Alexei Maximovich Peshkov[a] (Russian:Алексей Максимович Пешков;[b] 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), popularly known asMaxim Gorky (/ɡɔːrki/;Максим Горький), was a Russian and Soviet writer and proponent ofsocialism.[1] He was nominated five times for theNobel Prize in Literature.[2] Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across theRussian Empire, changing jobs frequently; these experiences would later influence his writing. He associated with fellow Russian writersLeo Tolstoy andAnton Chekhov, both mentioned by Gorky in his memoirs.
Gorky was active in the emergingMarxist socialist movement and later supported theBolsheviks. He publicly opposed theTsarist regime and for a time closely associated himself withVladimir Lenin andAlexander Bogdanov'sBolshevik wing of theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party. DuringWorld War I, Gorky supportedpacifism and internationalism and anti-war protests. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union, being critical both of Tsarism and of the Bolsheviks during theRussian Civil War and the 1920s, condemning the latter for political repressions. In 1928 he returned to the USSR onJoseph Stalin's personal invitation and lived there from 1932 until his death in June 1936. After his return he was officially declared the "founder ofSocialist Realism". Despite this, Gorky's relations with the Soviet regime were rather difficult: while being Stalin's public supporter, he maintained friendships withLev Kamenev andNikolai Bukharin, the leaders of the anti-Stalin opposition executed after Gorky's death; he also hoped to ease the Soviet cultural policies and made some efforts to defend the writers who disobeyed them, which resulted in him spending his last days under unannounced house arrest.[3][4]
Gorky's most famous works are his early short stories written in the 1890s (such as "Chelkash", "Old Izergil", and "Twenty-six Men and a Girl"), the playThe Lower Depths, hisfictional autobiographical trilogy,My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913–1923), and the novelMother (1906). Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, andMother has been frequently criticized; Gorky thought ofMother as one of his biggest failures.[5] However, there have been warmer appraisals of some of his lesser-known post-revolutionary works such as the novelsThe Artamonov Business (1925) andThe Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936); the latter is considered by some as Gorky's masterpiece and has been viewed by some critics as amodernist work.[6][7] Unlike his pre-revolutionary writings (known for their "anti-psychologism") Gorky's later works differ, with an ambivalent portrayal of theRussian Revolution and interest to human psychology.[8] Despite the opinions of the critics and scholars, it has been noted that his image and his literary legacy have been greatly compromised by his political career; many of his major works, including the post-revolutionary novels mentioned above, have remained largely unknown in the West.
Born as Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868, inNizhny Novgorod, Gorky became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother[1] and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880. After an attempt at suicide in December 1887 he travelled on foot across theRussian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing.[1]
In 1895, Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, a onetime shoemaker’s apprentice who had quit school at 10, adopted a new name: Maxim Gorky.[9]
As a journalist working for provincial newspapers, he wrote under the pseudonymИегудиил Хламида (Jehudiel Khlamida).[10] He started using the pseudonym "Gorky" (from горький; literally "bitter") in 1892, when his first short story, "Makar Chudra", was published by the newspaperKavkaz (The Caucasus) inTiflis where he spent several weeks doing menial jobs, mostly for the Caucasian Railway workshops.[11][12][13] The name reflected his simmering anger about life in Russia and a determination to speak the bitter truth. Gorky's first bookОчерки и рассказы (Essays and Stories) in 1898 enjoyed a sensational success and his career as a writer began. Gorky wrote incessantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world. He described the lives of people in the lowest strata and on the margins of society, revealing their hardships, humiliations, and brutalisation, but also their inner spark of humanity.[1]
Gorky's reputation grew as a unique literary voice from the bottom stratum of society and as a fervent advocate of Russia's social, political, and cultural transformation. By 1899, he was openly associating with the emergingMarxistsocial-democratic movement, which helped make him a celebrity among both theintelligentsia and the growing numbers of "conscious" workers. At the heart of all his work was a belief in the inherent worth and potential of the human person. In his writing, he counterposed individuals, aware of their natural dignity, and inspired by energy and will, with people who succumb to the degrading conditions of life around them. Both his writings and his letters reveal a "restless man" (a frequent self-description) struggling to resolve contradictory feelings of faith and scepticism, love of life and disgust at the vulgarity and pettiness of the human world.[citation needed]
In 1916, Gorky said that the teachings of the ancient Jewish sageHillel the Elder deeply influenced his life: "In my early youth I read...the words of...Hillel, if I remember rightly: 'If thou art not for thyself, who will be for thee? But if thou art for thyself alone, wherefore art thou'? The inner meaning of these words impressed me with their profound wisdom...The thought ate its way deep into my soul, and I say now with conviction: Hillel's wisdom served as a strong staff on my road, which was neither even nor easy. I believe that Jewish wisdom is more all-human and universal than any other; and this not only because of its immemorial age...but because of the powerful humaneness that saturates it, because of its high estimate of man."[14]
