Maxim Gorky (Alexey Maximovich Peshkov, Alexey Maximovich Gorky) or simply: "Gorky" (16 (28) March 1868, Nizhny Novgorod — 18 June 1936, Gorki-10, Moscow Region) — Russian writer, playwright, publicist, Meme.
Nature of the phenomenon
A significant Russian and great Soviet writer. As a public figure he became known as the ideologist of reduced forms of literary realism.
Beyond his well-known contribution to Russian literature, the life path of Alexey Peshkov (Maxim Gorky) — a native of a prosperous Nizhny Novgorod merchant family — can be said to have traced a route that many Russian oligarchs would later follow: living on islands and drawing sustenance from the resources of one's own people.
Life and work
Maxim Gorky was born on 28 March 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod into the family of a cabinetmaker. His parents died young, and the writer's childhood was spent in the home of his grandfather Vasily Kashirin. His grandfather taught the boy to read from church books, while his grandmother Akulina Ivanovna introduced her grandson to folk songs and fairy tales — but most importantly, she took the place of a mother, "filling" him, in Gorky's own words, "with a firm strength for a hard life" (Childhood).
In the summer of 1884, the sixteen-year-old Alexey Peshkov set off for Kazan hoping to enter university. However, lacking the means, he had to content himself with active socializing among students, attending self-education circles and gatherings. During this time he earned his living through day labor: working as a general laborer, a docker, and a baker. An unsettled life and personal troubles led Gorky to a psychological crisis that ended in a suicide attempt (December 1887).
From the summer of 1888 to October 1892, Gorky wandered "across Russia." Over four years he traversed all of southern Russia — from Astrakhan to Moscow — and visited southern Bessarabia, Crimea, and the Caucasus. He worked as a farmhand in villages, labored at fishing and salt operations, washed dishes, served as a railway watchman, and worked in repair workshops.
During these years Gorky made many acquaintances in creative intellectual circles, developed enthusiasms for Narodism, Tolstoyanism, and social-democratic teachings, and wrote poetry and prose. In September 1892 his story "Makar Chudra" was published in the newspaper Kavkaz (Tiflis) under the pen name "M. Gorky."
Until 1909, Gorky was closest in his views to the Bolsheviks. In 1909, owing to his sympathies with the "Vperyodists" and "God-builders," he parted ways with Lenin. After the February Revolution he co-founded, together with a number of left social-democratic publicists and writers, the internationalist newspaper Novaya Zhizn (New Life), which became the unifying center of a distinctive current within the Social-Democratic Party known as the "Novaya Zhizn tendency."
Novaya Zhizn and Gorky himself greeted the October Revolution with pessimism, predicting its imminent collapse. In the first weeks and months after the revolution, the writer published a series of articles under the general heading "Untimely Thoughts," in which he sharply criticized the course set by Lenin, emphasizing the prematurity of the revolution and its destructive consequences. Gorky spoke out in defense of the bourgeois press, arguing that the very nature of the transitional period demanded free competition among different political parties. Nevertheless, by 1919 he had become an ardent supporter of Soviet power.
The Bolsheviks themselves, however, did not regard him as a kindred spirit, and from 1921 to 1928 Gorky lived in emigration, departing after receiving extremely insistent advice from Lenin. Gorky settled in Sorrento (Italy), but maintained ties with the young Soviet literary scene (L. M. Leonov, V. V. Ivanov, A. A. Fadeyev, I. E. Babel). He wrote the cycle "Stories of 1922–1924," "Notes from a Diary," and the novel The Artamonov Business.
From 1925 Gorky began work on the historical epic The Life of Klim Samgin (the novel's original title was "Forty Years"), which, as the writer conceived it, was to serve as a chronicle of a pivotal era in the history of Russia and the Russian intelligentsia. He continued work on the novel until his death, but never managed to finish it.
In May 1928 Gorky returned to the USSR and spent the entire summer traveling around the country (Kursk, Kharkov, Dneprostroi, Zaporozhye, Crimea, Rostov-on-Don, Baku, Tiflis, Kodjori, Yerevan, Vladikavkaz, Stalingrad, Samara, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod). His impressions of these travels were gathered into the book Through the Soviet Union (1929).
In 1933 Gorky moved to Moscow. On his initiative, the journals Nashi Dostizheniya (Our Achievements) (1929–1936) and Literaturnaya Ucheba (Literary Studies) (1930–1941) were founded, along with the publication History of Factories and Plants, which released around 250 books of various kinds in 1931–1933, the publication History of the Civil War, a literary-artistic almanac, and the series Library of the Poet.
