Alexander
Peshkov (later
known as Maxim Gorky was born in Nizhny Novgorod on 16th March, 1868.
His father was a shipping agent but he died when Gorky was only five
years old. His mother remarried and Gorky was brought up by his grandmother.
Gorky left
home in 1879 and went to live in a small village in Kazan and worked
as a baker. At this time radical groups such as the Land
and Liberty group sent people into rural areas to educate the
peasants. Gorky attended these meetings and it was during this period
that Gorky read the works of Nikolai
Chernyshevsky, Peter Lavrov , Alexander
Herzen, Karl
Marx and
George
Plekhanov.
Gorky became a Marxist but he was later to
say that was largely because of the teachings of the village baker,
Vasilii Semenov.
In 1887
Gorky witnessed a Pogrom in Nizhny Novgorod.
Deeply shocked by what he saw, Gorky became a life-long opponent of
racism. Gorky worked with the Liberation
of Labour group and in October, 1889 was arrested and accused
of spreading revolutionary propaganda. He was later released because
they did not have enough evidence to gain a conviction. However, the
Okhrana decided to keep him under police
surveillance.
In 1891
Gorky moved to Tiflis where he found employment as a painter in a
railway yard. The following year his first short-story, Makar
Chudra, appeared in the Tiflis newspaper, Kavkaz.
He story appeared under the name Maxim Gorky (Maxim the Bitter). The
story was popular with the readers and soon others began appearing
in other journals such as the successful Russian
Wealth.
Gorky also
began writing articles on politics and literature for newspapers.
In 1895 he began writing a daily column under the heading, By the
Way. In this articles he campaigned against the eviction of peasants
from their land and the persecution of trade
unionists in Russia. He also criticized the country's poor educational
standards, the government's treatment of the Jewish
community and the growth in foreign investment in Russia.
His short
stories such as Twenty-six Men and a Girl,
often showed Gorky's interest in social reform. In a letter to a friend,
Gorky argued that "the aim of literature is to help man to understand
himself, to strengthen the trust in himself, and to develop in him
the striving toward truth; it is to fight meanness in people, to learn
how to find the good in them, to awake in their souls shame, anger,
courage; to do all in order that man should become nobly strong."
In 1898
Gorky published his first collection of short-stories. The book was
a great success and he was now one of the country's most read and
discussed writers. His choice of heroes and themes helped him emerge
as the champion of the poor and the oppressed. The Okhrana
became greatly concerned with Gorky's outspoken views, especially
his articles and stories about the police, but his increasing popularity
with the public made it difficult for them to take action against
him.
Gorky secretly
began helping illegal organizations such as the Socialist
Revolutionaries and the Social Democratic
Labour Party. He donated money to party funds and helped with
the distribution of radical newspapers such as Iskra.
One Bolsheviks later recalled that
Gorky's contribution included "financial help systematically
paid every month, technical assistance in the establishment of printing
shops, organizing transport of illegal literature, arranging for meeting
places, and supplying addresses of people who could be helpful."
On 4th
March, 1901, Gorky witnessed a police attack on a student demonstration
in Kazan. After publishing a statement attacking the way the police
treated the demonstrators, Gorky was arrested and imprisoned. Gorky's
health deteriorated and afraid he would die, the authorities released
him after a month. He was put under house arrest, his correspondence
was monitored and restrictions were placed on his movement around
the country. When he was allowed to travel to the Crimea, he was greeted
on the route by large crowds bearing banners with the words: "Long
live Gorky, the bard of Freedom exiled without investigation or trial."
In 1902
Gorky was elected to the Imperial Academy of Literature. Nicholas
II was furious when he heard the news and wrote to his Minister
of Education: "Neither Gorky's age nor his works provide enough
ground to warrant his election to such an honorary title. Much more
serious is the circumstance that he is under police surveillance.
And the Academy is allowing, in our troubled times, such a person
to be elected! I am deeply dismayed by all this and entrust to you
to announce that on my orders, the election of Gorky is to be cancelled."
When news
that the Academy had followed the Tsar's orders and had overruled
Gorky's election, several writers resigned in protest. Later that
year the statutes of the Academy were changed, giving Nicholas
II the power to approve the list of candidates before they came
up for election.
