Первым опубликованным произведением а м горького был рассказ

Реферат:           Первое опубликованное произведение М. Горького

МАКАР ЧУДРА
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          Первое опубликованное произведение М. Горького.
          Впервые напечатано в тифлисской газете «Кавказ», 1892, номер 242, 12/24 сентября под псевдонимом: М.Горький.
          Рассказ написан в 1892 году в Тифлисе, где Горький работал в мастерских Закавказских железных дорог.
          Рассказ включался во все собрания сочинений.
          Печатается по тексту, подготовленному Горьким для собрания сочинений в издании «Книга».

Макар Чудра

С моря дул влажный, холодный ветер, разнося по степи задумчивую мелодию плеска набегавшей на берег волны и шелеста прибрежных кустов. Изредка его порывы приносили с собой сморщенные, жёлтые листья и бросали их в костёр, раздувая пламя; окружавшая нас мгла осенней ночи вздрагивала и, пугливо отодвигаясь, открывала на миг слева — безграничную степь, справа — бесконечное море и прямо против меня — фигуру Макара Чудры, старого цыгана, — он сторожил коней своего табора, раскинутого шагах в пятидесяти от нас.

Не обращая внимания на то, что холодные волны ветра, распахнув чекмень, обнажили его волосатую грудь и безжалостно бьют её, он полулежал в красивой, сильной позе, лицом ко мне, методически потягивал из своей громадной трубки, выпускал изо рта и носа густые клубы дыма и, неподвижно уставив глаза куда-то через мою голову в мёртво молчавшую темноту степи, разговаривал со мной, не умолкая и не делая ни одного движения к защите от резких ударов ветра.

— Так ты ходишь? Это хорошо! Ты славную долю выбрал себе, сокол. Так и надо: ходи и смотри, насмотрелся, ляг и умирай — вот и всё!

— Жизнь? Иные люди? — продолжал он, скептически выслушав моё возражение на его «Так и надо». — Эге! А тебе что до того? Разве ты сам — не жизнь? Другие люди живут без тебя и проживут без тебя. Разве ты думаешь, что ты кому-то нужен? Ты не хлеб, не палка, и не нужно тебя никому.

— Учиться и учить, говоришь ты? А ты можешь научиться сделать людей счастливыми? Нет, не можешь. Ты поседей сначала, да и говори, что надо учить. Чему учить? Всякий знает, что ему нужно. Которые умнее, те берут что есть, которые поглупее — те ничего не получают, и всякий сам учится…

— Смешные они, те твои люди. Сбились в кучу и давят друг друга, а места на земле вон сколько, — он широко повел рукой на степь. — И все работают. Зачем? Кому? Никто не знает. Видишь, как человек пашет, и думаешь: вот он по капле с потом силы свои источит на землю, а потом ляжет в неё и сгниёт в ней. Ничего по нем не останется, ничего он не видит с своего поля и умирает, как родился, — дураком.

— Что ж, — он родился затем, что ли, чтоб поковырять землю, да и умереть, не успев даже могилы самому себе выковырять? Ведома ему воля? Ширь степная понятна? Говор морской волны веселит ему сердце? Он раб — как только родился, всю жизнь раб, и всё тут! Что он с собой может сделать? Только удавиться, коли поумнеет немного.

— А я, вот смотри, в пятьдесят восемь лет столько видел, что коли написать всё это на бумаге, так в тысячу таких торб, как у тебя, не положишь. А ну-ка, скажи, в каких краях я не был? И не скажешь. Ты и не знаешь таких краев, где я бывал. Так нужно жить: иди, иди — и всё тут. Долго не стой на одном месте — чего в нём? Вон как день и ночь бегают, гоняясь друг за другом, вокруг земли, так и ты бегай от дум про жизнь, чтоб не разлюбить её. А задумаешься — разлюбишь жизнь, это всегда так бывает. И со мной это было. Эге! Было, сокол.

— В тюрьме я сидел, в Галичине. «Зачем я живу на свете?» — помыслил я со скуки, — скучно в тюрьме, сокол, э, как скучно! — и взяла меня тоска за сердце, как посмотрел я из окна на поле, взяла и сжала его клещами. Кто скажет, зачем он живёт? Никто не скажет, сокол! И спрашивать себя про это не надо. Живи, и всё тут! И похаживай да посматривай кругом себя, вот и тоска не возьмет никогда. Я тогда чуть не удавился поясом, вот как!

— Хе! Говорил я с одним человеком. Строгий человек, из ваших, русских. Нужно, говорит он, жить не так, как ты сам хочешь, а так, как сказано в божьем слове. Богу покоряйся, и он даст тебе всё, что попросишь у него. А сам он весь в дырьях, рваный. Я и сказал ему, чтобы он себе новую одежду попросил у бога. Рассердился он и прогнал меня, ругаясь. А до того говорил, что надо прощать людей и любить их. Вот бы и простил мне, коли моя речь обидела его милость. Тоже — учитель! Учат они меньше есть, а сами едят по десять раз в сутки.

Он плюнул в костер и замолчал, снова набивая трубку. Ветер выл жалобно и тихо, во тьме ржали кони, из табора плыла нежная и страстная песня-думка. Это пела красавица Нонка, дочь Макара. Я знал ее голос густого, грудного тембра, всегда как-то странно, недовольно и требовательно звучавший — пела ли она песню, говорила ли «здравствуй». На ее смуглом, матовом лице замерла надменность царицы, а в подернутых какой-то тенью темно-карих глазах сверкало сознание неотразимости ее красоты и презрение ко всему, что не она сама.

Макар подал мне трубку.

— Кури! Хорошо поет девка? То-то! Хотел бы, чтоб такая тебя полюбила? Нет? Хорошо! Так и надо — не верь девкам и держись от них дальше. Девке целоваться лучше и приятней, чем мне трубку курить, а поцеловал ее — и умерла воля в твоем сердце. Привяжет она тебя к себе чем-то, чего не видно, а порвать — нельзя, и отдашь ты ей всю душу. Верно! Берегись девок! Лгут всегда! Люблю, говорит, больше всего на свете, а ну-ка, уколи ее булавкой, она разорвет тебе сердце. Знаю я! Эге, сколько я знаю! Ну, сокол, хочешь, скажу одну быль? А ты ее запомни и, как запомнишь, — век свой будешь свободной птицей.

«Был на свете Зобар, молодой цыган, Лойко Зобар. Вся Венгрия, и Чехия, и Славония, и все, что кругом моря, знало его, — удалый был малый! Не было по тем краям деревни, в которой бы пяток-другой жителей не давал богу клятвы убить Лойко, а он себе жил, и уж коли ему понравился конь, так хоть полк солдат поставь сторожить того коня — все равно Зобар на нем гарцевать станет! Эге! разве он кого боялся? Да приди к нему сатана со всей своей свитой, так он бы, коли б не пустил в него ножа, то наверно бы крепко поругался, а что чертям подарил бы по пинку в рыла — это уж как раз!

И все таборы его знали или слыхали о нем. Он любил только коней и ничего больше, и то недолго — поездит, да и продаст, а деньги, кто хочет, тот и возьми. У него не было заветного — нужно тебе его сердце, он сам бы вырвал его из груди, да тебе и отдал, только бы тебе от того хорошо было. Вот он какой был, сокол!

Наш табор кочевал в то время по Буковине, — это годов десять назад тому. Раз — ночью весенней — сидим мы: я, Данило-солдат, что с Кошутом воевал вместе, и Нур старый, и все другие, и Радда, Данилова дочка.

Ты Нонку мою знаешь? Царица девка! Ну, а Радду с ней равнять нельзя — много чести Нонке! О ней, этой Радде, словами и не скажешь ничего. Может быть, ее красоту можно бы на скрипке сыграть, да и то тому, кто эту скрипку, как свою душу, знает.

Много посушила она сердец молодецких, ого, много! На Мораве один магнат, старый, чубатый, увидал ее и остолбенел. Сидит на коне и смотрит, дрожа, как в огневице. Красив он был, как черт в праздник, жупан шит золотом, на боку сабля, как молния, сверкает, чуть конь ногой топнет, вся эта сабля в камнях драгоценных, и голубой бархат на шапке, точно неба кусок, — важный был господарь старый! Смотрел, смотрел, да и говорит Радде: «Гей! Поцелуй, кошель денег дам». А та отвернулась в сторону, да и только! «Прости, коли обидел, взгляни хоть поласковей», — сразу сбавил спеси старый магнат и бросил к ее ногам кошель — большой кошель, брат! А она его будто невзначай пнула ногой в грязь, да и все тут.

— Эх, девка! — охнул он, да и плетью по коню — только пыль взвилась тучей.

А на другой день снова явился. «Кто ее отец?» — громом гремит по табору. Данило вышел. «Продай дочь, что хочешь возьми!» А Данило и скажи ему: «Это только паны продают все, от своих свиней до своей совести, а я с Кошутом воевал и ничем не торгую!» Взревел было тот, да и за саблю, но кто-то из нас сунул зажженный трут в ухо коню, он и унес молодца. А мы снялись, да и пошли. День идем и два, смотрим — догнал! «Гей вы, говорит, перед богом и вами совесть моя чиста, отдайте девку в жены мне: все поделю с вами, богат я сильно!» Горит весь и, как ковыль под ветром, качается в седле. Мы задумались.

— А ну-ка, дочь, говори! — сказал себе в усы Данило.

— Кабы орлица к ворону в гнездо по своей воле вошла, чем бы она стала? — спросила нас Радда. Засмеялся Данило, и все мы с ним.

— Славно, дочка! Слышал, господарь? Не идет дело! Голубок ищи — те податливей. — И пошли мы вперед.

А тот господарь схватил шапку, бросил ее оземь и поскакал так, что земля задрожала. Вот она какова была Радда, сокол!

— Да! Так вот раз ночью сидим мы и слышим — музыка плывет по степи. Хорошая музыка! Кровь загоралась в жилах от нее, и звала она куда-то. Всем нам, мы чуяли, от той музыки захотелось чего-то такого, после чего бы и жить уж не нужно было, или, коли жить, так — царями над всей землей, сокол!

Вот из темноты вырезался конь, а на нем человек сидит и играет, подъезжая к нам. Остановился у костра, перестал играть, улыбаясь, смотрит на нас.

— Эге, Зобар, да это ты! — крикнул ему Данило радостно. Так вот он, Лойко Зобар!

Усы легли на плечи и смешались с кудрями, очи, как ясные звезды, горят, а улыбка — целое солнце, ей-богу! Точно его ковали из одного куска железа вместе с конем. Стоит весь, как в крови, в огне костра и сверкает зубами, смеясь! Будь я проклят, коли я его не любил уже, как себя, раньше, чем он мне слово сказал или просто заметил, что и я тоже живу на белом свете!

Вот, сокол, какие люди бывают! Взглянет он тебе в очи и полонит твою душу, и ничуть тебе это не стыдно, а еще и гордо для тебя. С таким человеком ты и сам лучше становишься. Мало, друг, таких людей! Ну, так и ладно, коли мало. Много хорошего было бы на свете, так его и за хорошее не считали бы. Так-то! А слушай-ка дальше.

Радда и говорит: «Хорошо ты, Лойко, играешь! Кто это делал тебе скрипку такую звонкую и чуткую?» А тот смеется: «Я сам делал! И сделал ее не из дерева, а из груди молодой девушки, которую любил крепко, а струны из ее сердца мною свиты. Врет еще немного скрипка, ну, да я умею смычок в руках держать!»

Известно, наш брат старается сразу затуманить девке очи, чтоб они не зажгли его сердца, а сами подернулись бы по тебе грустью, вот и Лойко тож. Но — не на ту попал. Радда отвернулась в сторону и, зевнув, сказала: «А еще говорили, что Зобар умен и ловок, — вот лгут люди!» — и пошла прочь.

— Эге, красавица, у тебя остры зубы! — сверкнул очами Лойко, слезая с коня. — Здравствуйте, браты! Вот и я к вам!

— Просим гостя! — сказал Данило в ответ ему. Поцеловались, поговорили и легли спать… Крепко спали. А наутро, глядим, у Зобара голова повязана тряпкой. Что это? А это конь зашиб его копытом сонного.