Gorky played a key role in establishing the Union of Soviet Writers, serving as the organizer and chairman of its First All-Union Congress (1934). On Gorky's initiative, the Literary Institute was founded; it was subsequently named after him.
Maxim Gorky died on June 18, 1936. His death was shrouded in rumor. Even during the Stalinist repressions, the official version held that the great proletarian writer had been "treated to death" by killer doctors. This version was later consigned to oblivion, still within the Soviet era. Today, the circumstances and causes of Gorky's death — and of his son Maxim's death in May 1934 — remain a subject of debate.
Political Journalism
From 1921 to 1931, Gorky lived abroad, primarily in Italy on the island of Capri. Even from abroad, the celebrated proletarian writer lent his authority to death sentences passed on absurd charges.
Upon returning to the USSR, Gorky threw himself energetically into the wholesale hunt for supposed "enemies" and "spies." Between 1929 and 1931, he regularly published articles in Pravda that were later collected under the title We Shall Stand Guard! These pieces called on readers to seek out wreckers in their midst — people who had secretly betrayed the cause of communism. The most famous article, "If the Enemy Does Not Surrender, He Is Destroyed" (1930), became a kind of motto for the whole of Soviet policy.
In this, Gorky — like the punitive organs he so admired — required no evidence whatsoever to affix the label "enemy." In his view, the most dangerous enemies were precisely those against whom no evidence existed. "Gorky does not merely sing in the chorus of accusers — he writes the music for that chorus," observes the Swiss scholar Georges Nivat.
The language of these articles by the "humanist writer" is striking: people are routinely referred to as flies, tapeworms, parasites, half-human creatures, degenerates. "Traitors, turncoats, and spies of the former 'masters of the country' are at work among the workers of the Soviet Union… It is entirely natural that the workers' and peasants' government should crush its enemies like lice." At the same time, Gorky extolled "the historically and scientifically grounded, genuinely universal, proletarian humanism of Marx–Lenin–Stalin" (the article "Proletarian Humanism"), and marveled at "how simple and accessible wise Comrade Stalin is" ("Letter to the Delegates of the All-Union Congress of Shock-Worker Collective Farmers"). Retaining his long-standing hatred of the peasantry, Gorky reminded his readers that "peasant strength is a socially unhealthy force, and that the cultural and political, consistent work of Lenin and Stalin is directed precisely toward eradicating from the peasant's consciousness this 'strength' of his, for that strength is… the instinct of the petty proprietor, expressed, as we know, in forms of zoological brutishness" ("Open Letter to A. S. Serafimovich," 1934). It bears recalling that this was published at a time when the most industrious and enterprising peasants ("kulaks") were being shot or deported to the permafrost zone.
In support of the OGPU-fabricated "Industrial Party" case, Gorky wrote the play Somov and Others (1930). In keeping with that absurd trial, the play features saboteur engineers who maliciously obstruct production to spite the people. At the end, "just retribution" arrives in the form of OGPU agents, who arrest not only the engineers but also a former singing teacher — whose crime is having "poisoned" Soviet youth with talk of the soul and ancient music. In his articles "To the Workers and Peasants" and "To the Humanists," Gorky endorses the equally preposterous charges against Professor Ryazanov and his "accomplices," who were shot for "organizing a Food Hunger."
Gorky did not necessarily approve of every repression. The arrests of old Bolsheviks — veterans of the struggle against the "accursed tsarism" — troubled him. In 1932, he even expressed his bewilderment to the Cheka chief G. Yagoda over the arrest of L. Kamenev. But the fate of the millions of ordinary people condemned to death aroused no such bewilderment in him. In 1929, Gorky visited the Solovetsky camp. One of the juvenile prisoners, seeing in him a defender of the oppressed, risked telling him about the monstrous conditions of life in that camp. Gorky shed tears — but after his conversation with the boy (who was shot almost immediately afterward), he left enthusiastic praise for the jailers in the Solovetsky camp's "Visitors' Book."
In 1934, under Gorky's editorship, the volume The Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal was published. The book endorses all the delirious accusations of the day — that engineers, for instance, were poisoning female workers with arsenic in factory canteens and secretly sabotaging machinery. The concentration camp is portrayed as a beacon of progress, and the book asserts that no one dies there — in reality, no fewer than 100,000 prisoners perished during the construction of the White Sea Canal. Speaking before the canal's construction workers on August 25, 1933, Gorky marveled at "how the OGPU remolds people," and spoke with tearful admiration of the Chekists' excessive modesty. In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's assessment in The Gulag Archipelago, The Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal was the first work in Russian literature to glorify slave labor.
