the secondary. Introduction studies the ambivalent aspects of Gorky’s art and life. Organized chronologically with an excellent index according to author and subject.

Gorky, Maxim. Autobiography of Maxim Gorky. Translated by Isidor Schneider. New York: Citadel Press, 1949. Covers the first twenty-odd years of his life and gives insights into the formative experiences and people that prepared him to become the spokesperson for the proletariat.

Habermann, Gerhard E. Maksim Gorky. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1971. Emphasizes in particular the factors contributing to Gorky’s political development and to his involvement in social causes. Concludes with a chronology of his life and significant contemporary events in Russia.

Levin, Dan. Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky. London: Frederick Muller, 1967. Studies the cultural, social, and political aspects of Gorky’s life and gives personal reactions to his works, including works frequently overlooked. Contains a helpful index of references to Gorky’s writings.

Marsh, Cynthia. Maxim Gorky: Russian Dramatist. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Marsh analyzes Gorky’s sixteen plays to determine the effects of his exile and religion on their content, the role of women characters, and the personal and political significance of motherhood.

Muchnic, Helen. “Maxim Gorky.” In From Gorky to Pasternak: Six Writers in Soviet Russia. Reprint. New York: Octagon Books, 1979. Discusses Gorky’s humanistic presentation of truth and reality, a contrast between “a truth that ’saved’ and a truth that ’killed.’” Evaluates his portraits drawn from life as superior to his creative work. Sympathetic analysis of Gorky’s literary strengths and weaknesses.

Segel, Harold B. Twentieth-Century Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Most detailed study of Gorky as a dramatist. Includes two chapters on Gorky’s plays, those before the revolution and those of the Soviet period. Contrasts the development and techniques of Chekhov and Gorky as dramatists.