Э, э, э! Поняли мы, кто тот конь, и улыбнулись в усы, и Данило улыбнулся. Что ж, разве Лойко не стоил Радды? Ну, уж нет! Девка как ни хороша, да у ней душа узка и мелка, и хоть ты пуд золота повесь ей на шею, все равно, лучше того, какова она есть, не быть ей. А, ну ладно!

Живем мы да живем на том месте, дела у нас о ту пору хорошие были, и Зобар с нами. Это был товарищ! И мудр, как старик, и сведущ во всем, и грамоту русскую и мадьярскую понимал. Бывало, пойдет говорить — век бы не спал, слушал его! А играет — убей меня гром, коли на свете еще кто-нибудь так играл! Проведет, бывало, по струнам смычком — и вздрогнет у тебя сердце, проведет еще раз — и замрет оно, слушая, а он играет и улыбается. И плакать и смеяться хотелось в одно время, слушая его. Вот тебе сейчас кто-то стонет горько, просит помощи и режет тебе грудь, как ножом. А вот степь говорит небу сказки, печальные сказки. Плачет девушка, провожая добра молодца! Добрый молодец кличет девицу в степь. И вдруг — гей! Громом гремит вольная, живая песня, и само солнце, того и гляди, затанцует по небу под ту песню! Вот как, сокол!

Каждая жила в твоем теле понимала ту песню, и весь ты становился рабом ее. И коли бы тогда крикнул Лойко: «В ножи, товарищи!» — то и пошли бы мы все в ножи, с кем указал бы он. Все он мог сделать с человеком, и все любили его, крепко любили, только Радда одна не смотрит на парня; и ладно, коли бы только это, а то еще и подсмеивается над ним. Крепко она задела за сердце Зобара, то-то крепко! Зубами скрипит, дергая себя за ус, Лойко, очи темнее бездны смотрят, а порой в них такое сверкает, что за душу страшно становится. Уйдет ночью далеко в степь Лойко, и плачет до утра его скрипка, плачет, хоронит Зобарову волю. А мы лежим да слушаем и думаем: как быть? И знаем, что, коли два камня друг на друга катятся, становиться между ними нельзя — изувечат. Так и шло дело.

Вот сидели мы, все в сборе, и говорили о делах. Скучно стало. Данило и просит Лойко: «Спой, Зобар, песенку, повесели душу!» Тот повел оком на Радду, что неподалеку от него лежала кверху лицом, глядя в небо, и ударил по струнам. Так и заговорила скрипка, точно это и вправду девичье сердце было! И запел Лойко:

Гей-гей! В груди горит огонь,

А степь так широка!

Как ветер, быстр мои борзый конь,

Тверда моя рука!

Повернула голову Радда и, привстав, усмехнулась в очи певуну. Вспыхнул, как заря, он.

Гей-гоп, гей! Ну, товарищ мой!

Поскачем, что ль, вперед!?

Одета степь суровой мглой,

А там рассвет нас ждет!

Гей-гей! Летим и встретим день.

Взвивайся в вышину!

Да только гривой не задень

Красавицу луну!

Вот пел! Никто уж так не поет теперь! А Радда и говорит, точно воду цедит:

— Ты бы не залетал так высоко, Лойко, неравно упадешь, да — в лужу носом, усы запачкаешь, смотри. — Зверем посмотрел на нее Лойко, а ничего не сказал — стерпел парень и поет себе:

Гей-гоп! Вдруг день придет сюда,

А мы с тобою спим.

Эй, гей! Ведь мы с тобой тогда

В огне стыда сгорим!

— Это песня! — сказал Данило. — Никогда не слыхал такой песни; пусть из меня сатана себе трубку сделает, коли вру я!

Старый Нур и усами поводил, и плечами пожимал, и всем нам по душе была удалая Зобарова песня! Только Радде не понравилась.

— Вот так однажды комар гудел, орлиный клекот передразнивая, — сказала она, точно снегом в нас кинула.

— Может быть, ты, Радда, кнута хочешь? — потянулся Данило к ней, а Зобар бросил наземь шапку, да и говорит, весь черный, как земля:

— Стой, Данило! Горячему коню — стальные удила! Отдай мне дочку в жены!

— Вот сказал речь! — усмехнулся Данило. — Да возьми, коли можешь!

— Добро! — молвил Лойко и говорит Радде: — Ну, девушка, послушай меня немного, да не кичись! Много я вашей сестры видел, эге, много! А ни одна не тронула моего сердца так, как ты. Эх, Радда, полонила ты мою душу! Ну что ж? Чему быть, так то и будет, и… нет такого коня, на котором от самого себя ускакать можно б было!.. Беру тебя в жены перед богом, своей честью, твоим отцом и всеми этими людьми. Но смотри, воле моей не перечь — я свободный человек и буду жить так, как я хочу! — И подошел к ней, стиснув зубы, сверкая глазами. Смотрим мы, протянул он ей руку, — вот, думаем, и надела узду на степного коня Радда! Вдруг видим, взмахнул он руками и оземь затылком — грох!..

Что за диво? Точно пуля ударила в сердце малого. А это Радда захлестнула ему ременное кнутовище за ноги, да и дернула к себе, — вот отчего упал Лойко.

И снова уж лежит девка не шевелясь да усмехается молча. Мы смотрим, что будет, а Лойко сидит на земле и сжал руками голову, точно боится, что она у него лопнет. А потом встал тихо, да и пошел в степь, ни на кого не глядя. Нур шепнул мне: «Смотри за ним!» И пополз я за Зобаром по степи в темноте ночной. Так-то, сокол!»

Макар выколотил пепел из трубки и снова стал набивать ее. Я закутался плотнее в шинель и, лежа, смотрел в его старое лицо, черное от загара и ветра. Он, сурово и строго качая головой, что-то шептал про себя; седые усы шевелились, и ветер трепал ему волосы на голове. Он был похож на старый дуб, обожженный молнией, но все еще мощный, крепкий и гордый силой своей. Море шепталось по-прежнему с берегом, и ветер все так же носил его шепот по степи. Нонка уже не пела, а собравшиеся на небе тучи сделали осеннюю ночь еще темней.

«Шел Лойко нога за ногу, повеся голову и опустив руки, как плети, и, придя в балку к ручью, сел на камень и охнул. Так охнул, что у меня сердце кровью облилось от жалости, но все ж не подошел к нему. Словом горю не поможешь — верно?! То-то! Час он сидит, другой сидит и третий не шелохнется — сидит.

И я лежу неподалеку. Ночь светлая, месяц серебром всю степь залил, и далеко все видно.

Вдруг вижу: от табора спешно Радда идет.

Весело мне стало! «Эх, важно! — думаю, — удалая девка Радда!» Вот она подошла к нему, он и не слышит. Положила ему руку на плечо; вздрогнул Лойко, разжал руки и поднял голову. И как вскочит, да за нож! Ух, порежет девку, вижу я, и уж хотел, крикнув до табора, побежать к ним, вдруг слышу:

— Брось! Голову разобью! — Смотрю: у Радды в руке пистоль, и она в лоб Зобару целит. Вот сатана девка! А ну, думаю, они теперь равны по силе, что будет дальше?

— Слушай! — Радда заткнула за пояс пистоль и говорит Зобару: — Я не убить тебя пришла, а мириться, бросай нож! — Тот бросил и хмуро смотрит ей в очи. Дивно это было, брат! Стоят два человека и зверями смотрят друг на друга, а оба такие хорошие, удалые люди. Смотрит на них ясный месяц да я — и все тут.

— Ну, слушай меня, Лойко: я тебя люблю! — говорит Радда. Тот только плечами повел, точно связанный по рукам и ногам.

— Видала я молодцов, а ты удалей и краше их душой и лицом. Каждый из них усы себе бы сбрил — моргни я ему глазом, все они пали бы мне в ноги, захоти я того. Но что толку? Они и так не больно-то удалы, а я бы их всех обабила. Мало осталось на свете удалых цыган, мало, Лойко. Никогда я никого не любила, Лойко, а тебя люблю. А еще я люблю волю! Волю-то, Лойко, я люблю больше, чем тебя. А без тебя мне не жить, как не жить и тебе без меня. Так вот я хочу, чтоб ты был моим и душой и телом, слышишь? — Тот усмехнулся.

— Слышу! Весело сердцу слушать твою речь! Ну-ка, скажи еще!

— А еще вот что, Лойко: все равно, как ты ни вертись, я тебя одолею, моим будешь. Так не теряй же даром времени — впереди тебя ждут мои поцелуи да ласки… крепко целовать я тебя буду, Лойко! Под поцелуй мой забудешь ты свою удалую жизнь… и живые песни твои, что так радуют молодцов-цыган, не зазвучат по степям больше — петь ты будешь любовные, нежные песни мне, Радде… Так не теряй даром времени, — сказала я это, значит, ты завтра покоришься мне как старшему товарищу юнаку. Поклонишься мне в ноги перед всем табором и поцелуешь правую руку мою — и тогда я буду твоей женой.

Вот чего захотела чертова девка! Этого и слыхом не слыхано было; только в старину у черногорцев так было, говорили старики, а у цыган — никогда! Ну-ка, сокол, выдумай что ни то посмешнее? Год поломаешь голову, не выдумаешь!

Прянул в сторону Лойко и крикнул на всю степь, как раненный в грудь. Дрогнула Радда, но не выдала себя.

— Ну, так прощай до завтра, а завтра ты сделаешь, что я велела тебе. Слышишь, Лойко?

— Слышу! Сделаю, — застонал Зобар и протянул к ней руки. Она и не оглянулась на него, а он зашатался, как сломанное ветром дерево, и пал на землю, рыдая и смеясь.

Вот как замаяла молодца проклятая Радда. Насилу я привел его в себя.

Эхе! Какому дьяволу нужно, чтобы люди горе горевали? Кто это любит слушать, как стонет, разрываясь от горя, человеческое сердце? Вот и думай тут!..

Воротился я в табор и рассказал о всем старикам. Подумали и решили подождать да посмотреть — что будет из этого. А было вот что. Когда собрались все мы вечером вокруг костра, пришел и Лойко. Был он смутен и похудел за ночь страшно, глаза ввалились; он опустил их и, не подымая, сказал нам:

— Вот какое дело, товарищи: смотрел в свое сердце этой ночью и не нашел места в нем старой вольной жизни моей. Радда там живет только — и все тут! Вот она, красавица Радда, улыбается, как царица! Она любит свою волю больше меня, а я ее люблю больше своей воли, и решил я Радде поклониться в ноги, так она велела, чтоб все видели, как ее красота покорила удалого Лойко Зобара, который до нее играл с девушками, как кречет с утками. А потом она станет моей женой и будет ласкать и целовать меня, так что уже мне и песен петь вам не захочется, и воли моей я не пожалею! Так ли, Радда? — Он поднял глаза и сумно посмотрел на нее. Она молча и строго кивнула головой и рукой указала себе на ноги. А мы смотрели и ничего не понимали. Даже уйти куда-то хотелось, лишь бы не видеть, как Лойко Зобар упадет в ноги девке — пусть эта девка и Радда. Стыдно было чего-то, и жалко, и грустно.

— Ну! — крикнула Радда Зобару.

— Эге, не торопись, успеешь, надоест еще… — засмеялся он. Точно сталь зазвенела, — засмеялся.

— Так вот и все дело, товарищи! Что остается? А остается попробовать, такое ли у Радды моей крепкое сердце, каким она мне его показывала. Попробую же, — простите меня, братцы!

Мы и догадаться еще не успели, что хочет делать Зобар, а уж Радда лежала на земле, и в груди у нее по рукоять торчал кривой нож Зобара. Оцепенели мы.

А Радда вырвала нож, бросила его в сторону и, зажав рану прядью своих черных волос, улыбаясь, сказала громко и внятно:

— Прощай, Лойко! я знала, что ты так сделаешь!.. — да и умерла…

Понял ли девку, сокол?! Вот какая, будь я проклят на веки вечные, дьявольская девка была!

— Эх! да и поклонюсь же я тебе в ноги, королева гордая! — на всю степь гаркнул Лойко да, бросившись наземь, прильнул устами к ногам мертвой Радды и замер. Мы сняли шапки и стояли молча.