He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime and was arrested many times. Gorky befriended many revolutionaries and became a personal friend ofVladimir Lenin after they met in 1902. He exposed governmental control of the press (seeMatvei Golovinski affair). In 1902, Gorky was elected an honorary Academician of Literature, butTsar Nicholas II ordered this annulled. In protest,Anton Chekhov andVladimir Korolenko left the academy.[15]
From 1900 to 1905, Gorky's writings became more optimistic. He became more involved in the opposition movement, for which he was again briefly imprisoned in 1901. In 1904, having severed his relationship with theMoscow Art Theatre in the wake of conflict withVladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Gorky returned toNizhny Novgorod to establish a theatre of his own.[c] BothKonstantin Stanislavski andSavva Morozov provided financial support for the venture.[17] Stanislavski believed that Gorky's theatre was an opportunity to develop the network of provincial theatres which he hoped would reform the art of the stage in Russia, a dream of his since the 1890s.[17] He sent some pupils from the Art Theatre School—as well asIoasaf Tikhomirov, who ran the school—to work there.[17] By the autumn, however, after the censor had banned every play that the theatre proposed to stage, Gorky abandoned the project.[17]
As a financially successful author, editor, and playwright, Gorky gave financial support to theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), as well as supporting liberal appeals to the government for civil rights and social reform. The brutal shooting of workers marching to the Tsar with a petition for reform on 9 January 1905 (known as the"Bloody Sunday"), which set in motion theRevolution of 1905, seems to have pushed Gorky more decisively toward radical solutions. He became closely associated withVladimir Lenin andAlexander Bogdanov'sBolshevik wing of the party, with Bogdanov taking responsibility for the transfer of funds from Gorky toVpered.[18] It is not clear whether he ever formally joined, and his relations with Lenin and the Bolsheviks would always be rocky. His most influential writings in these years were a series of plays on social and political themes, most famouslyThe Lower Depths (1902). While briefly imprisoned inPeter and Paul Fortress during the abortive1905 Russian Revolution, Gorky wrote the playChildren of the Sun, nominally set during an 1862cholera epidemic, but universally understood to relate to present-day events. He was released from the prison after a European-wide campaign, which was supported byMarie Curie,Auguste Rodin andAnatole France, amongst others.[19]
Gorky assisted theMoscow uprising of 1905, and after its suppression his apartment was raided by theBlack Hundreds. He subsequently fled toLake Saimaa,Finland.[20] In 1906, the Bolsheviks sent him on a fund-raising trip to the United States withIvan Narodny. When visiting theAdirondack Mountains, Gorky wroteMother, his probably most famous novel of revolutionary conversion and struggle; despite its success and political impact, various critics and Gorky himself were harsh of the book's value as of a work of art.[5] His experiences in the United States—which included a scandal over his travelling with his lover (the actressMaria Andreyeva) rather than his wife—deepened his contempt for the "bourgeois soul".
Between 1909–1911 Gorky lived on the island of Capri in the burgundy-coloured "VillaBehring".
From 1906 to 1913, Gorky lived on the island ofCapri insouthern Italy, partly for health reasons and partly to escape the increasingly repressive atmosphere in Russia.[1] He continued to support the work of Russian social-democracy, especially the Bolsheviks and invitedAnatoly Lunacharsky to stay with him on Capri. The two men had worked together onLiteraturny Raspad which appeared in 1908. It was during this period that Gorky, along with Lunacharsky,Bogdanov andVladimir Bazarov developed the idea of anEncyclopedia of Russian History as a socialist version ofDiderot'sEncyclopédie.
In 1906, Maxim Gorky visited New York City at the invitation ofMark Twain and other writers. An invitation to theWhite House by PresidentTheodore Roosevelt was withdrawn after theNew York World reported that the woman accompanying Gorky was not his wife.[21] After this was revealed all of the hotels inManhattan refused to house the couple, and they had to stay at an apartment inStaten Island.[20]
During a visit to Switzerland, Gorky met Lenin, who he charged spent an inordinate amount of his time feuding with other revolutionaries, writing: "He looked awful. Even his tongue seemed to have turned grey".[22] Despite hisatheism,[23] Gorky was not a materialist.[24] Most controversially, he articulated, along with a few other maverick Bolsheviks, a philosophy he called "God-Building" (богостроительство,bogostroitel'stvo),[1] which sought to recapture the power of myth for the revolution and to create religious atheism that placed collective humanity where God had been and was imbued with passion, wonderment, moral certainty, and the promise of deliverance from evil, suffering, and even death. Though 'God-Building' was ridiculed by Lenin, Gorky retained his belief that "culture"—the moral and spiritual awareness of the value and potential of the human self—would be more critical to the revolution's success than political or economic arrangements.
An amnesty granted for the300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty allowed Gorky to return to Russia in 1914, where he continued his social criticism, mentored other writers from the common people, and wrote a series of important cultural memoirs, including the first part of his autobiography.[1][25] On returning to Russia, he wrote that his main impression was that "everyone is so crushed and devoid of God's image." The only solution, he repeatedly declared, was "culture".