Gorky
gave his support to Father George Gapon
and his planned march to the Winter Palace. He attended the march
on the 22nd January, 1905, and that night Gapon stayed in his house.
After Blood Sunday Gorky changed his mind
about the moral right for revolutionaries to use violence. He wrote
to a friend: "Two hundred black eyes will not paint Russian history
over in a brighter colour; for that, blood is needed, much blood.
Life has been built on cruelty and force. For its reconstruction,
it demands cold calculated cruelty - that is all! They kill? It is
necessary to do so! Otherwise what will you do? Will you go to Count
Tolstoy and wait with him?"
After Blood
Sunday Gorky was arrested and charged with inciting the people
to revolt. Following a wide-world protest at Gorky's imprisonment
in the Peter and Paul Fortress, Nicholas II
agreed for him to be deported from Russia.
Gorky now
spent his time attempting to gain support for the overthrow of the
Russian autocracy. This included raising
money to buy arms for the Socialist Revolutionaries
and the Social Democratic Labour Party. He
also helped to fund the new Bolsheviks
newspaper Novaya Zhizn.
In 1906
Gorky toured Europe and the United States. He arrived in New
York on 28th March, 1906 and the New
York Times reported that "the reception given to Gorky
revealed with that of Kossuth and Garibaldi."His campaign tour
was organized by a group of writers that included Ernest
Poole, William Dean Howells, Jack
London, Mark Twain, Charles
Beard and Upton Sinclair.
The New
York World newspaper decided to run a smear campaign against
Gorky. The American public were shocked to hear that Gorky was staying
in his hotel with a woman who was not his wife. The newspaper printed
that the "so-called Mme Gorky who is not Mme Gorky at all, but
a Russian actress Andreeva, with whom he has been living since his
separation from his wife a few years ago."
As a result
of the story Gorky was evicted from his hotel and William
Dean Howells and Mark Twain changed
their mind about supporting his campaign. President Theodore
Roosevelt also withdrew his invitation for Gorky to meet him in
the White House.
Others
such as H. G. Wells continued to help Gorky
and issued a statement that included the comment: "I do not know
what motive actuated a certain section of the American press to initiate
the pelting of Maxim Gorky. A passion for moral purity ever before
begot so brazen and abundant torrent of lies." Frank
Giddings, a sociologist, compared the attack on Gorky to the lynching
of three African Americans in Missouri.
Gorky also
upset other supporters by sending a telegram of support to William
Haywood, the leader of the Industrial Workers
of the World, who was in prison waiting to be tried for the murder
of the politician, Frank Steunenberg.
Later Gorky
published a book American Sketches,
where he criticized the gross inequalities in American society. In
one article he wrote that if anyone "wanted to become a socialist
in a hurry, he should come to the United States."
In 1907
Gorky attended the Fifth Congress of the Social
Democratic Labour Party. While there he met Vladimir
Lenin, Julius Martov, George
Plekhanov, Leon Trotsky and other
leaders of the party. Gorky preferred Martov and the Mensheviks
and was highly critical of Lenin's attempts to create a small party
of professional revolutionaries.
Gorky continued
to write and his most successful novels include Three
of Them (1900), Mother
(1906), A Confession
(1908), Okurov City (1909)
and the Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin
(1910).
Gorky was
strongly opposed the First World War and
he was attacked in the Russian press as being unpatriotic. In 1915
he established the political-literary journal, Letopis
(Chronicle) and helped establish the Russian Society of the Life of
the Jews, an organization that protested against the persecution of
the Jewish community in Russia.
In March,
1917, Gorky welcomed the abdication of Nicholas
II and supported the Provisional
Government. Gorky wrote "We won not because we are strong,
but because the government was weak. We have made a political revolution
and have to reinforce our conquest. I am a social democrat, but I
am saying and will continue to say, that the time has not come for
socialist-style reforms."
Gorky started
a newspaper, New Life, in 1917,
and used it to attack the idea that the Bolsheviks
were planning to overthrow the government of Alexander
Kerensky. On 16th October, 1917, he called on Vladimir
Lenin to deny these rumours and show he was "capable of leading
the masses, and not a weapon in the hands of shameless adventurers
of fanatics gone mad."
