Maxim Gorky

Gorky's autographed portrait

Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (In Russian Алексей Максимович Пешков) (March 28, 1868 – June 14, 1936), better known as Maxim Gorky (Максим Горький), was a Russian author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. Socialist realism, an approach that sought to be "realist in form" and "socialist in content," became the artistic basis for all Soviet art and made heroes of previously unheroic literary types, holding that the purpose of art was to depict the glorious struggle of the proletariat in its creation of socialism.

Gorky was born in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, renamed Gorky in his honor during the Soviet era but restored to its original name following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989. Gorky was something of an enigma, a revolutionary who embraced the ethics and ideals of the revolution early on but had growing doubts about Lenin and the Bolsheviks following the 1917 Russian Revolution. Gorky's legacy is inextricably linked with both the revolution and the literary movement, socialist realism, that he helped to create.

From 1906 to 1913 and from 1921 to 1929 he lived abroad, mostly in Capri; after his return to the Soviet Union he reluctantly embraced the cultural policies of the time. Despite his belated support, he was not permitted to travel outside the country again.

Life

Maxim Gorky was born on March 16, 1868, in the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod, Russian's forth largest city. Gorky's father died when Gorky was 4 years old and lost his mother at age 9, and the boy was raised in conditions of hardship by his maternal grandparents. By age 10 Gorky was largely on his own and began a series of occupations as shopkeeper's errand boy, dishwasher on a steamer, and apprentice to an icon maker. During these youthful years Gorky witnessed the harsh, often cruel facts of life for the underclass, impressions that would inform his later writings.

Almost completely self-educated, Gorky tried unsuccessfully to enter the University of Kazan. For the next 6 years he wandered widely about Russia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus. After an attempt at suicide in December 1887, Gorky traveled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing.

1900, Yasnaya Polyana. Leo Tolstoy and Gorky.

1900, Yalta. Anton Chekhov and Gorky.

Gorky began writing under pseudonym Иегудиил Хламида (Jehudiel Khlamida), publishing stories and articles in newspapers of the Volga region. He began using the pseudonym Gorky (literally "bitter") in 1892, while working for the Tiflis newspaper Кавказ (The Caucasus). Gorky's first book, a two-volume collection of his writings entitled Очерки и рассказы (Essays and Stories) was published in 1898. It enjoyed great success, catapulting him to fame.

At the turn of the century, Gorky became associated with the Moscow Art Theater, which staged some of his plays. He also became affiliated with the Marxist journals Life and New Word and publicly opposed the Tsarist regime. Gorky befriended many revolutionary leaders, becoming Lenin's personal friend after they met in 1902, exposed governmental control of the press, and was arrested numerous times. In 1902, Gorky was elected the honorary Academician of Literature, but Nicholas II ordered the annulment of this election. In protest, Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko left the Academy.

Gorky and the Revolution

While briefly imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress during the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905, Gorky wrote the play Children of the Sun, nominally set during an 1862 cholera epidemic, but universally understood to relate to present-day events. In 1905, he officially joined the ranks of the Bolshevik faction in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. He left the country in 1906 to avoid arrest, traveling to America where he wrote his most famous novel, Mother.

He returned to Russia in 1913. During World War I, his apartment in Petrograd was turned into a Bolshevik staff room, but his relations with the Communists turned sour. Two weeks after the October Revolution of 1917 he wrote: "Lenin and Trotsky don't have any idea about freedom or human rights. They are already corrupted by dirty poison of the power, this is visible by their shameful disrespect of freedom of speech and all other civil liberties for which the democracy was fighting." Lenin's 1919 letters to Gorky contain threats: "My advice to you: change your surroundings, your views, your actions, otherwise life may turn away from you."

In August 1921, Nikolai Gumilyov, his friend, fellow writer and Anna Akhmatova's husband, was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka for his monarchist views. Gorky hurried to Moscow, attained the order to release Gumilyov from Lenin personally, but upon his return to Petrograd found out that Gumilyov had already been shot. In October, Gorky emigrated to Italy on grounds of illness: he had contracted tuberculosis.

Return from exile

1931. Kliment Voroshilov, Maxim Gorky, and Joseph Stalin (left to right)

While Gorky had his struggles with the Soviet regime, he never entirely broke ranks. His exile had been self-imposed. But in Sorrento, Gorky found himself without money and without glory. He visited the USSR several times after 1929, and in 1932, Joseph Stalin personally invited him to return from emigration for good, an offer he accepted. In June 1929, Gorky visited Solovki (cleaned up for this occasion) and wrote a positive article about the Gulag camp that already had gained an ill reputation in the West.