With Russia enteringWorld War I in 1914 and the outburst of patriotism Gorky became devastated; shortly after the destruction of theRheims Cathedral, Gorky wrote Andreeva: "All this is so terrible that I am unable to express even one one-hundredth of my heavy feelings, which are perhaps best described in words such as world catastrophe, the downfall of European culture." At first, Gorky along with the other writers signed a protest against the "barbarism of the Germans", blaming them for the war, "the despicable paper of the Russian liberals" in Lenin's words; later he wrote a series of anti-war publications, but succeeded in publishing only one of them, in which he appealed to feelings of international brotherhood and cooperation; one of the articles was confiscated by the censor, and another was condemned and led the journal being confiscated after being published. While not being a strong "defeatist" like Lenin, Gorky supported "a speedy end of the war and for peace without annexation or indemnities." In 1915, he launched the publishing houseParus and the magazineLetopis to spread anti-war stance and "defend the idea of international culture against all manifestations of nationalism and imperialism"; among its prominent writers were the poetsSergei Yesenin,Aleksandr Blok andVladimir Mayakovsky. Lenin was critical of Gorky's position: "In politics Gorky is always weak-willed and subject to emotions and moods." Gorky's best-known publication of the period were concerningantisemitism, written in response to the severe Tsarist repressions against the Jews, and an essay "Two Souls", which contrasted "the passive East" with "the active West" and promoted the values of European culture and progress and urged Russia to break free from the "Eastern-Asiatic" "soul" and encouraged the Russian bourgeoisie to participate "in the work of reform". Although theOkhrana, the secret police, had failed to find a legal pretext to close the journal, the government decided to do it in January 1917, but these plans failed because of theFebruary Revolution. Gorky distrusted it at first, but in Spring became cautiously optimist about it. In Summer, Gorky's publishing house published one of Lenin's most famous writings,Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, with Lenin's criticisms ofKautsky removed from the text.[26][27]
After the February Revolution, Gorky visited the headquarters of the Okhrana on Kronversky Prospekt together withNikolai Sukhanov and Vladimir Zenisinov.[28] Gorky described the former Okhrana headquarters, where he sought literary inspiration, as derelict, with windows broken, and papers lying all over the floor.[29] Having dinner with Sukhanov later the same day, Gorky grimly predicted that the revolution would end in "Asiatic savagery".[30] Initially a supporter of the Socialist-RevolutionaryAlexander Kerensky, Gorky switched over to the Bolsheviks after theKornilov affair.[31] In July 1917, Gorky wrote his own experiences of the Russian working class had been sufficient to dispel any "notions that Russian workers are the incarnation of spiritual beauty and kindness".[32] Gorky admitted to feeling attracted to Bolshevism, but admitted to concerns about a creed that made the entire working class "sweet and reasonable – I had never known people who were really like this".[33] Gorky wrote that he knew the poor, the "carpenters, stevedores, bricklayers", in a way that the intellectual Lenin never did, and he frankly distrusted them.[33]
During World War I, his apartment inPetrograd was turned into aBolshevik staff room, and his politics remained close to the Bolsheviks throughout therevolutionary period of 1917. On the day after theOctober Revolution of 7 November 1917, Gorky observed a gardener working the Alexander Park who had cleared snow during the February Revolution while ignoring the shots in the background, asked people during theJuly Days not to trample the grass and was now chopping off branches, leading Gorky to write that he was "stubborn as a mole, and apparently as blind as one too".[34] Gorky's relations with the Bolsheviks became strained, however, after theOctober Revolution. One contemporary recalled how Gorky would turn "dark and black and grim" at the mere mention of Lenin.[35] Gorky wrote that Vladimir Lenin together withLeon Trotsky "have become poisoned with the filthy venom of power", crushing the rights of the individual to achieve their revolutionary dreams.[35] Gorky wrote that Lenin was a "cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honor nor the life of the proletariat. ... He does not know the popular masses, he has not lived with them".[35] Gorky went on to compare Lenin to a chemist experimenting in a laboratory with the only difference being the chemist experimented with inanimate matter to improve life while Lenin was experimenting on the "living flesh of Russia".[35] A further strain on Gorky's relations with the Bolsheviks occurred when his newspaperNovaya Zhizn (New Life) fell prey to Bolshevik censorship during the ensuing civil war, around which time Gorky published a collection of essays critical of the Bolsheviks calledUntimely Thoughts in 1918, which would not be republished in Russia until after thePerestroika. The essays call Lenin a tyrant for his senseless arrests and repression of free discourse, and an anarchist for his conspiratorial tactics; Gorky compares Lenin to both the Tsar andNechayev.[36]
"Lenin and his associates", Gorky wrote, "consider it possible to commit all kinds of crimes ... the abolition of free speech and senseless arrests."[37]
He was a member of the Committee for the Struggle against Antisemitism within the Soviet government.[38]
In 1921, he hired a secretary,Moura Budberg, who later became his mistress. In August 1921, the poetNikolay Gumilev was arrested by the PetrogradCheka for hismonarchist views. There is a story that Gorky hurried to Moscow, obtained an order to release Gumilev from Lenin personally, but upon his return to Petrograd he found out that Gumilev had already been shot – butNadezhda Mandelstam, a close friend of Gumilev's widow,Anna Akhmatova wrote that: "It is true that people asked him to intervene. ... Gorky had a strong dislike of Gumilev, but he nevertheless promised to do something. He could not keep his promise because the sentence of death was announced and carried out with unexpected haste, before Gorky had got round to doing anything."[39] In October, Gorky returned to Italy on health grounds: he hadtuberculosis.
