Maxim Górkiy

Few writers have established their reputation so rapidly as MAXIM GÓRKIY. His first sketches (1892–95) were published in an obscure provincial paper of the Caucasus, and were totally unknown to the literary world, but when a short tale of his appeared in a widely-read review, edited by Korolénko, it at once attracted general attention. The beauty of its form, its artistic finish, and the new note of strength and courage which rang through it, brought the young writer immediately into prominence. It became known that “Maxim Górkiy” was the pseudonym of a quiet young man, A. PYÉSHKOFF, who was born in 1868 in Níjniy Nóvgorod, a large town on the Vólga; that his father was a merchant or an artisan, his mother a remarkable peasant woman, who died soon after the birth of her son, and that the boy, orphaned when only nine, was brought up in a family of his father’s relatives. The childhood of “Górkiy” must have been anything but happy, for one day he ran away and entered into service on a Vólga river steamer. This took place when he was only twelve. Later on he worked as a baker, became a street porter, sold apples in a street, till at last he obtained the position of clerk at a lawyer’s. In 1891 he lived and wandered on foot with the tramps in South Russia, and during these wanderings he wrote a number of short stories, of which the first was pubished in 1892, in a newspaper of Northern Caucasia. The stories proved to be remarkably fine, and when a collection of all that he had hitherto written was published in 1900, in four small volumes, the whole of a large edition was sold in a very short time, and the name of Górkiy took its place — to speak of living novelists only — by the side of those of Korolénko and Tchéhoff, immediately after the name of Leo Tolstóy. In Western Europe and America his reputation was made with the same rapidity as soon as a couple of his sketches were translated into French and German, and re-translated into English.

It is sufficient to read a few of Górkiy’s short stories, for instance, Málva, or Tchelkásh, or The Ex-Men or Twenty-Six Men and One Girl, to realise at once the causes of his rapidly won popularity. The men and women he describes are not heroes: they are the most ordinary tramps or slumdwellers; and what he writes are not novels in the proper sense of the word, but merely sketches of life. And yet, in the literature of all nations, including the short stories of Guy de Maupassant and Bret Harte, there are few things in which such a fine analysis of complicated and struggling human feelings is given, such interesting, original, and new characters are so well depicted, and human psychology is so admirably interwoven with a background of nature — a calm sea, menacing waves, or endless, sunburnt prairies.

In the first-named story you really see the promontory that juts out into “the laughing waters,” that promontory upon which the fisherman has pitched his hut; and you understand why Málva, the woman who loves him and comes to see him every Sunday, loves that spot as much as she does the fisherman himself. And then at every page you are struck by the quite unexpected variety of fine touches with which the love of that strange and complicated nature, Málva, is depicted, or by the unforeseen aspects under which both the ex-peasant fisherman and his peasant-son appear in the short space of a few days. The variety of strokes, refined and brutal, tender and terribly harsh, with which Górkiy pictures human feelings is such that in comparison with his heroes the heroes and heroines of our best novelists seem so simple — so simplified — just like a flower in European decorative art in comparison with a real flower.

Górkiy is a great artist; he is a poet; but he is also a child of all that long series of folk-novelists whom Russia has had for the last half century, and he has utilised their experience: he has found at last that happy combination of realism with idealism for which the Russian folk-novelists have been striving for so many years. Ryeshétnikoff and his school had tried to write novels of an ultra-realistic character without any trace of idealisation. They restrained themselves whenever they felt inclined to generalise, to create, to idealise. They tried to write mere diaries, in which events, great and small, important and insignificant, were related with an equal exactitude, without even changing the tone of the narrative. We have seen that in this way, by dint of their talent, they were able to obtain the most poignant effects; but like the historian who vainly tries to be “impartial,” yet always remains a party man, they had not avoided the idealisation which they so much dreaded. They could not avoid it. A work of art is always personal; do what he may, the author’s sympathies will necessarily appear in his creation, and he will always idealise those who answer to them. Grigórovitch and Márko Vovtchók had idealised the all-pardoning patience and the all-enduring submissiveness of me Russian peasant; and Ryeshétnikoff had quite unconsciously, and maybe against his will, idealised the almost supernatural powers of endurance which he had seen in the Urals and in the slums of St. Petersburg. Both had idealised something: the ultra-realist as well as the romantic. Górkiy must have understood the significance of this; at all events he does not object in the least to a certain idealisation. In his adherence to truth he is as much of a realist as Ryeshétnikoff; but he idealises in the same sense as Turguéneff did when he pictured Rúdin, Helen, or Bazároff. He even that we must idealise, and he chooses for idealisation the type he admired most among those tramps whom he knew — the rebel. This made his success; it appeared to be exactly what the readers of all nations were unconsciously calling for as a relief from the dull mediocrity and absence of strong individuality all about them.