After the
October Revolution the new government
got Joseph Stalin to lead the attack on
Gorky. In the newspaper Workers' Road,
Stalin wrote: "A whole list of such great names was discarded
by the Russian Revolution. Plekhanov, Kropotkin, Breshkovskaia, Zasulich
and all those revolutionaries who are distinguished only because they
are old. We fear that Gorky is drawn towards them, into the archives.
Well, to each his own. The Revolution neither pities nor buries its
dead."
Gorky retaliated
by writing in the New Life in
7th November, 1917. "Lenin and Trotsky and their followers already
have been poisoned by the rotten venom of power. The proof of this
is their attitude toward freedom of speech and of person and toward
all the ideals for which democracy was fighting." Three days
later Gorky called Vladimir Lenin and Leon
Trotsky the "Napoleons of socialism" who were involved
in a "cruel experiment with the Russian people."
In January,
1918, Gorky led the attack on Lenin's decision to close down the Constituent
Assembly. Gorky wrote in the New Life
that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the
ideals of generations of reformers: "For a hundred years the
best people of Russia lived with the hope of a Constituent Assembly.
In this struggle for this idea thousands of the intelligentsia perished
along with tens of thousands of workers and peasants."
The Bolshevik
government controlled the distribution of newsprint and in July, 1918,
it cut off supplies to New Life
and Gorky was forced to close his newspaper. The government also took
action making it impossible for Gorky to get his work published in
Russia.
During
the Civil War Gorky agreed to give his
support to the Bolsheviks against
the White Army. In return Vladimir
Lenin gave him permission to establish the publishing company,
World Literature. This enabled Gorky to give employment to people
such as Victor Serge and other critics
of the Soviet government.
Privately,
Gorky remained an opponent of the government. In September, 1919,
he wrote to Vladimir Lenin: "for me
it became clear that the "reds" are the enemies of the people
just as the "whites". Personally, I of course would rather
be destroyed by the "whites", but the "reds" are
also no comrades of mine."
In 1921
Gorky once again clashed with the Soviet government over the suppression
of the Kronstadt Uprising. Gorky blamed
Gregory Zinoviev for the way the sailors
were treated after the rebellion. Gorky failed to save the life of
the writer, Nikolai Gumilev, who was
arrested and executed for his support for the Kronstadt sailors. He
was also unsuccessfully in obtaining an exit visa for the poet, Alexander
Blok, who was dangerously ill. By the time Zinoviev gave permission
for Blok to leave the country, he was dead.
Gorky based
his play, The Plodder Slovotekov,
on his experiences of dealing with Gregory
Zinoviev. The play began its run on 18th June, 1921, but its criticism
of the Soviet government's inefficient bureaucracy resulted in it
being closed down after only three performances.
During
the terrible famine of 1921, Gorky used his world fame to appeal for
funds to provide food for the people starving in Russia. One of those
who responded was Herbert Hoover, head
of the American Relief Administration (ARA).
Gorky continued
to criticize the Soviet government and after coming under considerable
pressure from Vladimir Lenin, he agreed
to leave the country. In October, 1921, Gorky went to live in Germany
where he joined a community of around 600,000 Russian émigrés.
He continued to criticize Lenin and in one article wrote: "Russia
is not of any concern to Lenin but as a charred log to set the bourgeois
world on fire." In July, 1922, Gorky campaigned against the decision
to sentence to death twelve leading members of the Socialist
Revolutionary Party.
Gorky stayed
in Germany for two and half years before moving to Sorrento in Italy.
He continued to take a keen interest in Russian literature and was
particularly impressed with the work of Isaac
Babel, Vsevolod Ivanov and Konstantin
Fedin. He often invited these writers to stay with him in Sorrento
and did what he could to promote their careers.
Joseph
Stalin attempted to bring an end to Gorky's exile by inviting
him back to his homeland to celebrate the author's sixtieth birthday.
Gorky accepted the invitation and returned on 20th May, 1928. Stalin
wanted Gorky to write a biography of him. He refused but did take
the opportunity to seek help for those writers being persecuted in
the Soviet Union. This included asking for exit visas for some writers
and the publication of the works of others.