In July 1921, Gorky published an appeal to the outside world, saying that millions of lives were menaced by crop failure. TheRussian famine of 1921–22, also known asPovolzhye famine, killed an estimated 5 million, primarily affecting the Volga and Ural River regions.[40]
Gorky left Russia in September 1921, for Berlin. There he heard about the impendingMoscow Trial of 12 Socialist Revolutionaries, which hardened his opposition to the Bolshevik regime. He wrote toAnatole France denouncing the trial as a "cynical and public preparation for the murder" of people who had fought for the freedom of the Russian people. He also wrote to the Soviet vice-premier,Alexei Rykov asking him to tellLeon Trotsky that any death sentences carried out on the defendants would be "premeditated and foul murder."[41] This provoked a contemptuous reaction from Lenin, who described Gorky as "always supremely spineless in politics", and Trotsky, who dismissed Gorky as an "artist whom no-one takes seriously".[42] He was denied permission by Italy's fascist government to return to Capri, but was permitted to settle in Sorrento, where he lived from 1922 to 1932, with an extended household that included Moura Budberg, his ex-wife Andreyeva, her lover,Pyotr Kryuchkov, who acted as Gorky's secretary (initially a spy for Yagoda) for the remainder of his life, Gorky's son Max Peshkov, Max's wife, Timosha, and their two young daughters.
He wrote several successful books while there,[43] but by 1928 he was having difficulty earning enough to keep his large household, and began to seek an accommodation with the communist regime. The General Secretary of the Communist PartyJoseph Stalin was equally keen to entice Gorky back to the USSR. He paid his first visit in May 1928 – at the very time when the regime was staging its first show trial since 1922, the so-calledShakhty Trial of 53 engineers employed in the coal industry, one of whom, Pyotr Osadchy, had visited Gorky inSorrento. In contrast to his attitude to the trial of theSocialist Revolutionaries, Gorky accepted without question that the engineers were guilty, and expressed regret that in the past he had intervened on behalf of professionals who were being persecuted by the regime. During the visit, he struck up friendships withGenrikh Yagoda (deputy head of theOGPU) who vested interest in spying on Gorky, and two other OGPU officers,Semyon Firin andMatvei Pogrebinsky, who held high office in theGulag. Pogrebinsky was Gorky's guest in Sorrento for four weeks in 1930. The following year, Yagoda sent his brother-in-law,Leopold Averbakh to Sorrento, with instructions to induce Gorky to return to Russia permanently.[44]
Gorky's return fromFascist Italy was a major propaganda victory for the Soviets. He was decorated with theOrder of Lenin and given a mansion (formerly belonging to the millionairePavel Ryabushinsky, which was for many years theGorky Museum) in Moscow and adacha in the suburbs. The city of Nizhny Novgorod, and the surrounding province were renamed Gorky.[45]Moscow's main park, and one of the central Moscow streets, Tverskaya, were renamed in his honour, as was theMoscow Art Theatre.[46] The largest fixed-wing aircraft in the world in the mid-1930s, theTupolev ANT-20 was namedMaxim Gorky in his honour.
He was also appointed President of theUnion of Soviet Writers, founded in 1932, to coincide with his return to the USSR. On 11 October 1931 Gorky read his fairy tale poem "A Girl and Death" (which he wrote in 1892) to his visitorsJoseph Stalin,Kliment Voroshilov andVyacheslav Molotov, an event that was later depicted byAnatoly Yar-Kravchenko [ru] in his painting. On that same day Stalin left his autograph on the last page of this work by Gorky: "This piece is stronger thanGoethe'sFaust (love defeats death)".[47] Voroshilov also left a "resolution": "I am illiterate, but I think that Comrade Stalin more than correctly defined the meaning of A. Gorky's poems. On my own behalf, I will say: I love M. Gorky as my and my class of writer, who correctly defined our forward movement."[citation needed]
They wrote their resolution on his fairy tale "A Girl and Death".My father, who spoke about this episode with Gorky, insisted emphatically that Gorky was offended. Stalin and Voroshilov were drunk and fooling around.[48]
On his definitive return to the Soviet Union in 1932, Maxim Gorky received the Ryabushinsky Mansion, designed in 1900 byFyodor Schechtel for the Ryabushinsky family. The mansion today houses a museum about Gorky.