Regardless of whether one considers Gorky's talent first-rate or press-inflated; regardless of whether one believes in his sincerity or suspects that he privately disapproved of Stalin's policies; regardless of whether one accepts the theory that the 68-year-old writer, long treated for tuberculosis, died not from illness but from poison administered on orders from the Kremlin — the fact remains: Gorky was complicit in the organized murder of millions of innocent people.
Demanding Death for the "Organizers of the Food Famine" in the USSR
An example of A. M. Gorky's controversial public activity.
Gorky's address "To the Humanists" was first published simultaneously in the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia TsIK SSSR i VTsIK, 1930, issue 340, dated December 11.
It was included in the first and second editions of M. Gorky's book Publicistic Articles. Reproduced from the text prepared by the author for the second edition of that book. The text has been checked against the manuscript and the author-authorized typescript (A. M. Gorky Archive).
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To the Humanists
The "International Union of Democratic Writers," in the person of its General Secretary, Mr. Lucien Queint, has honored me with an invitation to contribute to the Union's literary journal. The Union's aim is "the rapprochement of democratic writers"; its presidium includes Romain Rolland and Upton Sinclair — men for whom I have great respect. But alongside them in the presidium sits Professor Albert Einstein, and on the committee Mr. Heinrich Mann. These two, together with many other humanists, recently signed a protest by the German "League for the Defense of Human Rights" against the execution of forty-eight criminals, the organizers of the Food Hunger in the Soviet Union. I am entirely certain that among human rights there is no right to commit a crime — and least of all a crime against the working people. The unspeakable vileness of the forty-eight's actions is well known to me; I know that what they did was something far more criminal and vile than what was done by the owners of the Chicago slaughterhouses, as described by E. Sinclair in his book The Jungle. The organizers of the Food Hunger, having provoked the righteous anger of the working people against whom they had hatched their vile conspiracy, were executed at the unanimous demand of the workers. I regard this execution as entirely lawful. It is the judgment of a people who, living and working in harsh conditions, denying themselves everything and sparing no effort, are courageously and successfully striving to build a workers' state free from predators and parasites — and also from those whose humanism, in essence, serves as a cover for predation and parasitism. It is clear that my assessment of the execution of the forty-eight sharply diverges from that of the "League for the Defense of Human Rights." And since Messrs. Einstein and Mann share the League's assessment, it goes without saying that any "rapprochement" between us is impossible, and I therefore decline to contribute to the journal of the "International Union of Democratic Writers." Over the past three years I have received several more invitations to participate in the organs of democratic "humanists." I did not reply to these invitations — let me try to make amends for my discourtesy. I address my reply to R. Rolland, E. Sinclair, B. Shaw, and H. G. Wells, whose names are mentioned in Mr. Lucien Queint's letter and whose opinion is not a matter of indifference to me — I believe it is to them that I owe an explanation of my attitude toward those intellectuals who have made humanism their profession. After the Ninth of January 1905, the humanist gentlemen of Europe, outraged by the mass killing of workers in the streets of St. Petersburg, bestowed upon Nikolai Romanov the title of "Bloody" — a title he had richly deserved even before that crime. But they did not protest against the French bankers who, having supplied the bloody tsar with money, helped him to destroy several thousand more of the most valuable Russians on the gallows, in penal servitude, and in prison. There was ample time for protest; the tsar's terror lasted three years. In 1910, together with Wilhelm Ostwald, Richard Dehmel, F. van Eeden, and Upton Sinclair, I took part in organizing an international association of intellectuals, whose aim was likewise the "rapprochement" of Europe's humanists. In 1914, Wilhelm Ostwald and Richard Dehmel were among the first to sign a bloodthirsty manifesto against England. That same year, a significant portion of Russian writers and scholars — all humanists! — composed and published something revoltingly shrill against the Germans, though not against the fact of the war itself. This was done by precisely those intellectuals who now, living in Berlin and Paris, clumsily and stupidly slander the workers' and peasants' government of the Soviet Union, poison the minds of Europe's humanists with filthy lies, preach the idea of intervention in the Soviet Union — that is, attempt to suggest the necessity of a new world war. This time, they who protested so passionately against "German atrocities" would like to see German and every other kind of "atrocity" visited upon the country that was their homeland, upon the people they once called their own. I find it necessary to state that I have never signed protests against German or any other military atrocities. I know that war is unbroken atrocity, and that in war people who have no grievance against one another destroy each other, having been forcibly placed in a condition of self-defense. I know that wars are