Что ты скажешь в таком деле, сокол? То-то! Нур сказал было: «Надо связать его!..» Не поднялись бы руки вязать Лойко Зобара, ни у кого не поднялись бы, и Нур знал это. Махнул он рукой, да и отошел в сторону. А Данило поднял нож, брошенный в сторону Раддой, и долго смотрел на него, шевеля седыми усами, на том ноже еще не застыла кровь Радды, и был он такой кривой и острый. А потом подошел Данило к Зобару и сунул ему нож в спину как раз против сердца. Тоже отцом был Радде старый солдат Данило!

— Вот так! — повернувшись к Даниле, ясно сказал Лойко и ушел догонять Радду.

А мы смотрели. Лежала Радда, прижав к груди руку с прядью волос, и открытые глаза ее были в голубом небе, а у ног ее раскинулся удалой Лойко Зобар. На лицо его пали кудри, и не видно было его лица.

Стояли мы и думали. Дрожали усы у старого Данилы, и насупились густые брови его. Он глядел в небо и молчал, а Нур, седой, как лунь, лег вниз лицом на землю и заплакал так, что ходуном заходили его стариковские плечи.

Было тут над чем плакать, сокол!

… Идешь ты, ну и иди своим путем, не сворачивая в сторону. Прямо и иди. Может, и не загинешь даром. Вот и все, сокол!»

Макар замолчал и, спрятав в кисет трубку, запахнул на груди чекмень. Накрапывал дождь, ветер стал сильнее, море рокотало глухо и сердито. Один за другим к угасающему костру подходили кони и, осмотрев нас большими умными глазами, неподвижно останавливались, окружая нас плотным кольцом.

— Гоп, гоп, эгой! — крикнул им ласково Макар и, похлопав ладонью шею своего любимого вороного коня, сказал, обращаясь ко мне: — Спать пора! — Потом завернулся с головой в чекмень и, могуче вытянувшись на земле, умолк.

Мне не хотелось спать. Я смотрел во тьму степи, и в воздухе перед моими глазами плавала царственно красивая и гордая фигура Радды. Она прижала руку с прядью черных волос к ране на груди, и сквозь ее смуглые, тонкие пальцы сочилась капля по капле кровь, падая на землю огненно-красными звездочками.

А за нею по пятам плыл удалой молодец Лойко Зобар; его лицо завесили пряди густых черных кудрей, и из-под них капали частые, холодные и крупные слезы…

Усиливался дождь, и море распевало мрачный и торжественный гимн гордой паре красавцев цыган — Лойко Зобару и Радде, дочери старого солдата Данилы.

А они оба кружились во тьме ночи плавно и безмолвно, и никак не мог красавец Лойко поравняться с гордой Раддой.

М. Горький

I Вариант

1. Уроженцем какого города был М. Горький?

а) Москвы б) Петербурга в) Нижнего Новгорода г) Саратова

2. Укажите годы жизни М. Горького.

а) 1868-1936 гг. б) 1870-1921 гг. в) 1890-1940 гг. г) 1895-1925 гг.

3. Как относится М. Горький к первой русской революции?

а) сочувствовал; б) активно поддерживал, помогал материально

в) настороженно; г) отрицательно

4. Ранние рассказы A.M. Горького написаны в духе:

а)модернизма; б) реализма; в) романтизма?

5. Первым опубликованным произведением А.М. Горького был рассказ:

а) «Макар Чудра»; б) «Старуха Изергиль»; в) «Челкаш»?

6. Определите жанр пьесы М. Горького «На дне».

а) бытовая драма; б) социально-философская драма

в) трагедия; г) мелодрама

7. Как звали Клеща?

а) Дмитрий; б) Андрей; в) Ванька; г) Степан.

8. Какой персонаж пьесы «На дне» вступает в философский спор с Лукой, утверждая, что не надо унижать человека жалостью?

а) Клещ; б) Сатин; в) Актёр; г) Барон.

9.  О ком идёт речь в пьесе «На дне»: «Сколько в ней зверства, в бабе этой!»

а) об Анне; б) о Наташе; в) о Насте; г) о Василисе.

10. Кто из персонажей пьесы «На дне» не хочет примириться с жизнью на «дне» и заявляет: «Я рабочий человек… и с малых лет работаю… Вылезу… Кожу сдеру, а вылезу»?

а) Сатин б) Барон в) Клещ г) Пепел

11. Кто из персонажей пьесы «На дне» утверждал: «Ложь – религия рабов и хозяев… Правда – бог свободного человека!»?

а) Лука б) Клещ в) Сатин г) Бубнов

12. В пьесе М. Горького «На дне» основным средством раскрытия характеров героев является речевая характеристика. По высказываниям героев определите персонаж драмы.

а) «Сделай так, чтоб работа мне была приятна – я, может быть, буду работать… Когда труд – удовольствие, жизнь – хороша! Когда труд – обязанность, жизнь – рабство!»

б) «На что совесть? Я — небогатый»

в) «Не помню, когда я сыта была… Всю жизнь мою дрожала… мучилась… как бы больше другого не съесть…»

г) «Тюрьма добру не научит, и Сибирь не научит… а человек – научит…»

д) «…А то… воображу себе, что завтра я скоропостижно помру… И станет от этого жутко… Летом хорошо воображать про смерть… грозы бывают летом…всегда может грозой убить…»

А) Наташа Б) Сатин В) Анна В) Бубнов Д) Лука

М. Горький

II Вариант

1. Укажите имя, отчество и настоящую фамилию М. Горького.

а) Алексей Максимович Пешков б) Василий Иванович Каширин

в) Максим Алексеевич Пешков г) Иван Алексеевич Каширин

2. Укажите, с какими политическими деятелям был дружен М. Горький и посвятил ему публицистический очерк?

а) А.В. Луначарский б) И.В. Сталин в) В.И. Ленин г) Н.И. Бухарин

3. Какое образование получил М. Горький?

а) учился в гимназии б) закончил Казанский университет

в) получил домашнее образование г) не получил никого систематического образования

4. Образ человека с «горящим сердцем» выведен в рассказе A.M. Горького:

а) «Макар Чудра»; б) «Старуха Изергиль»; в) «Челкаш»?

5. .Афоризм «В жизни… всегда есть место подвигу» A.M. Горький вложил в уста:

а) старухи Изергиль; б) Лойко Зобара; в) Данко?

6. Укажите основной драматургический конфликт пьесы М.Горького «На дне».

а) социальный (между Костылевым и ночлежниками)

б) идеологический (между Лукой и ночлежниками)

в) любовный (между Василисой, Пеплом и Наташей)

г)внутренний (В осознании ночлежниками своего падения и невозможностью с этим смириться)

7. Кто из персонажей пьесы «На дне», прикрываясь служением богу, грабит людей?

…И я на тебя полтинку накину, — маслица в лампадку куплю…. и будет перед святой иконой жертва моя гореть…

а) Барон б) Сатин в) Лука г) Костылев

8. В пьесе М. Горького «На дне» основным средством раскрытия характеров является речевая характеристика. Определите, кто из героев произносит следующие фразы:

а) «Всякая блоха не плоха, все – черненькие, все — прыгают»

б) «Хороший человек должен иметь пачпорт… Все хорошие люди пачпорта имеют» 

в) «Почему же иногда шулеру не говорить хорошо…, если порядочные люди говорят как шулера…»

г)«Никогда и ничего не понимал я… мне кажется, что я всю жизнь только переодевался…. А зачем?..Не понимаю!»

А) Барон           Б) Лука                 В) Сатин          Г) Костылев

9.  Какой герой попадает в тюрьму за убийство хозяина ночлежки?

а) Пепел; б) Клещ; в) Барон; г) Алёшка.

8. Назовите героя пьесы, в уста которого вкладывает М. Горький авторскую точку зрения.

а) Лука б) Сатин в) Бубнов г) Барон

10. Что является главным предметом изображения в пьесе М. Горького «На дне»?

а) жизненные обстоятельства, приведшие людей на «дно»

б) сознание людей, выброшенных на «дно» в результате социальных процессов, происходивших в русском обществе на рубеже веков

в) быт людей «дна»

г) взаимоотношения «хозяев жизни»и зависимых от них людей

11. какая сцена является завязкой внутреннего конфликта в пьесе М. Горького «На дне»?

а) разговор Костылева с ночлежниками в 1-м действии о Василисе б) появление Наташи

в) появление Луки в ночлежке г) рассказ-притча Луки о «Праведной земле»

12. Лука своими утешительными речами пробудил почти в каждом ночлежнике мечту о иной, лучшей, достойной жизни. О чем мечтают ночлежники?

а) Настя                               А) о лечебнице для алкоголиков

б) Анна                                Б) о чистой высокой любви

в) Васька Пепел                  В) об избавлений мучений на том свете

г) Актер                               Г) о честной, трудовой жизни на поселении в Сибири

История создания

Рассказ “Макар Чудра” является первым опубликованным произведением М. Горького. Он был написан в 1892 г. в Тифлисе, когда будущий писатель работал в мастерских Закавказских железных дорог, и опубликован в том же году в газете “Кавказ”.

Смысл названия

Макар Чудра – имя старого, умудренного жизненным опытом цыгана, который рассказывает печальную историю любви Радды и Лойко, напоминающую легенду.

Главная тема произведения

Главная тема произведения – человеческая воля.

Автор не случайно выбрал главным героем произведения старого цыгана. У этого кочевого народа нет собственного государства. Цыгане рассеяны по всему миру, поэтому превыше всего ценят свободу.

Макар Чудра за свою долгую жизнь побывал во многих краях. Состарившись, он лишь еще тверже укрепился во мнении, что счастье человека заключается в постоянном движении.

Цыган с усмешкой относится к людям, которые всю жизнь находятся на одном месте. Приковав себя к земле и работе, они становятся рабами. Макар считает, что жизнь и так слишком коротка, чтобы накладывать на нее ограничения и никогда не познать “ширь степную” и “говор морской волны”.

Макар приводит пример из своей жизни, когда он попал в тюрьму. Неволя для цыгана хуже смерти. Изнемогая от тоски по бескрайним просторам, Макар тогда чуть было не покончил с собой.

Старый цыган гордится тем, что принадлежит к гордому и вольному народу. В подтверждение своих слов он рассказывает быль, которая могла произойти только в цыганском таборе.

Лойко Зобар даже среди соплеменников выделялся своей удалью и бесшабашностью. Под стать ему была и Данилова дочка Радда. Двое красивых и гордых молодых людей, судя по всему, с первого взгляда по достоинству оценили друг друга. На правах мужчины Лойко попытался подчинить себе девушку, но столкнулся с таким же сильным и неукротимым характером.

Макар не зря предупреждает собеседника, что любая женщина представляет опасность, потому что рано или поздно покоряет волю влюбленного в нее человека. Требование Радды поклониться ей в ноги перед всем табором означало для Лойко добровольное попадание в рабство. Гордый цыган еще никогда и ни перед кем не склонял своей головы.

В этом столкновении двух независимых личностей не могло быть победителя. Лойко и Радда предпочли смерть необходимости покориться. Радда предчувствовала, что ее любимый скорее убьет ее, чем признает себя побежденным. Да и сам Лойко знал, что отец не простит ему убийство любимой дочери.

Влюбленные погибли, но стали символом цыганской вольности и независимости. Их тела давно истлели, но души в сознании всех цыган до сих пор ведут непримиримую борьбу с любыми проявлениями рабства.

Проблематика

На раннем этапе творческого пути Горькому было присуще впадать в крайности. Любая проблема решалась писателем по принципу: все или ничего. При этом высшей ценностью он считал свободу.

Проблема любовных отношений в рассказе решается прямолинейно. Если абсолютно свободная любовь невозможна, то есть только один выход – смерть. Автор вместе с Макаром одобряет такое развитие событий, хотя для большинства людей оно выглядит по меньшей мере странно.

История Лойко и Радды – красивая легенда, а не прямое руководство к действию. Это своеобразный гимн непобедимому стремлению к свободе. Любовь является одним из сильнейших человеческих чувств, но даже оно не должно приводить к рабству и подчинению одного человека другим.

В более широком смысле рассказ “Макар Чудра” поднимает главную проблему, волнующую молодого Горького. Это необходимость борьбы с угнетением и несправедливостью, во главе которой стоят самые гордые и свободолюбивые люди.