In 1933, Gorky co-edited, with Averbakh and Firin, an infamous book about theWhite Sea–Baltic Canal, presented as an example of "successful rehabilitation of the former enemies of proletariat". For other writers, he urged that one obtained realism by extracting the basic idea from reality, but by adding the potential and desirable to it, one added romanticism with deep revolutionary potential.[49] For himself, Gorky avoided realism. His denials that even a single prisoner died during the construction of the aforementioned canal was refuted byAleksandr Solzhenitsyn who claimed thousands of prisoners froze to death not only in the evenings from the lack of adequate shelter and food, but even in the middle of the day. Most tellingly, Solzhenitsyn andDmitry Likhachov document a visit, on 20 June 1929 toSolovki, the "original" forced labour camp, and the model upon which thousands of others were constructed. Given Gorky's reputation, (both to the authorities and to the prisoners), the camp was transformed from one where prisoners (Zeks) were worked to death to one befitting the official Soviet idea of "transformation through labour". Gorky did not notice the relocation of thousands of prisoners to ease the overcrowding, the new clothes on the prisoners (used to labouring in their underwear), or even the hiding of prisoners under tarpaulins, and the removal of the torture rooms. The deception was exposed when Gorky was presented with children "model prisoners", one of who challenged Gorky if he "wanted to know the truth". On the affirmative, the room was cleared and the 14-year-old boy recounted the truth – starvation, men worked to death, and of the pole torture, of using men instead of horses, of the summary executions, of rolling prisoners, bound to a heavy pole down stairs with hundreds of steps, of spending the night, in underwear, in the snow. Gorky never wrote about the boy, or even asked to take the boy with him. The boy was executed after Gorky left.[50] Gorky left the room in tears, and wrote in the visitor book "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".[51]
In a collection of academic papers about Gorky by theWorld Literature Institute of theRussian Academy of Sciences published in 1995 it was noted that the story about the boy was first told byAleksandr Solzhenitsyn inThe Gulag Archipelago and there was no other testimonies in support of it, that there were never details given about the boy's identity, and that the story isn't supported by documents: "In the Solovki Museum... information about the real boy was not found; this story is considered to be a legend."[52]Dmitry Bykov in his biography of Gorky wrote that whether or not did the boy exist, "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";[53] Gorky's biographerPavel Basinsky makes a similar statement that such "legends" represent "the essence of reality", but if the boy existed, it would be impossible for Gorky to "take the boy with him" even with his reputation of a "great proletarian writer": for example, Gorky had to spend over 2 years to freeJulia Danzas.[54]
Gorky also helped other political prisoners (not without the influence of his wife,Yekaterina Peshkova). For example, because of Gorky's interferenceMikhail Bakhtin's initial verdict (5 years of Solovki) was changed to 6 years of exile.[55]
Gorky strongly supported efforts in getting a law passed in 1934,making homosexuality a criminal offense. His attitude was coloured by the fact that some members of the NaziSturmabteilung were homosexual. The phrase "exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish" is often attributed to him.[56][57] Writing inPravda on 23 May 1934, Gorky said: "There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear."[58][59]
Gorky was a strong and sincere supporter of such Stalinist policies as usage of forced labour, collectivization and "dekulakization" and the show trials against the saboteurs of the Plan, but being a propagandist for such policies wasn't his main role; he was regarded as an "ideological asset" to personify the myth of the "proletarian culture" and bring literature, as Tovah Yedlin writes, under the control of the party,[60] becoming officially praised as "the founder ofSocialist Realism in literature". However, in her political biography of Gorky she also describes his various conflicts with the official cultural policies and the increasing pressure on him towards the end of his life;[26] during his last years, he supported friendly relations withLev Kamenev andNikolai Bukharin, the leaders of the opposition which were executed after Gorky's death, and he could be sympathetic to the centrist andRight Opposition in general; both Bukharin and Kamenev had been friends with Gorky since 1920s.[61][3][62] Paola Cioni noted that although there are traits of a conflict in the relations between Stalin and the state and Gorky, it is uncertain when this conflict was provoked by psychological motives, and when it was provoked by his political position.[62] It is certain, however, that Gorky intervened on behalf of such politically persecuted individuals as the historianYevgeny Tarle and the literary critic,Mikhail Bakhtin, succeeded in making possible for the writersYevgeny Zamyatin andVictor Serge to leave the country, tried to intercede on behalf ofKarl Radek and Bukharin, and made Kamenev appointed as director of the publishing houseAcademia; Gorky also made efforts to support the literary "fellow travellers" and writers who had troubles with their works being published for ideological or artistic reasons or were disapproved by the official critic.
For example, in letters to Stalin he defendedMikhail Bulgakov, and partly because of Gorky, Bulgakov's playsThe Cabal of Hypocrites andThe Days of the Turbins were allowed for staging;[63] Gorky tookAndrei Platonov to the "writers' brigades" after he was made unable to be published because of his work critical of the collectivization, although Gorky rejected his "pessimistic" texts;[64] with Gorky's intervention, Bukharin became one of the keynote speakers on the Writers' Congress and proclaimedBoris Pasternak, who was denounced by the Stalinist party critics as "decadent", to be "first poet" of the USSR.[61][3] Gorky was not a supporter of artistic pluralism and diversity among writers and agreed that some censorship had to be inevitable, often being dismissive and rigid of creative experiments; however, Gorky was concerned with the bureaucratization of the Union of Writers and tried to oppose the increasing pressure on writers and attacked the party-sanctioned authors and them achieving the highest ranks in the literary bureaucracy.