Maxim Gorky

Gorky

By Henri Troyat

Allison & Busby, 1994. 216 pp., $19.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/7999

In 1892, Alexey Peshkov adopted a new name for the publication of his first story in Russia, and Maxim Gorky, "the Bitter One", entered history. He had, as the French writer Henri Troyat recounts, gorged on the bitterness of life in tsarist Russia.

He was savagely beaten by his grandfather, step-father and other "little tsars". Sent out to work at age 11, he tramped over most of Russia observing and experiencing the misery of that feudal hell and the havoc it wrought on people's characters. He was particularly repelled by the coarseness of men in their dealings with women and the ugliness and brutality of rape.

Never one to accept "patience and submission to external forces", those "virtues of cattle, trees and stones", he fought back, defending his mother, peasant wives, prostitutes and others from physical attacks and abuse. It was an unequal struggle, however, and, despairing of the "appalling, squalid lives" in the world around him, he attempted suicide when he was only 19, sending a bullet through his lung.

He eventually found, in literature, a solution to his torments. Books offered a vision of better things for humanity, but his was not a book-learning that cut him off from life. He was attracted to young revolutionists debating strategies for liberation — educating the peasants, assassinating tsarist officials. Gorky's eventual choice was the Marxists who advocated working-class organisation and socialist revolution.

His early stories, with their portrayal of life in the raw, won him an audience amongst literate workers and the radical intelligentsia. They also made him an enemy of the tsarist state. He was plagued by the political police, and his first play at the Moscow Art Theatre had that bastion of liberal opposition to tsarism surrounded by mounted police.

He took part in the failed Revolution of 1905, not only with his pen but also helping to distribute weapons to striking workers. "Eight husky Georgian Bolsheviks" were assigned to him as a bodyguard to prevent assassination. Exiled after the crushing of the revolution, he returned to Russia in time for the Revolution of 1917, where he opposed the Bolsheviks' strategy for the working class to take power by insurrection.

As editor of New Life, a daily paper on the left edge of the moderate socialist Mensheviks, Gorky let fly with verbal missiles aimed at the Bolsheviks — Lenin and Trotsky were "poisoned by the slimy venom of power"; they were "blind fanatics", "demented lunatics"; Lenin was a "slave of dogma" and his "acolytes were slaves of their leader".

As Troyat notes (while citing these polemics with not a little glee), Gorky's socialism "was not reasoned but intuitive", and he could swing with mood and circumstance. The destruction of the old order in Russia was too tempestuous, too sweeping and sometimes too indiscriminate for the self-taught Gorky with his exaggerated love of "culture" and its human and artistic heritage.

Gorky did perform a useful service during the early years of Soviet power — he interceded with Lenin (although a political opponent, Gorky was also a personal friend of Lenin) on behalf of intellectuals and moderate socialists (as well as less innocent casualties from the old leisured classes). Gorky went into exile again in 1922, but his experience of the embittered emigres with their wild talk of Bolshevik "drinkers of Russian blood", and his homesickness for Russia, drove him back to his homeland in 1928.

Unfortunately, the Stalinist cancer was nearing full toxicity at this stage, and Gorky, from a mixture of "sincerity and opportunism", became the literary front man for Stalin. He accepted constraints on democracy and soft-soaped the labour camps, believing this was for the good of the workers and, possibly, because the regime rewarded Gorky for his loyalty with material luxury for the first time in his 60 years of hardship.

"Idealism and self-preservation", says Troyat, combined to make Gorky an apologist for tyranny during his later years. His literary output during these years was eminently forgettable. His novels were "ponderous and doctrinaire", creaking with "militant political sermonising".

At 68 years old, tubercular and in poor health, Gorky died in 1936. It may have been a natural death, as argued by Troyat, though there is a version which has Gorky poisoned by Stalin, because Gorky could never fully reconcile himself to Stalin. After his death, papers denouncing Stalin were found in Gorky's villa and burned. Stalin's blaming of Gorky's death on Trotsky may have been a case of the old ploy of a thief shouting "Stop thief!" to divert attention.

The head of Stalin's secret police said, after the discovery of Gorky's anti-Stalin papers, "No matter how you feed the wolf, he still dreams of the woods". It would be fitting to leave Gorky with this parting honour as it captures the strengths of this writer/activist who was born and died an opponent of cruel authority, and who has left a minor treasury of literature. Gorky had all the virtues of the storyteller — direct, clear narratives of real life from one who confronted the world head on in order to change it.

His writing often tipped over into simplistic plots and empty stereotypes, and, always, his intensity of feeling and language "masked the poverty of his psychological analysis", but his early stories and plays, and his classic biography, retain a simple power that bears the march of time well.

Trotsky's tribute to Gorky gets it just right: "never a revolutionary", Gorky was, however, inspired by and part of the great Russian social upheaval that changed history. He was "a great literary talent, not touched, however, by the breath of genius". Troyat's book goes some way to rescuing Gorky from his old Stalinist minders and his capitalist detractors, accepting his political limits and literary shortcomings as part of the unique talent he was.