Over the
next few years Gorky played an important role in saving the lives
of writers such as Victor Serge and Yevgeni
Zamyatin when he successfully obtained permission from Stalin
to let them leave the Soviet Union. In return, Gorky agreed to publicly
support some of Stalin's policies. This included collectivization,
his opposition to world revolution, and the formation of the Soviet
Writers' Union.
It is unlikely
that Gorky ever discovered the full picture of what Joseph
Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union. He was kept under close
surveillance by the NKVD and his private
correspondence reveals that he believed Stalin that Leon
Trotsky and his followers were behind the assassination of Sergy
Kirov.
Maxim Gorky
died of a heart attack on 18th June, 1936. Rumours began circulating
that Stalin had arranged for him to be murdered. This story was given
some support when Genrikh Yagoda, the
head of the NKVD at the time of his death,
was successfully convicted of Gorky's murder in 1938.
(1)
Osip Volzhanin first met Maxim Gorky in 1889.
He was
tall, stooped, dressed in a coat-like jacket and high polished boots.
His face was ordinary, plebeian, with a homely duck-like nose. By
his appearance he could easily have been taken for a worker or a craftsman.
The young man sat on the window sill, and swinging his long legs,
spoke strongly emphasizing the letter "O". We listened with
great delight to his stories, though Somov, an implacable "political",
disapproved of the stories and the behaviour of the young man. In
his opinion, the latter occupied himself with trifles.
(2)
Statement signed by Maxim Gorky and forty-two other people who were
critical of the way the police dealt with the student demonstration
on 4th March, 1901.
We believe
that the students were provoked by the police to assemble, and that
the leaflets and the invitations issued to the students originated
in the offices of the Okhrana. We declare that the Cossacks and not
the students were first to start the scuffle, that the Cossacks grabbed
women by their hair and beat them with whips.
(3)
Maxim Gorky, letter to N. D. Teleshov (December, 1901)
The aim
of literature is to help man to understand himself, to strengthen
the trust in himself, and to develop in him the striving toward truth;
it is to fight meanness in people, to learn how to find the good in
them, to awake in their souls shame, anger, courage; to do all in
order that man should become nobly strong.
(4)
Maxim Gorky was one of those who took part in the march to the Winter
Palace on 22nd January, 1915. That night George
Gapon took refuge in Gorky's house.
Gapon by
some miracle remained alive, he is in my house asleep. He now says
there is no Tsar anymore, no church, no God. This is a man who has
great influence upon the workers of the Putilov works. He has the
following of close to 10,000 men who believe in him as a saint. He
will lead the workers on the true path.
(5)
Maxim Gorky wrote to Leonid Andreev about his first impressions of
New York (11th April, 1906)
It is such
an amazing fantasy of stone, glass, and iron, a fantasy constructed
by crazy giants, monsters longing after beauty, stormy souls full
of wild energy. All these Berlins, Parises, and other "big"
cities are trifles in comparison with New York. Socialism should first
be realized here - that is the first thing you think of, when you
see the amazing houses, machines, etc.
(6)
Frank Giddings, The Social Lynching
of Gorky and Andreeva, The Independent (1906)
Maxim Gorky came to this country not for the purpose of
putting himself on exhibition, as many literary characters have done
at one time or another, not for the purpose of lining his pockets
with American gold, but for the purpose of obtaining sympathy and
financial assistance for a people struggling against terrific odds,
as the American people once struggled, for political and individual
liberty. All was assertion, accusation, hysteria, impertinence in
the way the papers have tried to instruct Gorky in morality.
(7)
Maxim Gorky first met Vladimir
Lenin at the Fifth Congress of the Social
Democratic Labour Party in 1907.
When we were introduced, he shook me heartily by the hand,
and scrutinizing me with his keen eyes and speaking in the tone of
an old acquaintance, he said jocularly: "So glad you've come,
believe you're fond of a scrap? There's going to be a fine old scuffle
here."
I did not
expect Lenin to be like that. Something was lacking in him. He rolled
his r's gutturally, and had a jaunty way of standing with his hands
somehow poked up under his armpits. He was somehow too ordinary and
did not give the impression of being a leader.