[65] Such Stalin's closest associates asLazar Kaganovich opposed Gorky and Bukharin in their efforts against the increasing party control of literature, and Kaganovich in his letters to Stalin wrote about Gorky's ideological faults and the ostensible influence of the Opposition on him. For example, Kaganovich and several Politburo members visited Gorky and demanded his keynote speech for the Congress of Writers to be rewritten, and in his account of the visit, Kaganovich reported that Gorky's "mood [was] apparently not very good", and that the "aftertaste" with which Gorky was critical about some life aspects in the USSR "reminded [him] ofComrade Krupskaya", Lenin's wife who supported theRight Opposition, and that Kamenev seemingly had "an important role in shaping" Gorky's "moods"; Kaganovich also proposed to heavily edit Gorky's attack on the members of the Organising Committee and publish it so it wouldn't circulate illegally. Another act which concerned the Politburo was Gorky's support of the members of theRAPP, the former party institution to control literature the members of which fell out of favour after its disbandment; Kaganovich wrote about Gorky supporting the RAPP-led campaignagainst Stalin's hand-picked leadership of the Organising Committee of the Union and demands to letLeopold Averbakh, the leader of RAPP who was executed in 1937, speak at the congress.[61]
After his arrest in the beginning of 1935, Kamenev wrote a letter to Gorky: "We didn't talk with you about politics, and when I told you about the feeling of love and respect for Stalin..., about my readiness to sincerely work with him, that all feelings of resentment and anger burned out in me — I told the truth... I loved you from the bottom of my heart"; Gorky's secretary Kryuchkov didn't register the letter in Gorky's correspondence receipt book, but the hand-written copy in the Gorky archives contains the writer's characteristic annotations in red pencil; meanwhile, as Gorky's relationship with Stalin worsened, the latter stopped visiting him and replying to his phone calls, and their formal correspondence was almost entirely maintained by Gorky, with Stalin replying occasionally.[61] Later Gorky tried to defend an issue of Dostoevsky'sDemons which was prepared by Kamenev and came out after his arrest; the novel had a reputation of a "counter-revolutionary" work. As the conflict was becoming more visible, Gorky's political and literary positions became weaker.Fyodor Panferov, one of the party-sanctioned leaders of the Socialist Realism writers earlier attacked by Gorky, published an answer to him, in which he dismissed his line of criticizing the officially acclaimed Socialist Realism writers while supporting such ostensible enemies of Communism asD. S. Mirsky. David Zaslavsky published an ironic response to Gorky's article defendingDemons, in which he accused Gorky in connivance in the formation of the "counter-revolutionaryintelligentsia" and directly compared his "liberal position" with the ideological enemies, namely Kamenev andZinoviev: "Next thing you know you'll be calling for publication of White Guard writers", asKorney Chukovsky summarized in his diary; Gorky's second answer to Zaslavsky was not published.[66][67] During the officially organizedcampaign against the composerDmitry Shostakovich, Gorky wrote a letter to Stalin in defense of the composer, demanding a "careful" treatment of him and calling his critics "a bunch of mediocre people, hack-workers" "attack[ing] Shostakovich in every possible way."[68]
Such sources asRomain Rolland's diary demonstrate that because of Gorky's refusal to blindly obey the policies of Stalinism, he had lost the Party's goodwill and spent his last days under unannounced house arrest.[26]
With the increase ofStalinist repression and especially after the assassination ofSergei Kirov in December 1934, Gorky was placed under unannounced house arrest in his house near Moscow inGorki-10 (the name of the place is a completely different word in Russian unrelated to his surname). His long-serving secretaryPyotr Kryuchkov had been recruited by Yagoda as a paid informer.[69] Before his death from a lingering illness in June 1936, he was visited at home by Stalin, Yagoda, and other leading communists, and byMoura Budberg, who had chosen not to return to the USSR with him but was permitted to stay for his funeral.
The sudden death of Gorky's son Maxim Peshkov in May 1934 was followed by the death of Maxim Gorky himself in June 1936 from pneumonia. Speculation has long surrounded the circumstances of his death. Stalin andMolotov were among those who carried Gorky's urn during the funeral. During theBukharin trial in 1938 (last of the threeMoscow Trials), one of the charges was that Gorky was killed byYagoda'sNKVD agents.[70]
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In the Soviet Union, the complexities in Gorky's life and outlook and literary work were reduced to an iconic image (echoed in heroic pictures and statues dotting the countryside): Gorky as a great Soviet writer who emerged from the common people, a loyal friend of the Bolsheviks, and the founder of the increasingly canonical "Socialist Realism".[75] At the same time, such treatment of Gorky as a "state poet" and a Socialist Realism writer and his political career greatly compromised his reputation and his literary legacy, especially in the West:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn later would call him "an apologist for executioners," although later scholars wrote about his contradictory relationship with the Bolsheviks and such points as his condemnation of the Red Terror and complicated relationships with Stalin (see above); the German scholar of Gorky Armin Knigge has concluded that Gorky "was never a Stalinist." In regards to his literary legacy, Knigge stated that Gorky is "not a classical writer like Fyodor Dostoevsky, but a representative of world literature" and a "rigorous observer on a level comparable to German writerThomas Mann."[76] In the West, out of his dramatical works,The Lower Depths (1902) has been the only play to retain a significant position in theatre, and only few of his early short stories had been influential;[77] in the last years, some of Gorky's works written before the Revolution, like the playChildren of the Sun (1905), and the early short stories, have been staged and republished.[76] Richard Freeborn writes that although his reputation suffered because of his political career, "nowadays his achievement as the creator of many vivid portraits, as a brilliant memoirist and autobiographer and successor to Chekhov as a dramatist is undeniable."[78] At the same time, even his best-known works, such asThe Lower Depths and the novelMother (1906) are hardly available in the West, and his other works, including the post-revolutionary novelsThe Artamonov Business (1925) andThe Life of Klim Samgin which have received positive acclaim among critics (see below) have not been republished for a long time; according to Aaron Lake Smith (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..." In Russia, his figure is better known because of his former state-sponsored cult, but "his legacy has been overtaken by a kind of fog, widely depoliticized and misunderstood."[79]
