Maxim Gorky

• 1. Introduction

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  Maxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, and by the time he died in June 1936, his ashes were carried through Moscow by Joseph Stalin himself. Between those two facts lies a life of extraordinary contradiction: a man who walked on foot across the Russian Empire as a young runaway, who befriended both Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Lenin, who wept at the horrors of a Soviet labor camp and then wrote nothing about them, who championed the poor in his fiction while living in a mansion given to him by the regime that crushed them. His pen name, Gorky, came from the Russian word for "bitter". He chose it to signal his determination to speak the bitter truth. Whether he kept that promise is the question his life keeps asking. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was officially declared the founder of Socialist Realism. He spent his last days under unannounced house arrest. What drove a man of such stubborn independence to walk back into a trap he had already escaped once? And what did Russian literature gain, and lose, in the bargain?

• 2. The Making of Gorky

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  Gorky became an orphan at eleven. By twelve, in 1880, he had run away from home. He had quit school at ten, worked as a shoemaker's apprentice, and accumulated a string of menial jobs before adopting the pen name the world would know him by. In December 1887 he attempted suicide. After that, he walked on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and gathering the raw material that would later fill his pages.

  His first short story, "Makar Chudra", appeared in 1892 in the Tiflis newspaper Kavkaz while he was doing menial work, mostly at the Caucasian Railway workshops. He signed it Maxim Gorky. The name was not vanity; it was a philosophical statement. From the Russian word for "bitter", it declared a simmering anger about life in Russia and a resolve to speak without softening the truth.

  His debut book, Essays and Stories, appeared in 1898 and was a sensational success. From that point, Gorky wrote incessantly. He described the lowest strata of Russian society, the hardships and humiliations of people on the margins, but always with an eye for what he called the inner spark of humanity. He viewed literature not as an aesthetic exercise, though he worked hard on style, but as a moral and political act capable of changing the world. That conviction would shape every major decision of his life, including the most costly ones.

• 3. The Revolutionary and the Gadfly

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  By 1899, Gorky was openly associating with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement. The brutal shooting of workers on the 9th of January 1905, known as Bloody Sunday, pushed him further toward radical solutions. He became closely associated with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, with Bogdanov handling the transfer of funds from Gorky to the Vpered faction.

  Yet Gorky was never a simple party instrument. In 1902, he was elected an honorary Academician of Literature, and Tsar Nicholas II promptly ordered the election annulled. In protest, Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko resigned from the academy. While briefly imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress during the 1905 revolution, Gorky wrote the play Children of the Sun, nominally set during an 1862 cholera epidemic but understood by everyone to address present-day Russia. His release came after a campaign supported by Marie Curie, Auguste Rodin, and Anatole France, among others.

  In 1906, the Bolsheviks sent him on a fund-raising trip to the United States with Ivan Narodny. His stay was not smooth. An invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt was withdrawn after a newspaper reported that the woman accompanying Gorky was not his wife, but his lover, the actress Maria Andreyeva. Every hotel in Manhattan refused to house them. They ended up in an apartment in Staten Island, where Gorky, visiting the Adirondack Mountains, wrote the novel Mother. He despised the experience of America, and it deepened his contempt for what he called the "bourgeois soul".

  In 1916, Gorky stated publicly that the ancient Jewish sage Hillel the Elder had deeply influenced his life. He quoted Hillel's words from memory: "If thou art not for thyself, who will be for thee? But if thou art for thyself alone, wherefore art thou?" Gorky called Jewish wisdom "more all-human and universal than any other" because of, in his words, "its high estimate of man." It was a rare moment of personal disclosure from a writer who made other people's lives his subject.

• 4. Exile and the God-Building Heresy

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  From 1906 to 1913, Gorky lived on the island of Capri in southern Italy, partly for health reasons and partly to escape Russia's repressive atmosphere. Italy became a laboratory for ideas that Lenin would find infuriating. Along with Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexander Bogdanov, and Vladimir Bazarov, Gorky developed the idea of an Encyclopedia of Russian History modeled on Diderot's Encyclopedie, as a socialist alternative to the original.

  More controversially, Gorky developed a philosophy he called "God-Building", bogostroitel'stvo. Its aim was to recapture the power of myth for the revolution, to create what he described as a religious atheism that placed collective humanity where God had once stood, imbued with passion, wonderment, moral certainty, and the promise of deliverance from evil and suffering. Lenin ridiculed it. But Gorky refused to let it go. He retained his conviction that "culture", the moral and spiritual awareness of the value of the human self, would matter more to the revolution's success than any political or economic arrangement.