Композиция

Произведение начинается с беседы автора с Макаром Чудрой. Основную часть занимает быль старого цыгана. В финале автор продолжает размышлять над смыслом рассказанной ему легенды.

Чему учит автор

Горький создает романтический образ двух влюбленных, которые не способны идти на компромиссы. Их смерть ради свободы недоступна для понимания обычных людей и может служить только идеалом, навсегда запечатленном в народной памяти.

Даниил Романович | Просмотров: 3.9k

Maxim Gorky
Gorky in 1926 at Posillipo
Born	Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	18 June 1936 (aged 68) Gorki-10, Moscow Oblast, Soviet Union
Occupation	Prose writer, dramatist, essayist, politician, poet
Period	1892–1936
Notable works	The Lower Depths (1902) Mother (1906) My Childhood. In the World. My Universities (1913–1923) The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936)
Signature

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (Russian: Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в;^[a] 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (Russian: Макси́м Го́рький), was a Russian writer and socialist political thinker and proponent.^[1] He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.^[2] Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.

Gorky’s most famous works are his early short stories, written in the 1890s («Chelkash», «Old Izergil», and «Twenty-Six Men and a Girl»); plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and Children of the Sun (1905); a poem, «The Song of the Stormy Petrel» (1901); his autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913–1923); and a novel, Mother (1906). Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and Mother has been frequently criticized, and Gorky himself thought of Mother as one of his biggest failures.^[3] However, there have been warmer judgements of some less-known post-revolutionary works such as the novels The Artamonov Business (1925) and The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936); the latter is considered Gorky’s masterpiece and has sometimes been viewed by critics as a modernist work. Unlike his pre-revolutionary writings (known for their «anti-psychologism») Gorky’s late works differ with an ambivalent portrayal of the Russian Revolution and «unmodern interest to human psychology» (as noted by D. S. Mirsky).^[4] He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, both mentioned by Gorky in his memoirs.

Gorky was active in the emerging Marxist communist and later in the Bolshevik movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov’s Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union (USSR). In 1932, he returned to the USSR on Joseph Stalin’s personal invitation and lived there until his death in June 1936. After his return, he was officially declared the «founder of Socialist Realism». Despite his official reputation, Gorky’s relations with the Soviet regime were rather difficult. Modern scholars consider his ideology of God-Building as distinct from the official Marxism–Leninism, and his work fits uneasily under the «Socialist Realist» label. Gorky’s work still has a controversial reputation because of his political biography, although in the last years his works are returning to European stages and being republished.^[5]

Life[edit]

Early years[edit]

Born as Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother^[1] and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880. After an attempt at suicide in December 1887, he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing.^[1]

As a journalist working for provincial newspapers, he wrote under the pseudonym Иегудиил Хламида (Jehudiel Khlamida).^[6] He started using the pseudonym «Gorky» (from горький; literally «bitter») in 1892, when his first short story, «Makar Chudra», was published by the newspaper Kavkaz (The Caucasus) in Tiflis, where he spent several weeks doing menial jobs, mostly for the Caucasian Railway workshops.^[8][9] The name reflected his simmering anger about life in Russia and a determination to speak the bitter truth. Gorky’s first book Очерки и рассказы (Essays and Stories) in 1898 enjoyed a sensational success, and his career as a writer began. Gorky wrote incessantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world. He described the lives of people in the lowest strata and on the margins of society, revealing their hardships, humiliations, and brutalisation, but also their inward spark of humanity.^[1]

Political and literary development[edit]

Gorky’s reputation grew as a unique literary voice from the bottom stratum of society and as a fervent advocate of Russia’s social, political, and cultural transformation. By 1899, he was openly associating with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement, which helped make him a celebrity among both the intelligentsia and the growing numbers of «conscious» workers. At the heart of all his work was a belief in the inherent worth and potential of the human person. In his writing, he counterposed individuals, aware of their natural dignity, and inspired by energy and will, with people who succumb to the degrading conditions of life around them. Both his writings and his letters reveal a «restless man» (a frequent self-description) struggling to resolve contradictory feelings of faith and scepticism, love of life and disgust at the vulgarity and pettiness of the human world.^{[citation needed]}

In 1916, Gorky said that the teachings of the ancient Jewish sage Hillel the Elder deeply influenced his life: «In my early youth I read…the words of…Hillel, if I remember rightly: ‘If thou art not for thyself, who will be for thee? But if thou art for thyself alone, wherefore art thou’? The inner meaning of these words impressed me with its profound wisdom…The thought ate its way deep into my soul, and I say now with conviction: Hillel’s wisdom served as a strong staff on my road, which was neither even nor easy. I believe that Jewish wisdom is more all-human and universal than any other; and this not only because of its immemorial age…but because of the powerful humaneness that saturates it, because of its high estimate of man.»^[10]

He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime and was arrested many times. Gorky befriended many revolutionaries and became a personal friend of Vladimir Lenin after they met in 1902. He exposed governmental control of the press (see Matvei Golovinski affair). In 1902, Gorky was elected an honorary Academician of Literature, but Tsar Nicholas II ordered this annulled. In protest, Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko left the Academy.^[11]

From 1900 to 1905, Gorky’s writings became more optimistic. He became more involved in the opposition movement, for which he was again briefly imprisoned in 1901. In 1904, having severed his relationship with the Moscow Art Theatre in the wake of conflict with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to establish a theatre of his own.^[b] Both Konstantin Stanislavski and Savva Morozov provided financial support for the venture.^[13] Stanislavski believed that Gorky’s theatre was an opportunity to develop the network of provincial theatres which he hoped would reform the art of the stage in Russia, a dream of his since the 1890s.^[13] He sent some pupils from the Art Theatre School—as well as Ioasaf Tikhomirov, who ran the school—to work there.^[13] By the autumn, however, after the censor had banned every play that the theatre proposed to stage, Gorky abandoned the project.^[13]

As a financially successful author, editor, and playwright, Gorky gave financial support to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), as well as supporting liberal appeals to the government for civil rights and social reform. The brutal shooting of workers marching to the Tsar with a petition for reform on 9 January 1905 (known as the «Bloody Sunday»), which set in motion the Revolution of 1905, seems to have pushed Gorky more decisively toward radical solutions. He became closely associated with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov’s Bolshevik wing of the party, with Bogdanov taking responsibility for the transfer of funds from Gorky to Vpered.^[14] It is not clear whether he ever formally joined, and his relations with Lenin and the Bolsheviks would always be rocky. His most influential writings in these years were a series of political plays, most famously The Lower Depths (1902). While briefly imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress during the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, Gorky wrote the play Children of the Sun, nominally set during an 1862 cholera epidemic, but universally understood to relate to present-day events. He was released from the prison after a European-wide campaign, which was supported by Marie Curie, Auguste Rodin and Anatole France, amongst others.^[15]

Gorky assisted the Moscow uprising of 1905, and after its suppression his apartment was raided by the Black Hundreds. He subsequently fled to Lake Saimaa, Finland.^[16] In 1906, the Bolsheviks sent him on a fund-raising trip to the United States with Ivan Narodny. When visiting the Adirondack Mountains, Gorky wrote Мать (Mat’, Mother), his notable novel of revolutionary conversion and struggle. His experiences in the United States—which included a scandal over his travelling with his lover (the actress Maria Andreyeva) rather than his wife—deepened his contempt for the «bourgeois soul.»

Capri years[edit]

From 1906 to 1913, Gorky lived on the island of Capri in southern Italy, partly for health reasons and partly to escape the increasingly repressive atmosphere in Russia.^[1] He continued to support the work of Russian social-democracy, especially the Bolsheviks and invited Anatoly Lunacharsky to stay with him on Capri. The two men had worked together on Literaturny Raspad which appeared in 1908. It was during this period that Gorky, along with Lunacharsky, Bogdanov and Vladimir Bazarov developed the idea of an Encyclopedia of Russian History as a socialist version of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

In 1906, Maxim Gorky visited New York City at the invitation of Mark Twain and other writers. An invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt was withdrawn after the New York World reported that the woman accompanying Gorky was not his wife.^[17] After this was revealed all of the hotels in Manhattan refused to house the couple, and they had to stay at an apartment in Staten Island.^[16]

During a visit to Switzerland, Gorky met Lenin, who he charged spent an inordinate amount of his time feuding with other revolutionaries, writing: «He looked awful. Even his tongue seemed to have turned grey».^[18] Despite his atheism,^[19] Gorky was not a materialist.^[20] Most controversially, he articulated, along with a few other maverick Bolsheviks, a philosophy he called «God-Building» (богостроительство, bogostroitel’stvo),^[1] which sought to recapture the power of myth for the revolution and to create religious atheism that placed collective humanity where God had been and was imbued with passion, wonderment, moral certainty, and the promise of deliverance from evil, suffering, and even death. Though ‘God-Building’ was ridiculed by Lenin, Gorky retained his belief that «culture»—the moral and spiritual awareness of the value and potential of the human self—would be more critical to the revolution’s success than political or economic arrangements.

Return from exile[edit]

An amnesty granted for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty allowed Gorky to return to Russia in 1914, where he continued his social criticism, mentored other writers from the common people, and wrote a series of important cultural memoirs, including the first part of his autobiography.^[1][21] On returning to Russia, he wrote that his main impression was that «everyone is so crushed and devoid of God’s image.» The only solution, he repeatedly declared, was «culture».

After the February Revolution, Gorky visited the headquarters of the Okhrana (secret police) on Kronversky Prospekt together with Nikolai Sukhanov and Vladimir Zenisinov.^[22] Gorky described the former Okhrana headquarters, where he sought literary inspiration, as derelict, with windows broken, and papers lying all over the floor.^[23] Having dinner with Sukhanov later the same day, Gorky grimly predicted that revolution would end in «Asiatic savagery».^[24] Initially a supporter of the Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky, Gorky switched over to the Bolsheviks after the Kornilov affair.^[25] In July 1917, Gorky wrote his own experiences of the Russian working class had been sufficient to dispel any «notions that Russian workers are the incarnation of spiritual beauty and kindness».^[26] Gorky admitted to feeling attracted to Bolshevism, but admitted to concerns about a creed that made the entire working class «sweet and reasonable — I had never known people who were really like this».^[27] Gorky wrote that he knew the poor, the «carpenters, stevedores, bricklayers», in a way that the intellectual Lenin never did, and he frankly distrusted them.^[27]

During World War I, his apartment in Petrograd was turned into a Bolshevik staff room, and his politics remained close to the Bolsheviks throughout the revolutionary period of 1917. On the day after the October Revolution of 7 November 1917, Gorky observed a gardener working the Alexander Park who had cleared snow during the February Revolution while ignoring the shots in the background, asked people during the July Days not to trample the grass and was now chopping off branches, leading Gorky to write that he was «stubborn as a mole, and apparently as blind as one too».^[28] Gorky’s relations with the Bolsheviks became strained, however, after the October Revolution. One contemporary recalled how Gorky would turn «dark and black and grim» at the mere mention of Lenin.^[29] Gorky wrote that Vladimir Lenin together with Leon Trotsky «have become poisoned with the filthy venom of power», crushing the rights of the individual to achieve their revolutionary dreams.^[29] Gorky wrote that Lenin was a «cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honor nor the life of the proletariat. … He does not know the popular masses, he has not lived with them».^[29] Gorky went on to compare Lenin to a chemist experimenting in a laboratory with the only difference being the chemist experimented with inanimate matter to improve life while Lenin was experimenting on the «living flesh of Russia».^[29] A further strain on Gorky’s relations with the Bolsheviks occurred when his newspaper Novaya Zhizn (Новая Жизнь, «New Life«) fell prey to Bolshevik censorship during the ensuing civil war, around which time Gorky published a collection of essays critical of the Bolsheviks called Untimely Thoughts in 1918. (It would not be re-published in Russia until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.) The essays call Lenin a tyrant for his senseless arrests and repression of free discourse, and an anarchist for his conspiratorial tactics; Gorky compares Lenin to both the Tsar and Nechayev.^{[citation needed]}

«Lenin and his associates,» Gorky wrote, «consider it possible to commit all kinds of crimes … the abolition of free speech and senseless arrests.»^[30]

He was a member of the Committee for the Struggle against Antisemitism within the Soviet government.^[31]

In 1921, he hired a secretary, Moura Budberg, who later became his mistress. In August 1921, the poet Nikolay Gumilev was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka for his monarchist views. There is a story that Gorky hurried to Moscow, obtained an order to release Gumilev from Lenin personally, but upon his return to Petrograd he found out that Gumilev had already been shot – but Nadezhda Mandelstam, a close friend of Gumilev’s widow, Anna Akhmatova wrote that: «It is true that people asked him to intervene. … Gorky had a strong dislike of Gumilev, but he nevertheless promised to do something. He could not keep his promise because the sentence of death was announced and carried out with unexpected haste, before Gorky had got round to doing anything.»^[32] In October, Gorky returned to Italy on health grounds: he had tuberculosis.