Gorky's novelMother, a story of a poor working woman overcoming the life of fear and ignorance in a Russian province and joining the revolutionary cause, is considered one of the most influential novels of the 20th century worldwide,[80] and among Gorky's novels, it remains the best known work. It was written in 1906 in the United States with the goal to support the revolutionary mood of the Russian workers by conveying the political agenda among the readers through his work.[81] Gorky himself was highly critical of the novel, saying that it was "an unsuccessful thing, not only in its external appearance, because it is long, boring and carelessly written, but chiefly because it is insufficiently democratic."[82] The opinion of Gorky have been shared by various literary critics: for example, Marylin Minto notes that the portrayal of Nilovna, the main character of the novel, is very successful, but the other characters are one-dimensional.[78] Richard Freeborn notes that the other characters are little more than "eloquent mouthpieces" of their points of view, yet, Gorky fixes the flaw by projecting them through Nilovna's apprehension of them.[82] Despite its artistic flaws, it is still read by general public, and some contemporary reviewers have made favourable comments on it:The Spectator in 2016, on the occasion of a new translation of the novel being published, described it as "surprisingly topical" and containing such "eternal themes" as "awakening from a life of fear and ignorance."[83]
My Childhood. In the World. My Universities (1915, 1916, 1923)
Gorky'strilogy of autobiographical prose works,My Childhood (1915),In the World (1916) andMy Universities (1923) is regarded by contemporary critics and scholars as one of his major writings;[78] according toEncyclopaedia Britannica, "considered to constitute one of the finest Russian autobiographies, the books reveal Gorky to be an acute observer of detail with great descriptive powers";[84] 'Britannica writes that the trilogy "contains many messages, which Gorky now tended to imply rather than preach openly: protests against motiveless cruelty, continued emphasis on the importance of toughness and self-reliance, and musings on the value of hard work."[85] The trilogy was praised by Gorky's contemporaries:D. S. Mirsky, for example, wrote that it made Gorky a "great realist"; he also described the trilogy as "one of the strangest autobiographies ever written" for being "about everyone except himself [Gorky]. His person is only the pretext round which to gather a wonderful gallery of portraits."[86]
The novelThe Artamonov Business (1925) has been regarded as one of Gorky's finest works of fiction:Irwin Weil has called the novel "perhaps Gorky's best single long work of fiction",[87] while Richard Freeborn calls it Gorky's "best novel".[78]Encyclopaedia Britannica callsThe Artamonov Business "one of his [Gorky's] best novels".[88]Geoffrey Grigson wrote that "it is like a less sophisticatedBuddenbrooks":[89] it is a chronicle of decline of a family of a pre-revolutionary industrialist family, from the beginning of 1860s to the Revolution of 1917.[78]
Gorky intended his final work of fiction,The Life of Klim Samgin, a novel which he worked on until his death, as his masterpiece; it was supposed to depict "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." Out of the four intended volumes of the novel, Gorky finished only three which he published between 1927 and 1931; the final fourth volume was left unfinished and published only after his death in 1937. The novel follows the decadence of Russianintelligentsia from the start of the 1870s and the assassination of Alexander II to the 1917 Revolution, seen through the eyes of Klim Samgin, a typical petit-bourgeois intellectual.
The novel received controversial reputation among Gorky's contemporaries; among the ones who praised the work were the Russian poet and writerBoris Pasternak and the English poetBrian Howard. After Gorky's death, some critics and scholars have described it as a notable work of the 20th-century literature, unique in its laconic, experimental and eclectic style, which combines different cultural traditions and literary inventions, in its polyphony of an enormous amount of characters, "identity-seekers who create mirror images of each other"; some critics found it similar to such modernist masterpieces asThomas Mann'sThe Magic Mountain (1924) andRobert Musil'sThe Man Without Qualities (1930–1943). Yet, despite the writings of critics, in the West the novel is "so unavailable that it's almost suspicious": it has never been reissued after being published in English in the 1930s.
Creatures That Once Were Men, stories in English translation (1905). This contained an introduction byG. K. Chesterton[94] The Russian title,Бывшие люди (literally "Former people") gained popularity as an expression in reference to people who severely dropped in their social status
In almost every large settlement of the states of the former USSR, there was[95] or is Gorky Street. In 2013, 2110 streets, avenues and lanes in Russia were named "Gorky", and another 395 were named "Maxim Gorky".[96]
InNizhny Novgorod the Central District Children's Library, the Academic Drama Theater, a street, as well as a square are named after Maxim Gorky. And the most important attraction there is the museum-apartment of Maxim Gorky
Drama theaters in the following cities are named after Maxim Gorky: Moscow (MAT, 1932),Vladivostok (Primorsky Gorky Drama Theater – PGDT), Berlin (Maxim Gorki Theater),Baku (ASTYZ),Astana (Russian Drama Theater named after M. Gorky),Tula (Tula Academic Theatre),Minsk (Theater named after M. Gorky),Rostov-on-Don (Rostov Drama Theater named after M. Gorky),Krasnodar,Samara (Samara Drama Theater named after M. Gorky),Orenburg (Orenburg Regional Drama Theater),Volgograd (Volgograd Regional Drama Theater),Magadan (Magadan Regional Music and Drama Theater),Simferopol (KARDT), Kustanay,Kudymkar (Komi- Perm National Drama Theater), Young Spectator Theater inLviv, as well as inSaint Petersburg from 1932 to 1992 (DB). Also, the name was given to the Interregional Russian Drama Theater of theFergana Valley, theTashkent State Academic Theater, the Tula Regional Drama Theater, and theNur-Sultan Regional Drama Theater.
