What you did not know about Maxim Gorky

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

His name was Alexey Peshkov, but he went down in history under the name of Maxim Gorky. The proletarian writer spent half his life abroad, lived in mansions and stood at the origins of "socialist realism." His fate was full of paradoxes.

Trample-rich man

For a long time, Gorky was portrayed by Soviet propaganda as a proletarian writer who emerged "from the people" and suffered hardship and want. The writer Bunin, however, in his memoirs quotes the dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron: “Gorky-Peshkov Alexey Maksimovich. Born in 1868, in a completely bourgeois environment: his father is the manager of a large steamship office; mother is the daughter of a wealthy dyer merchant. " It would seem that this is insignificant, the writer's parents died early, and his grandfather raised him, but it is unambiguous that Gorky quickly became one of the richest people of his time, and his financial well-being was fueled not only by fees.

Korney Chukovsky wrote interestingly about Gorky: “Now I remembered how Leonid Andreev scolded Gorky for me:“Pay attention: Gorky is a proletarian, and everything clings to the rich - to the Morozovs, to Sytin, to (he named a number of names). I tried to go on the same train with him in Italy - where are you going! Broke. There are no powers: he travels like a prince. " Poetess Zinaida Gippius also left interesting memories. On May 18, 1918, while still in Petrograd, she wrote: "Gorky buys antiques from the" bourgeoisie "who are dying of hunger for a pittance." As you can understand, Gorky was far from being a stranger to material well-being, and his biography, created already in Soviet times, is a well-fabricated myth that still requires detailed and impartial research.

Patriot Russophobe

Maxim Gorky more than once gave reason to doubt his patriotism. During the years of rampant “red terror” he wrote: “I explain the cruelty of the forms of revolution by the exceptional cruelty of the Russian people. The tragedy of the Russian revolution is played out among the "semi-wild people". “When the leaders of the revolution, the group of the most active intelligentsia, are accused of“beast”, I regard this accusation as a lie and slander, inevitable in the struggle of political parties or, among honest people, as a bona fide delusion." "Recent slave" - Gorky noted elsewhere - became "the most unbridled despot."

Political artist

The main contradiction in Gorky's life was the close conjugation of his literary and political career. He had a difficult relationship with both Lenin and Stalin. Stalin needed Gorky no less than Gorky needed Stalin. Stalin provided Gorky with everything necessary for life, the supply of the writer went through the channels of the NKVD, Gorky provided the regime of the "leader" with legitimacy and a cultural platform. On November 15, 1930, the newspaper Pravda published an article by Maxim Gorky: "If the enemy does not surrender, he is destroyed." Gorky allowed himself to "flirt" with the Soviet regime, but did not always imagine the consequences of his actions. The title of this article became one of the slogans of the Stalinist repressions. At the end of his life, Gorky once again wanted to go abroad, but Stalin could not let him go: he was afraid that the proletarian writer would not return. The "leader of the peoples" reasonably believed that Gorky abroad could pose a threat to the Soviet regime. He was unpredictable and knew too much.

Bolshevik who did not accept the revolution

For a long time, Gorky was positioned as a fierce revolutionary, a Bolshevik who took the helm of the cultural revolutionary process, but immediately after the October coup from the pages of the social democratic newspaper Novaya Zhizn, Gorky fiercely attacked the Bolsheviks: “Lenin, Trotsky and those accompanying them have already been poisoned by the rotten poison of power, as evidenced by their shameful attitude to freedom of speech, personality and to the whole sum of those rights, for the triumph of which democracy fought”. Boris Zaitsev recalled that one day Gorky told him: “The matter, you know, is simple. A handful of communists. And there are millions of peasants … millions!.. Whoever is more, they will cut out. It is a foregone conclusion. Communists will be cut out. They did not cut them out, they also found revolvers, and Maxim Gorky, who spoke so negatively about the Bolsheviks and Communists, became the tribune of the new regime.

Godfather is an atheist

Gorky's relationship with religion cannot be called simple. Gorky was characterized by spiritual seeking, in his youth he even walked to monasteries, talked with priests, met with John of Kronstadt, became the godfather of Yakov Sverdlov's brother Zinovy. Gorky and Tolstoy provided financial emigration to the West for Molokan Christians, but Gorky never became a religious person. In 1929, at the opening of the Second All-Union Congress of Militant Atheists, the writer said that "in the love preached by churchmen, Christians, there is an enormous amount of hatred towards man." Maxim Gorky was one of those who signed a letter with a request to destroy the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Something, but Christian humility was alien to Gorky. Back in 1917, in Untimely Thoughts, he wrote: “I have never repented of anything and to anyone, for I have an organic disgust for this. And I have nothing to repent of”.

Yagoda's friend, homophobe

Gorky was very intolerant towards homosexuals. He openly opposed them from the pages of Pravda and Izvestia. On May 23, 1934, he calls homosexuality "socially criminal and punishable" and says that "there is already a sarcastic saying:" Destroy homosexuality - fascism will disappear! " Nevertheless, Gorky's inner circle included homosexuals as well. If you do not touch on the creative environment in which homosexuality was a phenomenon, if not common, then widespread (Eisenstein, Meyerhold), we can say about the deputy chairman of the OGPU, Heinrich Yagoda, with whom Gorky closely communicated. Yagoda wrote memoranda to Stalin that "the homosexuals launched recruitment among the Red Army men, Red Navy men and individual university students", while he himself was no stranger to the condemned phenomenon, organized orgies at his dacha, and after his arrest a dildo was found among the belongings of the former OGPU deputy chairman.

Defender of Writers-Stalinist Tribune

Gorky's contribution to the organization of the literary process in the country cannot be denied. He published magazines, founded publishing houses, the Literary Institute was Gorky's project. It was at Gorky's apartment, in Ryabushinsky's mansion, that the term "socialist realism" was coined, in the mainstream of which Soviet literature developed for a long time. Gorky also headed the publishing house "World Literature" and played the role of a kind of cultural "window to Europe" for Soviet readers. With all these undoubted merits of Gorky, one cannot fail to note his negative role in justifying the repressions of the Stalinist regime. He was the editor of the voluminous book The White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Stalin, published in 1934. In it, Gorky openly does not skimp on praise "… this is an excellently successful experience of mass transformation of former enemies of the proletariat … into qualified workers of the working class and even into enthusiasts of state-essential labor … The corrective labor policy adopted by the State Political Administration … once again brilliantly justified itself." In addition, Gorky, by his mere presence on the Soviet literary Olympus, justified the repressive policy pursued by Stalin. He was an internationally renowned writer who was listened to and believed.