Maxim Gorky

BOOKS OF THE DAY

By E. H. CARR

MAXIM GORKY has been a European literary celebrity for the best part of forty years ; and it came as something of a surprise, on reading his obituary notice last week, to discover that he was not yet seventy when he died. The period of his greatest fame abroad was between 1900 and 1905 when he was still in

the early thirties. It seemed odd then (though it seems less so in retrospect) that the first authentic member of the working class to win a world-wide reputation as a writer should have been a Russian.

Alexei Peshkov (the more familiar name being a pseudonym) was born in 1868 near Nizhny Novgorod, which is now known to the official world as Gorky. He had no more than a few months' schooling in his hectic childhood. His real education began at fifteen when he was engaged to work as scullion on one of the river-steamers on the Volga. The cook was a former non-commissioned officer with a taste for literature, and had on board the most miscellaneous of libraries. Lives of the Saints, Fielding, Anne Radcliffe. Scott and Dumas were among the influences which dawned on young Gorky's quickly ripening intelligence as he drifted up and down the broad waters of the Volga washing the crockery and peeling the potatoes. Fired with the thirst for knowledge, he betook himself to Kazan,

where there was a university. But he soon discovered that knowledge is not imparted gratis in such establishments ; and My Universities (the title which he afterwards gave to the

third volume of his autobiography) were a biscuit factory where he earned his keep and three roubles a month ; a doss- house which appears in more than one of his stories and plays ; an unoccupied cellar which he shared with the corpses of stray cats and dogs ; and suoh odd jobs as an active young man could pick up in a busy river port.

In 1892. when he was employed on the railway, a provincial

paper published his first short story. By 1895 he had managed to attract the attention of one or two professional literary men, and one of his tales appeared in a Petersburg journal. Three years later a first collection of his stories in book form broke all the records of the Russian publishing world, 100,000 copies

being sold. About 1900 translations into French, German and English began to appear. In 1902-3 his play The Lower Depths (to give it the name under which, many years later, it was

produced by Laurence Irving in London) ran in Berlin for eighteen months without intermission—an easy record for that period for the German stage. By 1905, when the Russian police put him under arrest for alleged complicity in the revolution, Gorky was a world figure, and protests flowed in from literary men and societies in every country. His fame had equalled, perhaps momentarily eclipsed, that of Tolstoy.

If we turn back now to the pages which made such a stir

in the world of thirty years ago, we are filled with a faint sense of wonder. The formula seems so transparent and so naïve : a crude blend of sentimentality and realism. Gorky knew no Zola-like cult of truth for truth's sake.

"In my view," (he writes) "truth is not all and is not so necessary to mankind as people think. When I have felt that this or that truth strikes harshly on the soul, teaches nothing, merely degrades man and does not explain him to me, I have naturally preferred not to write about that truth."

The formula can be traced in practically all Gorky's short stories, and in none better than in the famous story which is to be found in every anthology and has already attained the dignity of a classic, Twenty-six and One. It is the story of twenty-six men working in a biscuit factory in the terrible Oonditicins in which Gorky himself had worked in Kazan. The sentiment which made this life bearable is represented

by a young innocent girl who would come every day to the little window of the cellar where they worked. Then one day she yielded to the blandishments of a handsome ex- soldier, one of the master-bakers. Like one man they turned and reviled her ; she had fallen in their eyes lower than they were themselves ; their idol was broken. The realism taken by itself would be intolerably real, the sentiment intolerably sentimental. But the blend of roughness and tenderness in the telling is irresistible.

After 1905, having toured America to collect funds for the revolutionary war-chest, Gorky settled at Capri. There he engaged in spasmodic political propaganda, corresponded with Lenin, financed a revolutionary school, and wrote novels, most of which had a political setting and a revolu- tionary moral. But their very titles are now forgotten. We may suspect that, at heart, Gorky's attitude was that of the student whom he describes in My Universities:

" The study of philosophy, brother, is as interesting as eating sunflower seeds and pretty well as useful."

It is an opinion of which no man need be ashamed. But Gorky has not the courage of his philistinism ; and the moralisings of his characters over the meaning of life soon became a tedious literary trick whose novelty had long worn off. Sympathy he had for poverty and distress. But political theory was not in his temperament. " You a socialist ! " exclaimed Tolstoy to him e,nce. " You are a romantic, and romantics must be mono.. chists." It is no wonder that Lenin found him unorthodox, and that, despite his literary distinction and his generous contributions to party funds, he was never admitted to the inner counsels of the revolutionaries.

The Soviet revolution found Gorky vaguely sympathetic ; and he sought congenial occupation in a scheme for employing destitute men of letters to translate foreign masterpieces into Russian. His own principal literary achievement during the years of war and revolution was his autobio- graphical trilogy, Childhood, Out in the World, and My Universities, in which, hovering between fact and fiction, he traces his own life between the ages of five and twenty. A budding author in one of Chekhov's plays complains bitterly that the only thing the critics will say of • his work is that he " does not write so well as Turgenev." It is partly Gorky's misfortune, and partly his fault, that his trilogy challenges comparison with Tolstoy's Childhood, Adolescence and Youth ; and the inevitable first verdict is that he " does not write so well as Tolstoy." But once we renounce the futile attempt to compare a picture-gallery of external impressions with the organic history of a spiritual growth, these vivid sketches of Gorky's childhood and wanderings have a quality of their own. The trilogy and his reminiscences of Tolstoy and Andreev are at present the most widely read of Gorky's works. But autobiography is a contemporary fashion, while the earlier stories belong to an age which now seems remote and strange ; and it may be that posterity will revise our current estimate and judge Gorky primarily by the stories which broke on our fathers' consciousness like some new revelation.

For that posterity will have to deal with Gorky, we need not doubt. It will not place him with Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, perhaps not even with Chekhov; for Gorky, with his funda- mental crudity, has, not that technical perfection which pre- serves, Chekhov from decay. But it will remember him as an honest painter of the world which he knew in colours legitimately heightened with a dash of. romance ; and when the time comes to cast up the literary debits and credits of our epoch, the rising school of " proletarian " writers in Russia will find placed to this account a large measure_ of indebtedness to the first of their number, Maxim Gorky.