organized by capitalists for the purpose of consolidating an order that makes the daily atrocities of "peacetime" routine — for the purpose of personal enrichment, not in the interest of the nation; the nation is the working people, and their economic interests are international. I know that capitalism is a contagious disease of peoples. I reject the right to existence of an order that makes wars between capitalists inevitable — wars fought by the forces of the working people and destructive of those very people. Against war — that supremely vile and senseless enterprise — the defenders of human rights do not protest. The Soviet proposal for complete and universal disarmament, put forward by Comrade Maxim Litvinov at the League of Nations, was not supported by the humanists. In 1918, the French, the British, and the Americans, having crushed Germany, organized a predatory raid upon a Russia exhausted by war — a raid aimed at turning Russia into their colony and plundering it as they plunder Germany. The humanists paid no attention to this fact, which was returning "cultured" Europe to the era of the exploits of Cortés and Pizarro. The "defenders of human rights" did not hear French General Franchet d'Espèrey exhorting his soldiers in Odessa: "The Russians are barbarians and scoundrels! Show them no ceremony — shoot them, from the peasant up to the highest representative." But those remarkable ravings of a savage were heard by those Russian humanists who stood alongside him then and who are now ready to assist any idiot capable, on the orders of his capitalists, of slashing and shooting the working people of the Soviet Union. Is it not true that humanists are a very strange breed? They are not in the least outraged by events in India, China, Africa, or Palestine; they are not outraged at home either, remaining indifferent to the growth of the zoological instincts of nationalism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, indifferent to the dramas and tragedies that play out almost daily in the old, blood-soaked edifices of bourgeois states. They make no attempt to protest against the shady dealings of Mr. Raymond Poincaré — a little man who nearly ruined France and who now diligently schemes a new slaughter of workers and peasants. It speaks poorly for the reason and health of bourgeois states that their destinies are managed by such nonentities as Poincaré and his ilk. Yes, there is a great deal of work for humanists in the modern world. One might point out to the head of the Catholic Church that preaching a crusade in the twentieth century is, at best, the humor of a misanthrope, and that such preaching has absolutely nothing in common with the "interests of culture" that humanists are so fond of invoking. One might ask the father of the Christian Church whether he truly approves of the position in which he and his Church found themselves in 1914–1918, when Christians were slaughtering one another by the hundreds of thousands. Yet throughout the world, humanists and defenders of "human rights" are for some reason interested in only one point on the map — the one occupied by the Union of Soviet Socialists. It is in the highest degree strange that they — literate people — find it possible and convenient to believe the tawdry fairy tale that the Soviet Union is a personal dictatorship, when it is obvious that what holds sway there is the concentrated energy of a many-million mass of workers and peasants — an energy organized by the genius of Vladimir Lenin and by the power of reason of his pupils and friends. The aim of this dictatorship is to cultivate, throughout the entire population of the Soviet Union, an awareness of their right to create new forms and conditions of cultural life, to build a socialist society of equals. This aim was not set by "the arbitrary will of fanatics and barbarians," as those people assert whose hatred compels them to feign ignorance and cretinism — this aim was set by the will of history, and it proves incontrovertibly that individualism as the basis of cultural development has exhausted itself, has outlived its time. Is violence used upon human beings in the cause of developing their consciousness? I say — yes! There has never been a moment when it was not used in pursuit of this goal. Culture is organized rational violence against the zoological instincts of people. In the schools of Europe, children are beaten for precisely this purpose — to make of them obedient servants of family and society, preservers of "cultural traditions" just like their parents. I strongly recommend to the pedagogues of Europe that they beat children for displays of the instinct of property, and also instill in children an awareness of their right to beat their parents for a passion for accumulating money through robbery — a robbery legalized by those same parents. Traitors, turncoats, and spies of the former "masters of the country" — masters who would like to restore their proprietary rights — are at work among the workers of the Soviet Union; it is entirely natural that the workers' and peasants' government should crush its enemies like lice. These former masters and former people are supported by the capitalists of Europe, its parasites, who support them in the hope of satisfying their morbid and insane thirst for profit. The workers and peasants of the Soviet Union are successfully building their state under conditions of zoological hatred toward them on the part of the bourgeoisie of the entire world — a class that has already degenerated, has exhausted its energy, is incapable of creating culture, and operates now only by force of inertia. What does this class of degenerates