The stratum of society from which Górkiy took the heroes of his first short stories — and in short stories he appears at his best — is that of the tramps of Southern Russia: men who have broken with regular society, who never accept the yoke of permanent work, labouring only as long as they want to, as “casuals” in the sea-ports on the Black Sea; who sleep in doss-houses or in ravines on the outskirts of the cities, and tramp in the summer from Odessa to the Crimea, and from the Crimea to the prairies of Northern Caucasia, where they are always welcome at harvest time.

That eternal complaint about poverty and bad luck, that helplessness and hopelessness which were the dominant notes with the early folk-novelists, are totally absent from Górkiy’s stories. His tramps do not complain. “Everything is all right,” one of them says; “no use to whine and complain — that would do no good. Live and endure till you are broken down, or if you are so already — wait for death. This is all the wisdom in the world — do you understand?”

Far from his whining and complaining about the hard lot of his tramps, a refreshing note of energy and courage, which is quite unique in Russian literature, sounds through the stories of Górkiy. His tramps are miserably poor, but they “don’t care.” They drink, but there is nothing among them nearly approaching the dark drunkenness of despair which we saw in Levítoff. Even the most “down-trodden” one of them — far from making a virtue of his helplessness, as Dostoyévskiy’s heroes always did — dreams of reforming the world and making it rich. He dreams of the moment when “we, once ‘the poor,’ shall vanish, after having enriched the Croesuses with the richness of the spirit and the power of life.” (A Mistake, 1, 170.)

Górkiy cannot stand whining; he cannot bear that self-castigation in which other Russian writers so much delight: which Turguéneff’s sub-Hamlets used to express so poetically, of which Dostoyévskiy has made a virtue, and of which Russia offers such an infinite variety of examples. Górkiy knows the type, but he has no pity for such men. Better anything than one of those egotistic weaklings who gnaw all the time at their own hearts, compel others to drink with them in order to perorate before them about their “burning souls”; those beings, “full of compassion” which, however, never goes beyond self-commiseration, and “full of love” which is never anything but self-love. Górkiy knows only too well these men who never fail to wantonly ruin the lives of those women who trust them; who do not even stop at murder, like Raskólnikoff, or the brothers Karamázoff, and yet whine about the circumstances which have brought them to it. “What’s all this talk about circumstances!” he makes Old Izerghil say. “Everyone makes his own circumstances! I see all sorts of men — but the strong ones, where are they? There are fewer and fewer noble men!”

Knowing how much the Russian “intellectuals” suffer from this disease of whining, knowing how rare among them are the aggressive idealists, the real rebels, and how numerous on the other hand are the Nezhdánoffs (Turguéneff’s Virgin Soil), even among those “politicals” who march with resignation to Siberia, Górkiy does not take his types from among the “intellectuals,” for he thinks that they too easily become the “prisoners of life.”