Povolzhye famine[edit]

In July 1921, Gorky published an appeal to the outside world, saying that millions of lives were menaced by crop failure. The Russian famine of 1921–22, also known as Povolzhye famine, killed an estimated 5 million, primarily affecting the Volga and Ural River regions.^[33]

Second exile[edit]

Gorky left Russia in September 1921, for Berlin. There he heard about the impending Moscow Trial of 12 Socialist Revolutionaries, which hardened his opposition to the Bolshevik regime. He wrote to Anatole France denouncing the trial as a «cynical and public preparation for the murder» of people who had fought for the freedom of the Russian people. He also wrote to the Soviet vice-premier, Alexei Rykov asking him to tell Leon Trotsky that any death sentences carried out on the defendants would be «premeditated and foul murder.»^[34] This provoked a contemptuous reaction from Lenin, who described Gorky as «always supremely spineless in politics», and Trotsky, who dismissed Gorky as an «artist whom no-one takes seriously».^[35] He was denied permission by Italy’s fascist government to return to Capri, but was permitted to settle in Sorrento, where he lived from 1922 to 1932, with an extended household that included Moura Budberg, his ex-wife Andreyeva, her lover, Pyotr Kryuchkov, who acted as Gorky’s secretary (initially a spy for Yagoda) for the remainder of his life, Gorky’s son Max Peshkov, Max’s wife, Timosha, and their two young daughters.

He wrote several successful books while there,^[36] but by 1928 he was having difficulty earning enough to keep his large household, and began to seek an accommodation with the communist regime. The General Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin was equally keen to entice Gorky back to the USSR. He paid his first visit in May 1928 – at the very time when the regime was staging its first show trial since 1922, the so-called Shakhty Trial of 53 engineers employed in the coal industry, one of whom, Pyotr Osadchy, had visited Gorky in Sorrento. In contrast to his attitude to the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Gorky accepted without question that the engineers were guilty, and expressed regret that in the past he had intervened on behalf of professionals who were being persecuted by the regime. During the visit, he struck up friendships with Genrikh Yagoda (deputy head of the OGPU) who vested interest in spying on Gorky, and two other OGPU officers, Semyon Firin and Matvei Pogrebinsky, who held high office in the Gulag. Pogrebinsky was Gorky’s guest in Sorrento for four weeks in 1930. The following year, Yagoda sent his brother-in-law, Leopold Averbakh to Sorrento, with instructions to induce Gorky to return to Russia permanently.^[37]

Return to Russia[edit]

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 Pavel Ryabushinsky, which was for many years the Gorky Museum) in Moscow and a dacha in the suburbs. The city of Nizhni Novgorod, and the surrounding province were renamed Gorky. Moscow’s main park, and one of the central Moscow streets, Tverskaya, were renamed in his honour, as was the Moscow Art Theatre. The largest fixed-wing aircraft in the world in the mid-1930s, the Tupolev ANT-20 was named Maxim Gorky in his honour.

He was also appointed President of the Union of Soviet Writers, founded in 1932, to coincide with his return to the USSR. On 11 October 1931 Gorky read his fairy tale poem «A Girl and Death» (which he wrote in 1892) to his visitors Joseph Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and Vyacheslav Molotov, an event that was later depicted by Viktor Govorov in his painting. On that same day Stalin left his autograph on the last page of this work by Gorky: «This piece is stronger than Goethe’s Faust (love defeats death)>» Voroshilov also left a «resolution»: «I am illiterate, but I think that Comrade Stalin more than correctly defined the meaning of A. Gorky’s poems. On my own behalf, I will say: I love M. Gorky as my and my class of writer, who correctly defined our forward movement.»^[38]

As Vyacheslav Ivanov remembers, Gorky was very upset:

They wrote their resolution on his fairy tale «A Girl and Death». My father, who spoke about this episode with Gorky, insisted emphatically that Gorky was offended. Stalin and Voroshilov were drunk and fooling around.^[39]

Apologist for the gulag[edit]

In 1933, Gorky co-edited, with Averbakh and Firin, an infamous book about the White Sea-Baltic Canal, presented as an example of «successful rehabilitation of the former enemies of proletariat». For other writers, he urged that one obtained realism by extracting the basic idea from reality, but by adding the potential and desirable to it, one added romanticism with deep revolutionary potential.^[40] For himself, Gorky avoided realism. His denials that even a single prisoner died during the construction of the aforementioned canal was refuted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who claimed thousands of prisoners froze to death not only in the evenings from the lack of adequate shelter and food, but even in the middle of the day. Most tellingly, Solzhenitsyn and Dmitry Likhachov document a visit, on June 20, 1929 to Solovki, the “original” forced labour camp, and the model upon which thousands of others were constructed. Given Gorky’s reputation, (both to the authorities and to the prisoners), the camp was transformed from one where prisoners (Zeks) were worked to death to one befitting the official Soviet idea of “transformation through labour”. Gorky did not notice the relocation of thousands of prisoners to ease the overcrowding, the new clothes on the prisoners (used to labouring in their underwear), or even the hiding of prisoners under tarpaulins, and the removal of the torture rooms. The deception was exposed when Gorky was presented with children “model prisoners”, one of who challenged Gorky if he “wanted to know the truth”. On the affirmative, the room was cleared and the 14-year-old boy recounted the truth — starvation, men worked to death, and of the pole torture, of using men instead of horses, of the summary executions, of rolling prisoners, bound to a heavy pole down stairs with hundreds of steps, of spending the night, in underwear, in the snow. Gorky never wrote about the boy, or even asked to take the boy with him. The boy was executed after Gorky left.^[41] Gorky left the room in tears, and wrote in the visitor book “I am not in a state of mind to express my impressions in just a few words. I wouldn’t want, yes, and I would likewise be ashamed to permit myself the banal praise of the remarkable energy of people who, while remaining vigilant and tireless sentinels of the Revolution, are able, at the same time, to be remarkably bold creators of culture”.^[42]

As Gorky’s biographer Pavel Basinsky notes, it was impossible for Gorky to «take the boy with him» even with his reputation of a «great proletarian writer». As he says, Gorky had to spend over 2 years to free Julia Danzas.^[43] Some of the Solovki historians doubt that there was a boy.

Gorky also helped other political prisoners (not without the influence of his wife, Yekaterina Peshkova). For example, because of Gorky’s interference Mikhail Bakhtin’s initial verdict (5 years of Solovki) was changed to 6 years of exile.

D: Mikhail Mikhailovich, have you met Gorky in person?
B: With Gorky? No. I only saw him several times, and then (there is no need to write this down), when, therefore, I was imprisoned, Gorky even sent two telegrams to the appropriate institutions …
D: Gorky?
B: Yes. In my defence.
D: Well, it just needs to be written down.
B: He knew my first book and generally heard a lot about me, and we had mutual acquaintances…
<…>
B: Well, it was… 1929.
D: Yeees. And Gorky… Then he stopped interfering.
B: So in the case… yes, in my case there were Gorky’s telegrams, his two telegrams. <…>
D: A lot of good things was made by his wife, Yekaterina Pavlovna.
B: Yes. Yekaterina Pavlovna. I didn’t know her <…> She was then the chairman of the so-called …
D: Red Cross.

B: Yes. Political Red Cross.

Hostility to homosexuality[edit]

Gorky strongly supported efforts in getting a law passed in 1934, making homosexuality a criminal offense. His attitude was coloured by the fact that some members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung were homosexual. The phrase «exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish» is often attributed to him.^[45][46] He was actually quoting a popular saying. Writing in Pravda on 23 May 1934, Gorky said: «There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear.»^[47][48]

Gorky and the Soviet censorship[edit]

And in my opinion, he (Vladislav Khodasevich) is right when he says that the Soviet critics have made up an anti-Soviet play from The Turbin Brothers. Bulgakov is «not a brother» to me; I have not the slightest desire to defend him. But he is a talented writer, and we don’t have many people like that. So there’s no point in making them «martyrs for an idea.»

— Letter to Joseph Stalin, 1930^[49]

Gorky was following Bulgakov’s literary career since 1925, when he first read The Fatal Eggs. According to his letters, even then he admired his talent. Partly because of Gorky Bulgakov’s plays The Cabal of Hypocrites and The Days of the Turbins were allowed for staging.^[50] Gorky also tried to use his influence to allow the Moscow Art Theater production of Bulgakov’s other play, Flight.^[51] However, it was banned because of Stalin’s personal reaction.^[52]

…I strongly support the publication by Academia of the novel Demons and other contrrevolutionary novels, such as Pisemsky’s’ Troubled Seas, Leskov’s No Way Out and Krestovsky’s Marevo. I do this because I am against the transformation of legal literature into illegal literature, which is being sold «from under the counter» and which seduces young people with its «taboo»… You need to know the enemy, you need to know his ideology… The Soviet government is not afraid of anything, and least of all can frighten the publication an old novel. But … Comrade Zaslavsky with his article brought true pleasure to our enemies, and especially to the White émigrés. «They ban Dostoyevsky» they screech, grateful to Comrade Zaslavsky.

.

Anti-formalist campaign[edit]

You have a big choice of weapons. Soviet literature has every opportunity to apply these types of weapons (genres, styles, forms and methods of literary creativity) in their diversity and completeness, selecting all the best that has been created in this area by all previous eras.^[54]

Socialist realism provides artistic creativity with an exceptional opportunity for the manifestation of creative initiative, the choice of various forms, styles and genres.

Shostakovich is a young man, about 25 years old, undeniably talented, but very self-confident and very nervous. The article in Pravda hit him like a brick on the head, the guy is completely depressed. <…> «Muddle», but why? In what and how is it expressed — «muddle»? Critics must give a technical assessment of Shostakovich’s music. And what the Pravda article gave allowed a bunch of mediocre people, hack-workers, to attack Shostakovich in every possible way.

— Letter to Joseph Stalin, 1936^[55]

Conflicts with Stalinism[edit]

Gorky’s relationship with the regime got colder after his return to the Soviet Union in 1933: the Soviet authorities would never let him out in Italy again. He continued to write the propagandist articles in Pravda and glorify Stalin. However, by 1934 his relationship with the regime was getting more and more distant. Leopold Averbakh, whom Gorky regarded as a protege, was denied a role in the newly created Writers Union, and objected to interference by the Central Committee staff in the affairs of the union^{[citation needed]}; Gorky’s conception of «Socialist realism» and creation of the Writers Union, instead of ending the RAPP «literary dictatorship» and uniting the «proletarian» writers with the denounced «poputchicks» becomes a tool to increase the censorship. This conflict, which may have been exacerbated by Gorky’s despair over the early death of his son, Max, came to a head just before the first Soviet Writers Congress, in August 1934.

His meetings with Stalin were getting more rare. At that time he gets influenced by Lev Kamenev, who was made the director of Academia publishing House because of Gorky’s request, and Nikolai Bukharin, who had been Gorky’s friend since 1920s.^[56] On 11 August, Gorky submitted an article for publication in Pravda which attacked the deputy head of the press department, Pavel Yudin with such intemperate language that Stalin’s deputy, Lazar Kaganovich ordered its suppression, but was forced to relent after hundreds of copies of the article circulated by hand.^{[citation needed]} Gorky’s draft of the keynote speech he was due to give at the congress caused such consternation when he submitted it to the Politburo that four of its leading members – Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, and Andrei Zhdanov – were sent to persuade him to make changes.^[57]

Yesterday we, having familiarized ourselves with M. Gorky’s speech to the Congress of Writers, came to the conclusion that the speech is not suitable in this form. First of all — the very construction and arrangement of the material — 3/4, if not more, is occupied by general historical and philosophical reasoning, and even then incorrect. Primitive society is presented as the ideal, and capitalism at all of its stages is portrayed as a reactionary force that hindered the development of technology and culture. It is clear that this position is non-Marxist. Soviet literature is almost not covered, but the speech is called «On Soviet Literature.» <…> …after a long talk he agreed to make some edits and changes. It seems that he is in a bad mood. <…> The point, of course, is not what he says, but how he says it. These talks have reminded me of comrade Krupskaya. I think that Kamenev plays an important role in shaping these sentiments of Gorky. <…>
Today we exchanged views and think that it is better, after making some edits, to publish it than to allow it to be read as illegal.