  When he visited Lenin in Switzerland during this period, Gorky found him consumed by quarrels with other revolutionaries. He wrote that Lenin "looked awful. Even his tongue seemed to have turned grey." It was an observation Gorky would eventually turn into something harder. When World War I broke out and Russia entered in 1914, Gorky's reaction was despair. After the destruction of the Rheims Cathedral, he wrote to Maria Andreyeva that he could not express even "one one-hundredth" of his feelings, which were best described as "world catastrophe, the downfall of European culture." In 1915, he launched the publishing house Parus and the magazine Letopis to spread anti-war ideas and defend international culture. Their contributors included the poets Sergei Yesenin, Aleksandr Blok, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. The government shut the journal down in January 1917, but was overtaken by the February Revolution before it could act.

• 5. Lenin, Trotsky, and Untimely Thoughts

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  The October Revolution did not fill Gorky with triumph. In his diary he wrote about a gardener in the Alexander Park who cleared snow during the February Revolution while ignoring the shooting around him, asked people during the July Days not to trample the grass, and was now chopping branches. Gorky called him "stubborn as a mole, and apparently as blind as one too." It was not a compliment to the gardener.

  As Bolshevik censorship moved against his newspaper Novaya Zhizn (New Life), Gorky published Untimely Thoughts in 1918, a collection of essays that would not be republished in Russia until after the Perestroika. In them, he called Lenin a tyrant for senseless arrests and repression of free discourse. He compared Lenin to both the Tsar and to the anarchist revolutionary Nechayev. He wrote that Lenin and Leon Trotsky had "become poisoned with the filthy venom of power." He wrote that Lenin "does not know the popular masses, he has not lived with them" and compared him to a chemist experimenting on living flesh.

  One contemporary recalled Gorky turning "dark and black and grim" at the mere mention of Lenin's name. Lenin returned the feeling. He described Gorky as "always supremely spineless in politics" and told Anatole France, after Gorky wrote denouncing a 1921 trial of Socialist Revolutionaries as a "cynical and public preparation for murder", that no-one took him seriously as a political figure. Trotsky dismissed him as "an artist whom no-one takes seriously."

  In October 1921, Gorky left Russia for Italy, this time carrying a diagnosis of tuberculosis. His second exile had begun. He settled in Sorrento, where he lived from 1922 to 1932, with an extended household that included his secretary and mistress Moura Budberg, his ex-wife Andreyeva, her lover Pyotr Kryuchkov who acted as Gorky's secretary, his son Max Peshkov, Max's wife Timosha, and their two young daughters.

• 6. The Return and the Gulag Visit

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  In May 1928, Gorky paid his first visit back to the USSR at Stalin's personal invitation. He returned permanently in 1932. The regime greeted him with spectacular honors: the Order of Lenin, a mansion in Moscow that had belonged to the millionaire Pavel Ryabushinsky, a dacha in the suburbs, and the renaming of his birthplace, Nizhny Novgorod, as Gorky. Moscow's main park was renamed for him. So was Tverskaya, one of the central Moscow streets, and the Moscow Art Theatre. The largest fixed-wing aircraft in the world in the mid-1930s, the Tupolev ANT-20, was named the Maxim Gorky.

  In 1929, before his permanent return, Gorky visited the Solovetsky Islands, the original Soviet forced labor camp, the model upon which thousands of others were constructed. Because of Gorky's reputation, the camp was transformed for his visit: thousands of prisoners were relocated to ease overcrowding, prisoners who normally labored in their underwear were given new clothes, prisoners were hidden under tarpaulins, and torture rooms were removed. Gorky did not notice.

  The deception was pierced when he was presented with children described as model prisoners. One of them, described as fourteen years old, challenged Gorky to hear the truth. The room was cleared. The boy described starvation, men worked to death, pole torture, men used instead of horses, summary executions, prisoners rolled down stairs bound to heavy poles, nights spent in underwear in the snow. Gorky left the room in tears. He never wrote about the boy. The boy was executed after Gorky left.

  Whether the boy existed is contested. A collection of academic papers published in 1995 by the World Literature Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences noted that the story originated with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and that no documentary record of the boy had been found at the Solovki Museum. But Dmitry Likhachov, who unlike Solzhenitsyn was actually at Solovki, provides a first-person account. Gorky's biographer Dmitry Bykov wrote that whether or not the boy existed, "mass consciousness is structured in such a way that the boy is needed, and it is no longer possible to erase him from Gorky's biography." What Gorky did write in the visitors' book is documented: "I am not in a state of mind to express my impressions in just a few words. I wouldn't want, yes, and I would likewise be ashamed to permit myself the banal praise of the remarkable energy of people who, while remaining vigilant and tireless sentinels of the Revolution, are able, at the same time, to be remarkably bold creators of culture."