In Váreñka Olésova Górky expresses all his contempt for the average “intellectual” of our own days. He introduces to us the interesting type of a girl, full of vitality; a most primitive creature, absolutely untouched by any ideals of liberty and equality, but so full of an intense life, so independent, so much herself, that one cannot but feel greatly

interested in her. She meets with one of those “intellectuals” who know and admire higher ideals, but are weaklings, utterly devoid of the nerve of life. Of course, Váreñka laughs at the very idea of such a man’s falling in love with her; and these are the expressions in which Górkiy makes her define the usual hero of Russian novels:

“The Russian hero is always silly and stupid,” she says; “he is always sick of something; always thinking about something that cannot be understood, and is himself so miserable, so mi-i-serable! He will think, think, then talk, then he will go and make a declaration of love, and after that he thinks, and thinks again, till he marries... And when he is married, he talks all sorts of nonsense to his wife, and then abandons her.” (Vàreñka Olèsova, 11, 281.)

Górkiy’s favourite type is the “rebel” — the man in full revolt against Society, but at the same time a strong man, a power; and as he has found among the tramps with whom he has lived at least the embryo of this type, it is from this stratum of society that he takes his most interesting heroes.

In Konováloff Górkiy himself gives the psychology, or, rather, a partial psychology, of his tramp hero: — “An ‘intellectual’ amongst those whom fate has ill-used-amongst the ragged, the hungry and embittered half-men and half-beasts with whom the city slums teem” — “Usually a being that can be included in no order,” the man who has “been torn from all his moorings, who is hostile to everything and ready to turn upon anything the force of his angry, embittered scepticism” (II, 23). His tramp feels that he has been defeated in life, but he does not seek excuse in circumstances. Konováloff, for instance, will not admit the theory which is in such vogue among the educated ne’er-do-well, namely, that he is the sad product of adverse conditions. “One must be faint-hearted indeed,” he says, “to become such a man ... .. I live, and something goads me on” ... but “I have no inner line to follow... do you understand me? I don’t know how to say it. I have not that spark in my soul, ... force, perhaps? Something is missing; that’s all!” And when his young friend who has read in books all sorts of excuses for weakness of character mentions “the dark hostile forces round you,” Konováloff retorts: “Then make a stand! take a stronger footing! find your ground, and make a stand!”

Some of Górkiy’s tramps are, of course, philosophers. They think about human life, and have had opportunities to know what it is. “Everyone,” he remarks somewhere, “who has had a struggle to sustain in his life, and has been defeated by life, and now feels cruelly imprisoned amidst its squalor, is more of a philosopher than Schopenhauer himself; for abstract thought can never be cast into such a correct and vivid plastic form as that in which is expressed the thought born directly out of suffering.” (1, p. 31.) “The knowledge of life among such men is striking,” he says again.

Love of nature is, of course, another characteristic feature of the tramp — “Konováloff loved nature with a deep, inarticulate love, which was betrayed only by a glitter in his eyes. Every time he was in the fields, or on the river bank, he became permeated with a sort of peace and love which made him still more like a child. Sometimes he would exclaim looking at the sky: ‘Good!’ and in this exclamation there was more sense and feeling than in the rhetoric of many poets... Like all the rest, poetry loses its holy simplicity and spontaneity when it becomes a profession.” (I, 33–4.)

However, Górkiy’s rebel-tramp is not a Nietzsche who ignores everything beyond his narrow egotism, or imagines himself a “man”; the “diseased ambition” of “an intellectual” is required to create the true Nietzsche type. In Górkiy’s tramps, as in his women of the lowest class, there are flashes of greatness of character and a simplicity which is incompatible with the super-man’s self-conceit. He does not idealise them so as to make of them real heroes; that would be too untrue to life: the tramp is still a defeated being. But he shows how among these men, owing to an inner consciousness of strength, there are moments of greatness, even though that inner force be not strong enough to make out of Orlóff (in The Orlóffs) or Iliyá (in The Three) a real power, a real hero — the man who fights against those much stronger than himself. He seems to say: Why are not you, intellectuals, as truly “individual,” as frankly rebellious against the Society you criticise, and as strong as some of these submerged ones are?