In his speech he calls Fyodor Dostoevsky a «medieval inquisitor», however, he admires him for «having painted with the most vivid perfection of word portraiture a type of egocentrist, a type of social degenerate in the person of the hero of his Notes from Underground» and notes him as a major figure in Russian classic literature.^[59] After the end of the congress Central Committee of the Party, in which maintained that writers the likes of Panferov, Ermilov, Fadeyev, Stavsky, and many other writers who were approved as the «masters of Socialist realism», were unworthy of membership in the Union of Soviet Writers, obviously preferring Boris Pasternak, Andrei Bely, Andrei Platonov and Artyom Vesyoly (Gorky took the latter two in his «writers brigade» because of their inability to be published,^[60] although he criticized Bely and Platonov for their techniques). He also wrote an article about Panferov’s novel Brusski: «One could, of course, not note the verbal errors and careless technique of the gifted writer, but he acts as an adviser and teacher, and he teaches the production of literary waste».^[61]

Gorky also tried to fight the Soviet censorship as it was growing more power. For example, he tried to defend an issue of Dostoevsky’s Demons.

As the conflict was becoming more visible, Gorky’s political and literary positions became weaker. Panferov wrote an answer to Gorky, in which he criticized him. David Zaslavsky published an ironical response to Gorky’s defense of Demons.

According to some sources (such as Romain Rolland’s diary), because of Gorky’s refusal to blindly obey the policies of Stalinism, he had lost the Party’ s goodwill and spent his last days under unannounced house arrest.^[62]

Death[edit]

With the increase of Stalinist repression and especially after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Gorky was placed under unannounced house arrest in his house near Moscow in Gorki-10 (the name of the place is a completely different word in Russian unrelated to his surname). His long-serving secretary Pyotr Kryuchkov had been recruited by Yagoda as a paid informer.^[63] Before his death from a lingering illness in June 1936, he was visited at home by Stalin, Yagoda, and other leading communists, and by Moura Budberg, who had chosen not to return to the USSR with him but was permitted to stay for his funeral.

The sudden death of Gorky’s son Maxim Peshkov in May 1934 was followed by the death of Maxim Gorky himself in June 1936 from pneumonia. Speculation has long surrounded the circumstances of his death. Stalin and Molotov were among those who carried Gorky’s urn during the funeral. During the Bukharin trial in 1938 (one of the three Moscow Trials), one of the charges was that Gorky was killed by Yagoda’s NKVD agents.^[64]

In Soviet times, before and after his death, the complexities in Gorky’s life and outlook were reduced to an iconic image (echoed in heroic pictures and statues dotting the countryside): Gorky as a great Soviet writer who emerged from the common people, a loyal friend of the Bolsheviks, and the founder of the increasingly canonical «socialist realism».^[65]

Bibliography[edit]

Source: Turner, Lily; Strever, Mark (1946). Orphan Paul; A Bibliography and Chronology of Maxim Gorky. New York: Boni and Gaer. pp. 261–270.

Novels[edit]

• Goremyka Pavel, (Горемыка Павел, 1894). Published in English as Orphan Paul^[66]
• Foma Gordeyev (Фома Гордеев, 1899). Also translated as The Man Who Was Afraid
• Three of Them (Трое, 1900). Also translated as Three Men and The Three
• The Mother (Мать, 1906). First published in English, in 1906
• The Life of a Useless Man (Жизнь ненужного человека, 1908)
• A Confession (Исповедь, 1908)
• Gorodok Okurov (Городок Окуров, 1908), not translated
• The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin (Жизнь Матвея Кожемякина, 1910)
• The Artamonov Business (Дело Артамоновых, 1925). Also translated as The Artamonovs and Decadence
• The Life of Klim Samgin (Жизнь Клима Самгина, 1925–1936). Published in English as Forty Years: The Life of Clim Samghin
  • Volume I. Bystander (1930)
  • Volume II. The Magnet (1931)
  • Volume III. Other Fires (1933)
  • Volume IV. The Specter (1938)

Novellas and short stories[edit]

• Sketches and Stories (Очерки и рассказы), 1899
  • «Makar Chudra» (Макар Чудра), 1892
  • «Old Izergil» (Старуха Изергиль), 1895
  • «Chelkash» (Челкаш), 1895
  • «Konovalov» (Коновалов), 1897
  • The Orlovs (Супруги Орловы), 1897
  • Creatures That Once Were Men (Бывшие люди), 1897
  • «Malva» (Мальва), 1897
  • Varenka Olesova (Варенька Олесова), 1898
  • «Twenty-six Men and a Girl» (Двадцать шесть и одна), 1899

Plays[edit]

• The Philistines (Мещане), translated also as The Smug Citizens and The Petty Bourgeois (Мещане), 1901
• The Lower Depths (На дне), 1902
• Summerfolk (Дачники), 1904
• Children of the Sun (Дети солнца), 1905
• Barbarians (Варвары), 1905
• Enemies, 1906.
• The Last Ones (Последние), 1908. Translated also as Our Father^[c]
• Reception (Встреча), 1910. Translated also as Children
• Queer People (Чудаки), 1910. Translated also as Eccentrics
• Vassa Zheleznova (Васса Железнова), 1910, 1935 (revised version)
• The Zykovs (Зыковы), 1913
• Counterfeit Money (Фальшивая монета), 1913
• The Old Man (Старик), 1915, Revised 1922, 1924. Translated also as The Judge
• Workaholic Slovotekov (Работяга Словотеков), 1920
• Egor Bulychev (Егор Булычов и другие), 1932
• Dostigayev and Others (Достигаев и другие), 1933

Non-fiction[edit]

• My Childhood. In the World. My Universities (1913–1923)
• Chaliapin, articles in Letopis, 1917^[d]
• My Recollections of Tolstoy, 1919
• Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev, 1920–1928
• Fragments from My Diary (Заметки из дневника), 1924
• V.I. Lenin (В.И. Ленин), reminiscence, 1924–1931
• The I.V. Stalin White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal, 1934 (editor-in-chief)
• Literary Portraits [c.1935].^[68]

Essays[edit]

• O karamazovshchine (О карамазовщине, On Karamazovism/On Karamazovshchina), 1915, not translated
• Untimely Thoughts. Notes on Revolution and Culture (Несвоевременные мысли. Заметки о революции и культуре), 1918
• On the Russian Peasantry (О русском крестьянстве), 1922

Poems[edit]

• «The Song of the Stormy Petrel» (Песня о Буревестнике), 1901
• «Song of a Falcon» (Песня о Соколе), 1902. Also referred to as a short story

Autobiography[edit]

• My Childhood (Детство), Part I, 1913–1914
• In the World (В людях), Part II, 1916
• My Universities (Мои университеты), Part III, 1923

Collections[edit]

• Sketches and Stories, three volumes, 1898–1899
• Creatures That Once Were Men, stories in English translation (1905). This contained an introduction by G. K. Chesterton^[69] The Russian title, Бывшие люди (literally «Former people») gained popularity as an expression in reference to people who severely dropped in their social status
• Tales of Italy (Сказки об Италии), 1911–1913
• Through Russia (По Руси), 1923
• Stories 1922-1924 (Рассказы 1922-1924 годов), 1925

Commemoration[edit]

• In almost every large settlement of the states of the former USSR, there was^[70] or is Gorky Street. In 2013, 2110 streets, avenues and lanes in Russia were named «Gorky», and another 395 were named «Maxim Gorky».^[71]
• Gorky was the name of Nizhny Novgorod from 1932 to 1990.
• Gorkovsky suburban railway line, Moscow
• Gorkovskoye village of Novoorsky District of Orenburg Oblast
• Gorky village in the Leningrad oblast
• Gorkovsky village (Volgograd) (formerly Voroponovo)
• Village n.a. Maxim Gorky, Kameshkovsky District of Vladimir Oblast
• Gorkovskoye village is the district center of Omsk Oblast (formerly Ikonnikovo)
• Maxim Gorky village, Znamensky District of Omsk Oblast
• Village n.a. Maxim Gorky, Krutinsky District of Omsk Oblast
• In Nizhny Novgorod the Central District Children’s Library, the Academic Drama Theater, a street, as well as a square are named after Maxim Gorky. And the most important attraction there is the museum-apartment of Maxim Gorky
• Drama theaters in the following cities are named after Maxim Gorky: Moscow (MAT, 1932), Vladivostok (Primorsky Gorky Drama Theater — PGDT), Berlin (Maxim Gorki Theater), Baku (ASTYZ), Astana (Russian Drama Theater named after M. Gorky), Tula (Tula Academic Theatre), Minsk (Theater named after M. Gorky), Rostov-on-Don (Rostov Drama Theater named after M. Gorky), Krasnodar, Samara (Samara Drama Theater named after M. Gorky), Orenburg (Orenburg Regional Drama Theater), Volgograd (Volgograd Regional Drama Theater), Magadan (Magadan Regional Music and Drama Theater), Simferopol (KARDT), Kustanay, Kudymkar (Komi- Perm National Drama Theater), Young Spectator Theater in Lviv, as well as in Saint Petersburg from 1932 to 1992 (DB). Also, the name was given to the Interregional Russian Drama Theater of the Fergana Valley, the Tashkent State Academic Theater, the Tula Regional Drama Theater, and the Nur-Sultan Regional Drama Theater.
• Palaces of Culture n.a. Maxim Gorky were built in Nevinnomyssk, Rovenky, Novosibirsk and Saint Petersburg
• Universities: Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, Ural State University, Donetsk National Medical University, Minsk State Pedagogical Institute, Omsk State Pedagogical University, until 1993 Turkmen State University in Ashgabat was named after Maxim Gorky (now named after Magtymguly Pyragy), Sukhum State University was named after Maxim Gorky, National University of Kharkiv was named after Gorky in 1936–1999, Ulyanovsk Agricultural Institute, Uman Agricultural Institute, Kazan Order of the Badge of Honor The institute was named after Maxim Gorky until it was granted the status of an academy in 1995 (now Kazan State Agrarian University), the Mari Polytechnic Institute and Perm State University named after Maxim Gorky (1934–1993)
• The following cities have parks named after Maxim Gorky: Rostov-on-Don, Taganrog, Saratov, Minsk, Krasnoyarsk, Kharkiv, Odessa, Melitopol, Moscow, Alma-Ata

Monuments[edit]

Monuments of Maxim Gorky are installed in many cities. Among them:

• In Russia — Borisoglebsk, Arzamas, Volgograd, Voronezh, Vyborg, Dobrinka, Izhevsk, Krasnoyarsk, Moscow, Nevinnomyssk, Nizhny Novgorod, Orenburg, Penza, Pechora, Rostov-on-Don, Rubtsovsk, Rylsk, Ryazan, St. Petersburg, Sarov, Sochi, Taganrog, Khabarovsk, Chelyabinsk, Ufa, Yartsevo.
• In Belarus — Dobrush, Minsk. Mogilev, Gorky Park, bust.
• In Ukraine — Donetsk, Kryvyi Rih, Melitopol, Kharkiv, Yalta, Yasynuvata
• In Azerbaijan — Baku
• In Kazakhstan — Alma-Ata, Zyryanovsk, Kostanay
• In Georgia — Tbilisi
• In Moldova — Chisinaus, Leovo
• In Italy — Sorrento
• In India — Gorky Sadan,^[72] Kolkata

On 6 December 2022 the City Council of the Ukrainian city Dnipro decided to remove from the city all monuments to figures of Russian culture and history, in particular it was mentioned that the monuments to Gorky, Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lomonosov would be removed from the public space of the city.^[73] The monument of Gorky that been erected in 1977 was dismantled on 26 December 2022.^[74]

Philately[edit]

Maxim Gorky is depicted on postage stamps: Albania (1986),^[75] Vietnam (1968)^[76] India (1968),^[77] Maldives (2018),^[78] and many more. Some of them can be found below.