• 7. The Last Years

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  On the 11th of October 1931, Gorky read his 1892 fairy tale poem "A Girl and Death" aloud to Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Vyacheslav Molotov. Stalin left his autograph on the last page with the assessment: "This piece is stronger than Goethe's Faust (love defeats death)." Gorky was offended. As Vyacheslav Ivanov later recalled, his father had spoken with Gorky about the episode: "Stalin and Voroshilov were drunk and fooling around."

  During the 1930s, Gorky's relationship with the regime became increasingly fraught. He supported Stalinist collectivization and the show trials against saboteurs of the Plan publicly, but his private actions told a different story. He interceded for the historian Yevgeny Tarle and the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. He helped the writers Yevgeny Zamyatin and Victor Serge leave the country. He defended Mikhail Bulgakov in letters to Stalin, and partly through Gorky's intervention, Bulgakov's plays The Cabal of Hypocrites and The Days of the Turbins were allowed to be staged. He arranged for Bukharin to be a keynote speaker at the Writers' Congress and had Boris Pasternak, whom Stalinist critics denounced as decadent, proclaimed the first poet of the USSR.

  Lazar Kaganovich wrote to Stalin about Gorky's "ideological faults", noting that Kamenev seemed to have "an important role in shaping" Gorky's moods. After Kamenev's arrest in early 1935, he wrote Gorky a letter: "I loved you from the bottom of my heart." Gorky's secretary Kryuchkov did not register the letter in the official correspondence receipt book, but the handwritten copy in the Gorky archives carries Gorky's characteristic annotations in red pencil.

  After the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Gorky was placed under unannounced house arrest near Moscow. His long-serving secretary Kryuchkov had been recruited by Genrikh Yagoda as a paid informer. Gorky's son Maxim Peshkov died in May 1934. Gorky himself died from pneumonia in June 1936. Stalin and Molotov carried his urn during the funeral. At the Bukharin trial in 1938, one of the charges was that Gorky had been killed by Yagoda's NKVD agents, using substances developed at a special NKVD laboratory. Several historians have endorsed the view that both Gorky and his son were poisoned on Stalin's orders.

• 8. The Literary Legacy

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  The play The Lower Depths, written in 1902, is the only one of Gorky's dramatic works to retain a significant position in Western theatre. His novel Mother, which he wrote in 1906 in the Adirondacks and regarded as one of his biggest failures, remains his best-known work in the West. He called it "an unsuccessful thing, not only in its external appearance, because it is long, boring and carelessly written, but chiefly because it is insufficiently democratic." A 2016 review in The Spectator, on the occasion of a new translation, described it as "surprisingly topical" and containing "eternal themes" such as "awakening from a life of fear and ignorance."

  His three-part autobiography, My Childhood (1915), In the World (1916), and My Universities (1923), is regarded by critics as among his finest work. The critic D. S. Mirsky described it as "one of the strangest autobiographies ever written" because it is "about everyone except himself. His person is only the pretext round which to gather a wonderful gallery of portraits."

  His later novel The Artamonov Business (1925), a chronicle of the decline of a pre-revolutionary industrialist family from the beginning of the 1860s to the 1917 Revolution, has been called by the scholar Irwin Weil "perhaps Gorky's best single long work of fiction." His final novel, The Life of Klim Samgin, which he worked on until his death, was intended to depict, in his own words, "all the classes, all the trends, all the tendencies, all the hell-like commotion of the last century, and all the storms of the 20th century." He finished three of the four intended volumes between 1927 and 1931. The fourth was left incomplete and published after his death in 1937. Some critics have compared it to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. Yet as Aaron Lake Smith noted in Lapham's Quarterly, Gorky's work is "so unavailable that it's almost suspicious, as if there might still be a wizened Cold Warrior clanking away in a basement office somewhere in Washington."

  The German scholar Armin Knigge concluded that Gorky "was never a Stalinist" and that he is "not a classical writer like Fyodor Dostoevsky, but a representative of world literature" comparable in rigor to Thomas Mann. In 2013, more than two thousand streets and avenues in Russia were still named Gorky. The city of Nizhny Novgorod bore his name from 1932 to 1990. The man who chose the word "bitter" as his identity left behind a body of work still waiting, in much of the world, to be read.