Gorky, Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Stalin, and Kalinin at the podium of Lenin's mausoleum.

Gorky's return from fascist Italy was a major propaganda victory for the Soviets. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin and given a mansion (formerly belonging to the millionaire, Ryabushinsky, currently Gorky Museum) in Moscow and a dacha in the suburbs. One of the central Moscow streets, Tverskaya, was renamed in his honor, in addition to the city of his birth.

In 1933, Gorky edited an infamous book about the Belomorkanal, presented as an example of the "successful rehabilitation of the former enemies of proletariat."

File:Painting of maxim gorki.jpg

Older Gorky. Artistic rendering.

He supported the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 and Stalin's policies in general. Yet, with the step-up of Stalinist repressions, especially after the death of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Gorky was placed under unannounced house arrest in his Moscow house. The sudden death of his son Maxim Peshkov in May 1935 was followed by his own in June 1936. Both died under mysterious circumstances, but speculation that they were poisoned has never been proven. Stalin and Molotov were among those who hand-carried Gorky's coffin during his funeral.

During the Bukharin "show trial" in 1938, one of the charges brought up was that Gorky was killed by Genrikh Yagoda's NKVD agents.

Gorky's city of birth was renamed back to Nizhny Novgorod in 1990.

Works

Gorky's literary output is intimately bound up with the revolution and the artistic movement that he helped to found, socialist realism. His novel, Mother, would serve as example to numerous others. It tells the story of the revolutionary transformation of Pavel Vlasov and his mother, Nilovna. Pavel's story is fairly typical, a factory worker who becomes radicalized. But the story of his mother, Nilovna, is what gives the novel its center. She represents the transition from simple, uneducated Christian to dedicated revolutionary. Timid and superstitious, she undergoes a process of enlightenment, with the valor born of conviction. The real hero of the novel is the revolution itself. The milieu is proletarian. Morality is determined by class. All representatives of the regime and upper class are corrupt and disgusting. The peasants are sympathetic but undisciplined. The proletarians are the moral force for positive change.

His best novels are the autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, In the World, and My University Years. (The title of the last novel ironically refers to the fact that Gorky was denied admission to Kazan University.) Gorky is at his best when recounting episodes from his own life. Once again the lower class milieu provides the backdrop for his reflections on pre-revolutionary life. Despite his uneasy relationship with the revolution, his work is inextricably linked to the real drama that unfolded in Russia after the turn of the century. His struggle to find a moral high ground within post-revolutionary society ultimately did not bear much fruit, and he perished like many of his colleagues, unable to realize his revolutionary aspirations.

Selected works

• Makar Chudra (Макар Чудра)
• Chelkash (Челкаш)
• Petit-Bourgeois (Мещане)
• Malva
• Creatures That Once Were Men
• Twenty-six Men and a Girl
• Foma Gordeyev (Фома Гордеев)
• Three of Them (Трое)
• A Confession (Исповедь)
• Okurov City (Городок Окуров)
  

  Gorky Reading to Stalin and Molotov (1940).
• The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin (Жизнь Матвея Кожемякина)
• Children of the Sun (Дети солнца), 1905
• Mother (Мать), 1907
• The Lower Depths (На дне)
• Childhood (Детство), 1913–1914
• In the World (В людях), 1916
• Song of a Storm Petrel (Песня о Буревестнике)
• Song of a Falcon (Песня о Соколе)
• My Universities (Мои университеты), 1923
• The Artamonov Business (Дело Артамоновых)
• Life of Klim Samgin (Жизнь Клима Самгина)
• Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev
• V.I.Lenin (В.И.Ленин)

Tributes to Gorky

• The Gorky Trilogy is a series of three feature films—The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, My Apprenticeship, and My Universities—directed by Mark Donskoy, filmed in the Soviet Union, released 1938–1940. The trilogy was adapted from Gorky's autobiography.

• The largest airplane in the world in the mid-1930s, the Tupolev ANT-20, was also named Maxim Gorky. It was used for propaganda purposes and often demonstratively flew over the Soviet capital.

Quotes

• "Если враг не сдается, его уничтожают" (An enemy who doesn't give up shall be destroyed)

External link

• Brief biography
• Maxim Gorky Internet Archive at Marxists.org
• "Anton Chekhov: Fragments of Recollections" by Maxim Gorky
• Some works of Maxim Gorky in the original Russian
• The Song of the Stormy Petrel in original Russian
• Works by Maxim Gorky. Project Gutenberg

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