• Maxim Gorky postage stamps

• 

  Postage stamp USSR, 1932

• 

  Postage stamp USSR, 1932

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1943

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1943

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, «10 years since the death of M. Gorky» (1946, 30 kopeeks)

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, «10 years since the death of M. Gorky» (1946, 60 kopeeks)

• 

  Postage stamp, GDR, 1953

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1956

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1958

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1959

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1968

• 

  Postage stamp, Russia, «Rusiia. XX век. Culture» (2000, 1,30 rubles)

In 2018, FSUE Russian Post released a miniature sheet dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the writer.

Numismatics[edit]

• In 1988, a 1 ruble coin was issued in the USSR, dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the writer.
• In 2018, on the 150th anniversary of the writer’s birthday, the Bank of Russia issued a commemorative silver coin with a face value of 2 rubles in the series “Outstanding Personalities of Russia”.

Depictions and adaptations[edit]

• In 1912, the Italian composer Giacomo Orefice based his opera Radda on the character of Radda in Gorky’s 1892 short story Makar Chudra.
• In 1932, German playwright Bertolt Brecht published his play The Mother, which was based on Gorky’s 1906 novel Mother. The same novel was also adapted for an opera by Valery Zhelobinsky in 1938.
• In 1938–1939, Gorky’s three-part autobiography was released by Soyuzdetfilm as three feature films: The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, My Apprenticeship and My Universities, all three directed by Mark Donskoy.
• In 1975, Gorky’s 1908 play The Last Ones (Последние), had its New York debut at the Manhattan Theater Club, under the alternative English title Our Father, directed by Keith Fowler.
• In 1985, Gorky’s 1906 play Enemies was translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair and Jeremy Brooks and directed in London by Ann Pennington in association with the Internationalist Theatre at the tail end of the British miners’ strike of 1984–1985. Gorky’s «pseudo-populism» is done away with in this production by the actors speaking «without distinctive accents and consequently without populist sentiment».^[79]

See also[edit]

• FK Sloboda Tuzla football club from Bosnia and Herzegovina, originally called FK Gorki
• Gorky Park in Moscow and Park of Maxim Gorky in Kharkiv, Ukraine
• Maxim Gorky Literature Institute
• Palace of Culture named after Maxim Gorky, Novosibirsk
• Soviet cruiser Maxim Gorky, a Project 26bis (or Kirov-class) light cruiser, which served from 1940 to 1956 and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1944
• Tupolev ANT-20 aircraft, nicknamed «Maxim Gorky»
• Znanie Publishers

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

• Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43437-8.
• Benedetti, Jean (1999). Stanislavski : His Life and Art : a Biography (3rd, rev. and expanded ed.). London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-52520-1. OCLC 1109272008.
• McSmith, Andy (2015). Fear and the Muse Kept Watch, The Russian Masters – from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein – under Stalin. New York: The New Press. ISBN 9781620970799. OCLC 907678164.
• Moynahan, Brian (1992). Comrades : 1917 — Russia in Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-58698-6. OCLC 1028562793 – via Internet Archvive.
• Worrall, Nick. 1996. The Moscow Art Theatre. Theatre Production Studies ser. London and NY: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-05598-9.
• Figes, Orlando: A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 The Bodley Head, London. (2014) ISBN 978-0-14-024364-2

Further reading[edit]

• Figes, Orlando (June 1996). «Maxim Gorky and the Russian revolution». History Today. 46 (6): 16. ISSN 0018-2753. EBSCOhost 9606240213.
• Tovah Yedlin. Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography

External links[edit]

• Maxim Gorky Archive at marxists.org
• Works by Maxim Gorky at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Maxim Gorky at Internet Archive
• Works by Maxim Gorky at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Newspaper clippings about Maxim Gorky in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Maxim Gorky
Gorky in 1926 at Posillipo
Born	Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 Nizhny Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	18 June 1936 (aged 68) Gorki-10, Moscow Oblast, Soviet Union
Occupation	Prose writer, dramatist, essayist, politician, poet
Period	1892–1936
Notable works	The Lower Depths (1902) Mother (1906) My Childhood. In the World. My Universities (1913–1923) The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936)
Signature

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (Russian: Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в;^[a] 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (Russian: Макси́м Го́рький), was a Russian writer and socialist political thinker and proponent.^[1] He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.^[2] Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.

Gorky’s most famous works are his early short stories, written in the 1890s («Chelkash», «Old Izergil», and «Twenty-Six Men and a Girl»); plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and Children of the Sun (1905); a poem, «The Song of the Stormy Petrel» (1901); his autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913–1923); and a novel, Mother (1906). Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and Mother has been frequently criticized, and Gorky himself thought of Mother as one of his biggest failures.^[3] However, there have been warmer judgements of some less-known post-revolutionary works such as the novels The Artamonov Business (1925) and The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936); the latter is considered Gorky’s masterpiece and has sometimes been viewed by critics as a modernist work. Unlike his pre-revolutionary writings (known for their «anti-psychologism») Gorky’s late works differ with an ambivalent portrayal of the Russian Revolution and «unmodern interest to human psychology» (as noted by D. S. Mirsky).^[4] He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, both mentioned by Gorky in his memoirs.

Gorky was active in the emerging Marxist communist and later in the Bolshevik movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov’s Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union (USSR). In 1932, he returned to the USSR on Joseph Stalin’s personal invitation and lived there until his death in June 1936. After his return, he was officially declared the «founder of Socialist Realism». Despite his official reputation, Gorky’s relations with the Soviet regime were rather difficult. Modern scholars consider his ideology of God-Building as distinct from the official Marxism–Leninism, and his work fits uneasily under the «Socialist Realist» label. Gorky’s work still has a controversial reputation because of his political biography, although in the last years his works are returning to European stages and being republished.^[5]

Life[edit]

Early years[edit]

Born as Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother^[1] and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880. After an attempt at suicide in December 1887, he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing.^[1]

As a journalist working for provincial newspapers, he wrote under the pseudonym Иегудиил Хламида (Jehudiel Khlamida).^[6] He started using the pseudonym «Gorky» (from горький; literally «bitter») in 1892, when his first short story, «Makar Chudra», was published by the newspaper Kavkaz (The Caucasus) in Tiflis, where he spent several weeks doing menial jobs, mostly for the Caucasian Railway workshops.^[8][9] The name reflected his simmering anger about life in Russia and a determination to speak the bitter truth. Gorky’s first book Очерки и рассказы (Essays and Stories) in 1898 enjoyed a sensational success, and his career as a writer began. Gorky wrote incessantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world. He described the lives of people in the lowest strata and on the margins of society, revealing their hardships, humiliations, and brutalisation, but also their inward spark of humanity.^[1]

Political and literary development[edit]

Gorky’s reputation grew as a unique literary voice from the bottom stratum of society and as a fervent advocate of Russia’s social, political, and cultural transformation. By 1899, he was openly associating with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement, which helped make him a celebrity among both the intelligentsia and the growing numbers of «conscious» workers. At the heart of all his work was a belief in the inherent worth and potential of the human person. In his writing, he counterposed individuals, aware of their natural dignity, and inspired by energy and will, with people who succumb to the degrading conditions of life around them. Both his writings and his letters reveal a «restless man» (a frequent self-description) struggling to resolve contradictory feelings of faith and scepticism, love of life and disgust at the vulgarity and pettiness of the human world.^{[citation needed]}

In 1916, Gorky said that the teachings of the ancient Jewish sage Hillel the Elder deeply influenced his life: «In my early youth I read…the words of…Hillel, if I remember rightly: ‘If thou art not for thyself, who will be for thee? But if thou art for thyself alone, wherefore art thou’? The inner meaning of these words impressed me with its profound wisdom…The thought ate its way deep into my soul, and I say now with conviction: Hillel’s wisdom served as a strong staff on my road, which was neither even nor easy. I believe that Jewish wisdom is more all-human and universal than any other; and this not only because of its immemorial age…but because of the powerful humaneness that saturates it, because of its high estimate of man.»^[10]

He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime and was arrested many times. Gorky befriended many revolutionaries and became a personal friend of Vladimir Lenin after they met in 1902. He exposed governmental control of the press (see Matvei Golovinski affair). In 1902, Gorky was elected an honorary Academician of Literature, but Tsar Nicholas II ordered this annulled. In protest, Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko left the Academy.^[11]

From 1900 to 1905, Gorky’s writings became more optimistic. He became more involved in the opposition movement, for which he was again briefly imprisoned in 1901. In 1904, having severed his relationship with the Moscow Art Theatre in the wake of conflict with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to establish a theatre of his own.^[b] Both Konstantin Stanislavski and Savva Morozov provided financial support for the venture.^[13] Stanislavski believed that Gorky’s theatre was an opportunity to develop the network of provincial theatres which he hoped would reform the art of the stage in Russia, a dream of his since the 1890s.^[13] He sent some pupils from the Art Theatre School—as well as Ioasaf Tikhomirov, who ran the school—to work there.^[13] By the autumn, however, after the censor had banned every play that the theatre proposed to stage, Gorky abandoned the project.^[13]

As a financially successful author, editor, and playwright, Gorky gave financial support to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), as well as supporting liberal appeals to the government for civil rights and social reform. The brutal shooting of workers marching to the Tsar with a petition for reform on 9 January 1905 (known as the «Bloody Sunday»), which set in motion the Revolution of 1905, seems to have pushed Gorky more decisively toward radical solutions. He became closely associated with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov’s Bolshevik wing of the party, with Bogdanov taking responsibility for the transfer of funds from Gorky to Vpered.^[14] It is not clear whether he ever formally joined, and his relations with Lenin and the Bolsheviks would always be rocky. His most influential writings in these years were a series of political plays, most famously The Lower Depths (1902). While briefly imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress during the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, Gorky wrote the play Children of the Sun, nominally set during an 1862 cholera epidemic, but universally understood to relate to present-day events. He was released from the prison after a European-wide campaign, which was supported by Marie Curie, Auguste Rodin and Anatole France, amongst others.^[15]

Gorky assisted the Moscow uprising of 1905, and after its suppression his apartment was raided by the Black Hundreds. He subsequently fled to Lake Saimaa, Finland.^[16] In 1906, the Bolsheviks sent him on a fund-raising trip to the United States with Ivan Narodny. When visiting the Adirondack Mountains, Gorky wrote Мать (Mat’, Mother), his notable novel of revolutionary conversion and struggle. His experiences in the United States—which included a scandal over his travelling with his lover (the actress Maria Andreyeva) rather than his wife—deepened his contempt for the «bourgeois soul.»

Capri years[edit]

From 1906 to 1913, Gorky lived on the island of Capri in southern Italy, partly for health reasons and partly to escape the increasingly repressive atmosphere in Russia.^[1] He continued to support the work of Russian social-democracy, especially the Bolsheviks and invited Anatoly Lunacharsky to stay with him on Capri. The two men had worked together on Literaturny Raspad which appeared in 1908. It was during this period that Gorky, along with Lunacharsky, Bogdanov and Vladimir Bazarov developed the idea of an Encyclopedia of Russian History as a socialist version of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

In 1906, Maxim Gorky visited New York City at the invitation of Mark Twain and other writers. An invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt was withdrawn after the New York World reported that the woman accompanying Gorky was not his wife.^[17] After this was revealed all of the hotels in Manhattan refused to house the couple, and they had to stay at an apartment in Staten Island.^[16]

During a visit to Switzerland, Gorky met Lenin, who he charged spent an inordinate amount of his time feuding with other revolutionaries, writing: «He looked awful. Even his tongue seemed to have turned grey».^[18] Despite his atheism,^[19] Gorky was not a materialist.^[20] Most controversially, he articulated, along with a few other maverick Bolsheviks, a philosophy he called «God-Building» (богостроительство, bogostroitel’stvo),^[1] which sought to recapture the power of myth for the revolution and to create religious atheism that placed collective humanity where God had been and was imbued with passion, wonderment, moral certainty, and the promise of deliverance from evil, suffering, and even death. Though ‘God-Building’ was ridiculed by Lenin, Gorky retained his belief that «culture»—the moral and spiritual awareness of the value and potential of the human self—would be more critical to the revolution’s success than political or economic arrangements.