In his short stories Górkiy is great; but like his two contemporaries, Korolénko and Tchéhoff, whenever he has tried to write a longer novel, with a full development of characters, he has not succeeded. Taken as a whole, Fomá Gordéeff, notwithstanding several beautiful and deeply impressive scenes, is weaker than most of Górkiy’s short stories, and while the first portion of The Three — the idyllic life of the three young people, and the tragical issues foreshadowed in it — makes us expect to find in this novel one of the finest productions in Russian literature — its end is disappointing. The French translator of The Three has even preferred to terminate it abruptly, at the point where Iliyá stands on the grave of the man whom he has killed, rather than to give Górkiy’s end of the novel.

Why Górkiy should fail in this direction is, of course, too delicate and too difficult a question to answer. One cause, however, may be suggested. Górkiy, like Tolstóy, is too honest an artist to “invent” an end which the real lives of his heroes do not suggest to him, although that end might have been very picturesque; and the class of men whom he so admirably depicts is not possessed of that consistency and that “oneness” which are necessary to render a work of art perfect and to give it that final accord without which it is never complete.

Take, for instance, Orlóff in The Orlóffs. “My soul burns within me,” he says. “I want space, to give full swing to my strength. I feel within me an indomitable force! If the cholera, let us say, could become a man, a giant — were it Iliyá Múromets himself — I would meet it! ‘Let it be a struggle to the death,’ I would say; ‘you are a force, and I, Grishka Orlóff, am a force, too: let us see which is the better!’”

But that power, that force does not last. Orlóff says somewhere that “he is torn in all directions at once,” and that his fate is to be — not a fighter of giants, but merely a tramp. And so he ends. Górkiy is too great an artist to make of him a giant-killer. It is the same with Iliyá in The Three. This is a powerful type, and one feels inclined to ask, Why did not Górkiy make him begin a new life under the influence of those young propagandists of socialism whom he meets? Why should he not die, let us say, in one of those encounters between workingmen on strike and soldiers which took place in Russia precisely at the time Górkiy was finishing this novel? But here, too, Górkiy’s reply probably would be that such things do not happen in real life. Men, like Iliyá, who dream only of the “clean life of a merchant,” do not join in labour movements. And he preferred to give a very disappointing end to his hero — to make him appear miserable and small in his attack upon the wife of the police-officer, so as to turn the reader’s sympathies towards even this woman — rather than to make of Iliyá a prominent figure in a strike-conflict. If it had been possible to idealise Iliyá so much, without over-straining the permissible limits of idealisation, Górkiy probably would have done it, because he is entirely in favour of idealisation in realistic art; but this would have been pure romanticism.

Over and over again he returns to the idea of the necessity of an ideal in the work of the novel-writer. “The cause of the present opinion (in Russian Society) is,” he says, “the neglect of idealism. Those who have exiled from life all romanticism have stripped us so as to leave us quite naked: this is why we are so uninteresting to one another, and so disgusted with one another.” (A Mistake, I. 151.) And in The Reader (1898), he develops his aesthetic canons in full. He tells how one of his earliest productions, on its appearance in print, is read one night before a circle of friends. He receives many compliments for it, and after leaving the house is tramping along a deserted street, feeling for the first time in his existence the happiness of life, when a person unknown to him, and whom he had not noticed among those present at the reading, overtakes him, and begins to talk about the duties of the author.

“You will agree with me,” the stranger says, “that the duty of literature is to aid man in understanding himself, to raise his faith in himself, to develop his longing, for truth; to combat what is bad in men; to find what is good in them, and to wake up in their souls shame, anger, courage, to do everything, in short, to render men strong in a noble sense of the word, and capable of inspiring their lives with the holy spirit of beauty.” (III, 271.) “It seems to me, we need once more to have dreams, pretty creations of our fancy and visions, because the life we have built up is poor in colour, is dim and dull... Well, let us try, perhaps imagination will help to rise for a moment above the earth and find his true place on it, which he has lost,” (245.)

