THE STEPSON OF THE PEOPLE
TWENTY years ago Gorki enjoyed a reputation of which little more than a shadow remains. Some of it, no doubt, he owed to his politics. Nevertheless we find Tchehov, a just though generous critic, writing, at a still earlier date, of Gorki that he has "real, great talent," is "the dough of which artists are made," is "the real thing." To Tolstoi he is a "remarkable writer " ; to Korolenko an ungram- matical genius. And the work of Gorki's prime, written when the impressions of his wandering youth were still bright in his memory, and the clumsiness of his technique had been reduced, if it can no longer fascinate us as once it did, may yet convince us that the judgments of Tchehov and Tolstoi signified something more than the easy patronage of a rising literary man by his successful elders. How is it, then, that, while Gorki's name is perhaps better known than that of any other living Russian author, his writings are by common consent ranked" with the second rate ? This instalment of his reminiscences answers the question.
Gorki was of humble parentage, as indeed was Tehehov, but while the latter was educated, because he could earn enough to pay the fees, at high school and University, the former was schooled in bake shop and on railway, with the help of a tattered miscellany of cheap reprints. He read economics in Adam Smith, but was bored because, in his opinion, he knew all that Adam Smith taught already. He read metaphysics, but the fancies provoked thereby were so terrible and disturbing that he could not sleep, and dangerous hallucinations gave warning to him of insanity. Meanwhile he was meeting the queerest and most interesting people. With all his hunger for learning Gorki does not appear to have been of a naturally studious temperament, and when rival claims were made on his attention by Smith on the one hand, by tramps, pilgrims, peasants, fishermen and, peculiar sinners on the other, Smith naturally was defeated. Later the time was to come when Gorki, putting aside the dreamy poems and cloudy allegories with which he first experimented, could gain favour and profit by his stories of
the Down and Out. In the interim he lost all powers of connected thought. There is not from beginning to end of his reminiscences a single idea surpassing the powers of a child of six to frame. Pictures, and amusing pictures, there are in plenty. "When you describe a thing you see it and touch it with your hands," Tchehov wrote to him in '98. But his large and respectable powers of description are not here, and never have been, supported by intelligence. What- ever mind Gorki has, he has reserved for his private life, and kept out of his writings.
An exception should perhaps be made to this charge of unintellectuality on behalf of Gorki's- confession : "I am not the son, but the stepson, of the people." That was a saying of genius, whether deliberate or accidental. Gorki never liked the people. He thought them, and gives reasons why he should, mean, dirty, cruel. He lived uneasily in their midst, and admired among them only the rebels. Unhappily he was equally at a loss when he entered the company of the intelligentsia. His aversion for his early surroundings had not been of the quality which could equip him for entry into a different society. He remained a rebel, flirting with the ideas now of Tolstoi and now of Marx, winning for his bright bouquet of memories instant praise, but never assured "what it all meant." As Gorki to-day vacillates between praise and abuse of the Communist Government, so in those happier days before his exile and return he now worshipped, now lespised the literary middle classes. So understood, the grim Axe stories of which these reminiscences are composed become pathetic. They resemble the naughtiness of a child. They are the doubts of an inarticulate sceptic translated into fact.
Regarded, however, as a record of queer experiences, this book is full of direct and historic interest. Its presentation of pre-revolutionary Russia is unique, while few pages can be turnel without the eye meeting an extraordinary anecdote. Concerning the merits of the English into which the book has been put, the less said the kinder. H. C. HARWOOD.
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