want? It wants to sit on someone else's neck a little while longer, to live a little longer off someone else's labor. Just a little. It does not count on a prolonged existence. One of its obedient servants, Gustave Hervé, luring German capitalists into a "rapprochement" with French ones, candidly let slip in the newspaper La Victoire the modest intentions of his masters. He wrote: Germany would sever its ties with Moscow and, standing together with Poland as a barrier against Russian Bolshevism, would take part in all economic measures in the interest of defending civilization from communist barbarism. The collapse of Bolshevism in Russia, the restoration of the capitalist regime there — and this must be remembered — means 20, 30, 40, or 50 years of guaranteed work for American and European industry. As you see, the capitalists want truly very little: no fewer than twenty and no more than fifty years of habitually tranquil, well-fed, colorless, licentious, and irresponsible life. And so, in order to secure for themselves this "life of prosperity," they are once again preparing to send millions of their workers and peasants and their colonial slaves into battle against a country with a population of 150 million and an army in which every soldier knows full well what he will be fighting for. In all its history, the bourgeoisie has never expressed its inhumanity in so frankly cynical and vile a form! But what is the matter? Why, over the past two years, has the bourgeoisie of Europe been exposing its inhuman nature with particular indecency and cynicism? A perfectly clear answer to this question is given by the former Conservative MP Arthur Hopkinson in the English journal Empire Review. He writes "with disarming candor": What I particularly wish to emphasize for the reader's information is that it is foolish to pretend that the Five-Year Plan has failed. It is a fact that in many areas the plan has already been exceeded. I am doing my utmost to warn the reader against the mistake that might arise from the assumption that the Five-Year Plan will fail, because in reality it is already achieving such sweeping success that it is becoming a threat to the entire civilized world. Hopkinson draws with horror the prospect of the USSR becoming a state independent of world capitalism. He calls frantically for war against the USSR, concluding his article with the following emphatic warning: The hammer and sickle may mean for Europe in the future what the crescent meant in the past. It may be true that "he who takes the sword shall perish by the sword." But the history of the next fifty years will show that he who did not take the sword will perish by a more shameful death. This former man is cleverer than Gustave Hervé. He says nothing about the "barbarism of communism," evidently understanding that communism and barbarism are incompatible. He does not shriek, as other idiots do, about the "destruction of culture" by communism. His wolfish howl is provoked by the fear that the Soviet Union is becoming a state independent of world capitalism. That, gentlemen humanists, is what strikes terror into the hearts of property-owners, and that is the source of the hatred for the Soviet Union, the source of the slanders against the workers' and peasants' government, its way of life, its people — a people whose remarkable energy is inaugurating an era of new and truly universal renaissance. Gentlemen humanists! Allow me to pose a naive question: Why do you not protest against a state order that permits a numerically negligible and morally ruined minority to dispose of the lives of the majority — to poison it with their vices, to keep it in conditions of poverty and ignorance, to send million-strong nations to fields of battle for mutual slaughter, to squander enormous quantities of metal and other treasures of the earth on armaments — treasures that belong to the working people and should secure their future? Does it not seem to you that this senseless order serves as an obstacle to the growth of the genuine, universal culture of which you platonically dream?Maxim Gorky
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Legacy in Nizhny Novgorod
- In 1932, Nizhny Novgorod was renamed The City of Gorky. The city's historical name was restored in 1990.
- Since 1944, the Nizhny Novgorod State Academic Drama Theatre has borne M. Gorky's name.
- There are streets and a Gorky Square named after Gorky in Nizhny Novgorod and the Nizhny Novgorod Region.
- The Gorky State Museum has been established.
- There is a Gorky House of Culture.
Points of Interest
- In almost every Soviet city there were Gorky squares and streets, which residents jokingly called "Whatshisname Street." In Moscow, Tverskaya Street long bore that name.
- In 1929, Gorky visited (archive) the Solovetsky labor camp. One of the juvenile prisoners, seeing in him a champion of the oppressed, risked telling him about the monstrous conditions of life in the camp. Gorky was moved to tears, yet after his conversation with the boy (who was shot almost immediately afterward) he left glowing praise for the jailers in the Solovetsky camp's "Visitors' Book."
- The ancient city of Nizhny Novgorod bore the name Gorky for many decades. Today this is recalled by the reservoir that flooded the Volga floodplain and by a railway station. The memory of Gorky is still preserved in the name of Ikonnikovo, a selo (larger village) and district center of Omsk Region, and in a suburb of Tsaritsyn (Volgograd). The Gorky name is also carried by a metro station in St. Petersburg, the Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Moscow, various ships, and countless other sites across Russia.