(8)
V. M. Khodasevich first met Maxim Gorky in 1916.
Before me stood a tall man of slender build, his head
relative to his height, rather small. I was stuck by the intense,
very attractive, childlike, blue eyes. There was nothing artificial
about him, a simple demeanour, nothing that would harken of him being
famous. He was dressed in a grey well-fitting suit, a blue shirt and
no tie.
(9)
Maxim Gorky, letter to his son (April,
1917)
Remember, the revolution just began, it will last for
a long time. We won not because we are strong, but because the government
was weak. We have made a political revolution and have to reinforce
our conquest. I am a social democrat, but I am saying and will continue
to say, that the time has not come for socialist-style reforms. The
new government has inherited not a state but its ruins.
(10)
Maxim Gorky, New Life (7th
November, 1917)
Lenin and Trotsky and their followers already have been
poisoned by the rotten venom of power. The proof of this is their
attitude toward freedom of speech and of person and toward all the
ideals for which democracy was fighting. Blind fanatics and conscienceless
adventurers are rushing at full speed on the road on the road to a
social revolution - in actuality, it is a road toward anarchy.
(11)
Maxim Gorky, New Life (10th
November, 1917)
Lenin and Trotsky and all who follow them are dishonoring
the Revolution, and the working-class. Imagining themselves Napoleons
of socialism. The proletariat is for Lenin the same as iron ore is
for a metallurgist. It is possible, taking into consideration the
present conditions, to cast out of this ore a socialist state? Obviously
this is impossible. Conscious workers who follow Lenin must understand
that a pitiless experiment is being carried out with the Russian people
which is going to destroy the best forces of the workers, and which
will stop the normal growth of the Russian Revolution for a long time.
(12)
Maxim Gorky, New Life (9th January, 1918)
For a hundred years the best people of Russia lived with
the hope of a Constituent Assembly. In this struggle for this idea
thousands of the intelligentsia perished and tens of thousands of
workers and peasants.
On 5th
January, the unarmed revolutionary democracy of Petersburg - workers,
officials - were peacefully demonstrating in favour of the Constituent
Assembly. Pravda lies when it writes that the demonstration
was organized by the bourgeoisie and by the bankers. Pravda
lies; it knows that the bourgeoisie has nothing to rejoice in the
opening of the Constituent Assembly, for they are of no consequence
among the 246 socialists and 140 Bolsheviks. Pravda knows that
the workers of the Obukhavo, Patronnyi and other factories were taking
part in the demonstrations. And these workers were fired upon. And
Pravda may lie as much as it wants, but it cannot hide the
shameful facts.
(13)
Maxim Gorky, letter to Alexei
Rykov
(3rd July, 1922)
If the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries will end
with a death sentence, then this will be a premeditated murder, a
foul murder. I beg of you to inform Leon Trotsky and the others that
this is my contention. I hope this will not surprise you since I had
told the Soviet authorities a thousand times that it is a senseless
and criminal to decimate the ranks of our intelligentsia in our illiterate
and lacking of culture country. I am convinced, that if the SR's should
be executed the crime will result in a moral blockade of Russia by
all of socialist Europe.
(14)
Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary
(1945)
Maxim Gorky welcomed me affectionately. In the famished
years of his youth, he had been acquainted with my mother's family
at Nizhni-Novgorod. His apartment at the Kronversky Prospect, full
of books, seemed as warm as a greenhouse. He himself was chilly even
under his thick grey sweater, and coughed terribly, the result of
his thirty years' struggle against tuberculosis. Tall, lean and bony,
broad-shouldered and hollow-chested, he stooped a little as he walked.
His frame, sturdily-built but anaemic, appeared essentially as a support
for his head. An ordinary, Russian man in the street's head, bony
and pitted, really almost ugly with its jutting cheek-bones, great
thin-lipped mouth and professional smeller's nose, broad and peaked.
He spoke
harshly about the Bolsheviks: they were "drunk with authority",
"cramping the violent, spontaneous anarchy of the Russian people",
and "starting bloody despotism all over again"; all the
same they were "facing chaos alone" with some incorruptible
men in their leadership. His observations always started from facts,
from chilling anecdotes upon which he would base his well-considered
generalizations.
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