Universities:Maxim Gorky Literature Institute,Ural State University,Donetsk National Medical University, Minsk State Pedagogical Institute, Omsk State Pedagogical University, until 1993Turkmen State University in Ashgabat was named after Maxim Gorky (now named afterMagtymguly Pyragy), Sukhum State University was named after Maxim Gorky,National University of Kharkiv was named after Gorky in 1936–1999, Ulyanovsk Agricultural Institute, Uman Agricultural Institute, Kazan Order of the Badge of Honor The institute was named after Maxim Gorky until it was granted the status of an academy in 1995 (now Kazan State Agrarian University), the Mari Polytechnic Institute and Perm State University named after Maxim Gorky (1934–1993)
On 6 December 2022, theDnipro City Council in Ukraine decided to remove from the city all monuments to figures ofRussian culture andhistory, in particular it was mentioned that the monuments to Gorky,Alexander Pushkin andMikhail Lomonosov would be removed from the public space of the city.[100] The monument of Gorky that been erected in 1977 was dismantled on 26 December 2022.[101]
Maxim Gorky is depicted on postage stamps:Albania (1986),[102]Vietnam (1968)[103] India (1968),[104]Maldives (2018),[105] and many more. Some of them can be found below.
In 1988, a 1 ruble coin was issued in the USSR, dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the writer.
In 2018, on the 150th anniversary of the writer's birthday, theBank of Russia issued a commemorative silver coin with a face value of 2 rubles in the series "Outstanding Personalities of Russia".
In 1985, Gorky's 1906 playEnemies was translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair and Jeremy Brooks and directed in London by Ann Pennington in association with theInternationalist Theatre at the tail end of theBritish miners' strike of 1984–1985. Gorky's "pseudo-populism" is done away with in this production by the actors speaking "without distinctive accents and consequently without populist sentiment".[106]
^His own pronunciation, according to his autobiographyDetstvo (Childhood), was[pʲˈeʃkʌ́vˈɛ], but most Russians say[pʲˈéʃkˈof], which is therefore found in reference books.
^Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko had insulted Gorky with his critical assessment of Gorky's new playSummerfolk, which Nemirovich described as shapeless and formless raw material that lacked a plot. DespiteStanislavski's attempts to persuade him otherwise, in December 1904 Gorky refused permission for theMAT to produce hisEnemies and declined "any kind of connection with the Art Theatre."[16]
^William Stancil's English translation, titledOur Father, was premiered by theVirginia Museum Theater in 1975, under the direction ofKeith Fowler. Its New York debut was at the Manhattan Theater Club.
^The manuscript of this work, which Gorky wrote using information supplied by his friendChaliapin, was translated, together with supplementary correspondence of Gorky with Chaliapin and others.[91]
^Evgeniĭ Aleksandrovich Dobrenko (2007).Political Economy of Socialist Realism. Yale University Press. p. 76.ISBN978-0-300-12280-0.Gorky hated religion with all the passion of a former God-builder. Probably no other Russian writer (unless one considers Dem'ian Bednyi a writer) expressed so many angry words about God, religion, and the church. But Gorky's atheism always fed on that same hatred of nature. He wrote about God and about nature in the very same terms.
^Tova Yedlin (1999).Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 86.ISBN978-0-275-96605-8.Gorky had long rejected all organized religions. Yet he was not a materialist, and thus he could not be satisfied with Marx's ideas on religion. When asked to express his views about religion in a questionnaire sent by the French journal Mercure de France on April 15, 1907, Gorky replied that he was opposed to the existing religions of Moses, Christ, and Mohammed. He defined religious feeling as an awareness of a harmonious link that joins man to the universe and as an aspiration for synthesis, inherent in every individual.
^Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918, ed. Mark D. Steinberg, trans. Herman Ermolaev, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
^Harrison E. Salisbury,Black Night, White Snow, New York, 1978, p. 540.
^Brendan McGeever. Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution. — Cambridge University Press, 2019. — p.p. 247.
^Vyshinsky, Andrey (April 1938)."The Treason Case Summed Up"(PDF).neworleans.indymedia.org. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on 5 March 2009. Retrieved10 February 2022.From Soviet Russia Today, April 1938 Vol. 7 No. 2. Transcribed by Red Flag Magazine.
^N. Froud and J. Hanley (Eds and translators),Chaliapin: An Autobiography as told to Maxim Gorky (Stein and Day, New York 1967) Library of Congress card no. 67-25616.
^Gorky, Maxim; Orfenov, V. H. (1945)."How I Learnt to Write".The Slavonic and East European Review.23 (62). Modern Humanities Research Association:2–7.ISSN0037-6795.JSTOR4203622. Retrieved7 December 2023.
McSmith, Andy (2015).Fear and the Muse Kept Watch, The Russian Masters – from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein – under Stalin. New York: The New Press.ISBN9781620970799.OCLC907678164.
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