But further on Górkiy makes a confession which explains perhaps why be has not yet succeeded in creating a longer character-novel: “I discovered in myself,” he says, “many good feelings and desires — a fair proportion of what is usually called good, but a feeling which could unify all this — a well-founded, clear thought, embracing all the phenomena of life — I did not find in myself.” And on reading this, one at once thinks of Turguéneff, who saw in such a “freedom,” in such a unified comprehension of the universe and its life, the first condition for being a great artist.

“Can you,” the Reader goes on to ask, “create for men ever so small an illusion that has the power to raise them? No!” “All of you teachers of the day take more than you give, because you speak only about faults — you see only those. But there must also be good qualities in men: you possess some, don’t you? ... Don’t you notice that owing to your continual efforts to define and to classify them, the virtues and the vices have been entangled like two balls of black and white thread which have become grey by taking colour from each other?” ... “I doubt whether God has sent you on earth. If he had sent messengers, he would have chosen stronger men than you are. He would have lighted in them the fire of a passionate love of life, of truth, of men.”

“Nothing but everyday life, everyday life, only everyday people, day thoughts and events!” the same pitiless Reader continues. “When will you, then, speak of ‘the rebel spirit,’ of the necessity of a new birth of the spirit? Where is, then, the calling to the creation of a new life? where the lessons of courage? where the words which would give wings to the soul?”

“Confess you don’t know how to represent life, so that your pictures of it shall provoke in a man a redemptive spirit of shame and a burning desire of creating new forms of life... Can you accelerate the pulsation of life? Can you inspire it with energy, as others have done?”

“I see many intelligent men round about me, but few noble ones among them, and these few are broken and suffering souls. I don’t know why it should be so, but so it is: the better the man, the cleaner and the more honest his soul, the less energy he, has; the more he suffers and the harder is his life... But although they suffer so much from feeling the want of something better, they have not the force to create it.”

“One thing more” — said after an interval my strange interlocutor. “Can you awake in man a laughter full of the joy of life and at the same time elevating to the soul? Look, men have quite forgotten good wholesome laughter!”

“The sense of life is not in self-satisfaction; after all, man is better than that. The sense of life is in the beauty and the force of striving towards some aim; every moment of being ought to have its higher aim.” “Wrath, hatred, shame, loathing, and finally a grim despair — these are the levers by means of which you may destroy everything on earth.” “What can you do to awake a thirst for life when you only whine, sigh, moan, or coolly point out to man that he is nothing but dust? “

“Oh, for a man, firm and loving, with a burning heart and a powerful all-embracing mind. In the stuffy atmosphere of shameful silence, his prophetic words would resound like an alarm-bell, and perhaps the mean souls of the living dead would shiver!” (253.)

These ideas of Górkiy about the necessity of something better than everyday life — something that shall elevate the soul, fully explain also his last drama, At the Bottom, which has had such a success at Moscow, but played by the very same artists at St. Petersburg met with but little enthusiasm. The idea is the same as that of Ibsen’s Wild Duck. The inhabitants of a doss-house, all of them, maintain their life-power only as long as they cherish some illusion: the drunkard actor dreams of recovery in some special retreat; a fallen girl takes refuge in her illusion of real love, and so on. And the dramatic situation of these beings with already so little to retain them in life, is only the more poignant when the illusions are destroyed. The drama is powerful. It must lose, though, on the stage on account of some technical mistakes (a useless fourth act, the unnecessary person of a woman introduced in the first scene and then disappearing); but apart from these mistakes it is eminently dramatic. The positions are really tragical, the action is rapid, and as to the conversations of the inhabitants of the doss-house and their philosophy of life, both are above all praise. Altogether one feels that Górkiy is very far yet from having said his last word. The question is only whether in the classes of society he now frequents he will be able to discover the further developments — undoubtedly existing — of the types which he understands best. Will he find among them further materials responding to the aesthetic canons whose following has hitherto been the source of his power?