Return from exile[edit]

An amnesty granted for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty allowed Gorky to return to Russia in 1914, where he continued his social criticism, mentored other writers from the common people, and wrote a series of important cultural memoirs, including the first part of his autobiography.^[1][21] On returning to Russia, he wrote that his main impression was that «everyone is so crushed and devoid of God’s image.» The only solution, he repeatedly declared, was «culture».

After the February Revolution, Gorky visited the headquarters of the Okhrana (secret police) on Kronversky Prospekt together with Nikolai Sukhanov and Vladimir Zenisinov.^[22] Gorky described the former Okhrana headquarters, where he sought literary inspiration, as derelict, with windows broken, and papers lying all over the floor.^[23] Having dinner with Sukhanov later the same day, Gorky grimly predicted that revolution would end in «Asiatic savagery».^[24] Initially a supporter of the Socialist-Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky, Gorky switched over to the Bolsheviks after the Kornilov affair.^[25] In July 1917, Gorky wrote his own experiences of the Russian working class had been sufficient to dispel any «notions that Russian workers are the incarnation of spiritual beauty and kindness».^[26] Gorky admitted to feeling attracted to Bolshevism, but admitted to concerns about a creed that made the entire working class «sweet and reasonable — I had never known people who were really like this».^[27] Gorky wrote that he knew the poor, the «carpenters, stevedores, bricklayers», in a way that the intellectual Lenin never did, and he frankly distrusted them.^[27]

During World War I, his apartment in Petrograd was turned into a Bolshevik staff room, and his politics remained close to the Bolsheviks throughout the revolutionary period of 1917. On the day after the October Revolution of 7 November 1917, Gorky observed a gardener working the Alexander Park who had cleared snow during the February Revolution while ignoring the shots in the background, asked people during the July Days not to trample the grass and was now chopping off branches, leading Gorky to write that he was «stubborn as a mole, and apparently as blind as one too».^[28] Gorky’s relations with the Bolsheviks became strained, however, after the October Revolution. One contemporary recalled how Gorky would turn «dark and black and grim» at the mere mention of Lenin.^[29] Gorky wrote that Vladimir Lenin together with Leon Trotsky «have become poisoned with the filthy venom of power», crushing the rights of the individual to achieve their revolutionary dreams.^[29] Gorky wrote that Lenin was a «cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honor nor the life of the proletariat. … He does not know the popular masses, he has not lived with them».^[29] Gorky went on to compare Lenin to a chemist experimenting in a laboratory with the only difference being the chemist experimented with inanimate matter to improve life while Lenin was experimenting on the «living flesh of Russia».^[29] A further strain on Gorky’s relations with the Bolsheviks occurred when his newspaper Novaya Zhizn (Новая Жизнь, «New Life«) fell prey to Bolshevik censorship during the ensuing civil war, around which time Gorky published a collection of essays critical of the Bolsheviks called Untimely Thoughts in 1918. (It would not be re-published in Russia until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.) The essays call Lenin a tyrant for his senseless arrests and repression of free discourse, and an anarchist for his conspiratorial tactics; Gorky compares Lenin to both the Tsar and Nechayev.^{[citation needed]}

«Lenin and his associates,» Gorky wrote, «consider it possible to commit all kinds of crimes … the abolition of free speech and senseless arrests.»^[30]

He was a member of the Committee for the Struggle against Antisemitism within the Soviet government.^[31]

In 1921, he hired a secretary, Moura Budberg, who later became his mistress. In August 1921, the poet Nikolay Gumilev was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka for his monarchist views. There is a story that Gorky hurried to Moscow, obtained an order to release Gumilev from Lenin personally, but upon his return to Petrograd he found out that Gumilev had already been shot – but Nadezhda Mandelstam, a close friend of Gumilev’s widow, Anna Akhmatova wrote that: «It is true that people asked him to intervene. … Gorky had a strong dislike of Gumilev, but he nevertheless promised to do something. He could not keep his promise because the sentence of death was announced and carried out with unexpected haste, before Gorky had got round to doing anything.»^[32] In October, Gorky returned to Italy on health grounds: he had tuberculosis.

Povolzhye famine[edit]

In July 1921, Gorky published an appeal to the outside world, saying that millions of lives were menaced by crop failure. The Russian famine of 1921–22, also known as Povolzhye famine, killed an estimated 5 million, primarily affecting the Volga and Ural River regions.^[33]

Second exile[edit]

Gorky left Russia in September 1921, for Berlin. There he heard about the impending Moscow Trial of 12 Socialist Revolutionaries, which hardened his opposition to the Bolshevik regime. He wrote to Anatole France denouncing the trial as a «cynical and public preparation for the murder» of people who had fought for the freedom of the Russian people. He also wrote to the Soviet vice-premier, Alexei Rykov asking him to tell Leon Trotsky that any death sentences carried out on the defendants would be «premeditated and foul murder.»^[34] This provoked a contemptuous reaction from Lenin, who described Gorky as «always supremely spineless in politics», and Trotsky, who dismissed Gorky as an «artist whom no-one takes seriously».^[35] He was denied permission by Italy’s fascist government to return to Capri, but was permitted to settle in Sorrento, where he lived from 1922 to 1932, with an extended household that included Moura Budberg, his ex-wife Andreyeva, her lover, Pyotr Kryuchkov, who acted as Gorky’s secretary (initially a spy for Yagoda) for the remainder of his life, Gorky’s son Max Peshkov, Max’s wife, Timosha, and their two young daughters.

He wrote several successful books while there,^[36] but by 1928 he was having difficulty earning enough to keep his large household, and began to seek an accommodation with the communist regime. The General Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin was equally keen to entice Gorky back to the USSR. He paid his first visit in May 1928 – at the very time when the regime was staging its first show trial since 1922, the so-called Shakhty Trial of 53 engineers employed in the coal industry, one of whom, Pyotr Osadchy, had visited Gorky in Sorrento. In contrast to his attitude to the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Gorky accepted without question that the engineers were guilty, and expressed regret that in the past he had intervened on behalf of professionals who were being persecuted by the regime. During the visit, he struck up friendships with Genrikh Yagoda (deputy head of the OGPU) who vested interest in spying on Gorky, and two other OGPU officers, Semyon Firin and Matvei Pogrebinsky, who held high office in the Gulag. Pogrebinsky was Gorky’s guest in Sorrento for four weeks in 1930. The following year, Yagoda sent his brother-in-law, Leopold Averbakh to Sorrento, with instructions to induce Gorky to return to Russia permanently.^[37]

Return to Russia[edit]

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 Pavel Ryabushinsky, which was for many years the Gorky Museum) in Moscow and a dacha in the suburbs. The city of Nizhni Novgorod, and the surrounding province were renamed Gorky. Moscow’s main park, and one of the central Moscow streets, Tverskaya, were renamed in his honour, as was the Moscow Art Theatre. The largest fixed-wing aircraft in the world in the mid-1930s, the Tupolev ANT-20 was named Maxim Gorky in his honour.

He was also appointed President of the Union of Soviet Writers, founded in 1932, to coincide with his return to the USSR. On 11 October 1931 Gorky read his fairy tale poem «A Girl and Death» (which he wrote in 1892) to his visitors Joseph Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and Vyacheslav Molotov, an event that was later depicted by Viktor Govorov in his painting. On that same day Stalin left his autograph on the last page of this work by Gorky: «This piece is stronger than Goethe’s Faust (love defeats death)>» Voroshilov also left a «resolution»: «I am illiterate, but I think that Comrade Stalin more than correctly defined the meaning of A. Gorky’s poems. On my own behalf, I will say: I love M. Gorky as my and my class of writer, who correctly defined our forward movement.»^[38]

As Vyacheslav Ivanov remembers, Gorky was very upset:

They wrote their resolution on his fairy tale «A Girl and Death». My father, who spoke about this episode with Gorky, insisted emphatically that Gorky was offended. Stalin and Voroshilov were drunk and fooling around.^[39]

Apologist for the gulag[edit]

In 1933, Gorky co-edited, with Averbakh and Firin, an infamous book about the White Sea-Baltic Canal, presented as an example of «successful rehabilitation of the former enemies of proletariat». For other writers, he urged that one obtained realism by extracting the basic idea from reality, but by adding the potential and desirable to it, one added romanticism with deep revolutionary potential.^[40] For himself, Gorky avoided realism. His denials that even a single prisoner died during the construction of the aforementioned canal was refuted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who claimed thousands of prisoners froze to death not only in the evenings from the lack of adequate shelter and food, but even in the middle of the day. Most tellingly, Solzhenitsyn and Dmitry Likhachov document a visit, on June 20, 1929 to Solovki, the “original” forced labour camp, and the model upon which thousands of others were constructed. Given Gorky’s reputation, (both to the authorities and to the prisoners), the camp was transformed from one where prisoners (Zeks) were worked to death to one befitting the official Soviet idea of “transformation through labour”. Gorky did not notice the relocation of thousands of prisoners to ease the overcrowding, the new clothes on the prisoners (used to labouring in their underwear), or even the hiding of prisoners under tarpaulins, and the removal of the torture rooms. The deception was exposed when Gorky was presented with children “model prisoners”, one of who challenged Gorky if he “wanted to know the truth”. On the affirmative, the room was cleared and the 14-year-old boy recounted the truth — starvation, men worked to death, and of the pole torture, of using men instead of horses, of the summary executions, of rolling prisoners, bound to a heavy pole down stairs with hundreds of steps, of spending the night, in underwear, in the snow. Gorky never wrote about the boy, or even asked to take the boy with him. The boy was executed after Gorky left.^[41] Gorky left the room in tears, and wrote in the visitor book “I am not in a state of mind to express my impressions in just a few words. I wouldn’t want, yes, and I would likewise be ashamed to permit myself the banal praise of the remarkable energy of people who, while remaining vigilant and tireless sentinels of the Revolution, are able, at the same time, to be remarkably bold creators of culture”.^[42]

As Gorky’s biographer Pavel Basinsky notes, it was impossible for Gorky to «take the boy with him» even with his reputation of a «great proletarian writer». As he says, Gorky had to spend over 2 years to free Julia Danzas.^[43] Some of the Solovki historians doubt that there was a boy.

Gorky also helped other political prisoners (not without the influence of his wife, Yekaterina Peshkova). For example, because of Gorky’s interference Mikhail Bakhtin’s initial verdict (5 years of Solovki) was changed to 6 years of exile.

D: Mikhail Mikhailovich, have you met Gorky in person?
B: With Gorky? No. I only saw him several times, and then (there is no need to write this down), when, therefore, I was imprisoned, Gorky even sent two telegrams to the appropriate institutions …
D: Gorky?
B: Yes. In my defence.
D: Well, it just needs to be written down.
B: He knew my first book and generally heard a lot about me, and we had mutual acquaintances…
<…>
B: Well, it was… 1929.
D: Yeees. And Gorky… Then he stopped interfering.
B: So in the case… yes, in my case there were Gorky’s telegrams, his two telegrams. <…>
D: A lot of good things was made by his wife, Yekaterina Pavlovna.
B: Yes. Yekaterina Pavlovna. I didn’t know her <…> She was then the chairman of the so-called …
D: Red Cross.

B: Yes. Political Red Cross.

Hostility to homosexuality[edit]

Gorky strongly supported efforts in getting a law passed in 1934, making homosexuality a criminal offense. His attitude was coloured by the fact that some members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung were homosexual. The phrase «exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish» is often attributed to him.^[45][46] He was actually quoting a popular saying. Writing in Pravda on 23 May 1934, Gorky said: «There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear.»^[47][48]

Gorky and the Soviet censorship[edit]

And in my opinion, he (Vladislav Khodasevich) is right when he says that the Soviet critics have made up an anti-Soviet play from The Turbin Brothers. Bulgakov is «not a brother» to me; I have not the slightest desire to defend him. But he is a talented writer, and we don’t have many people like that. So there’s no point in making them «martyrs for an idea.»

— Letter to Joseph Stalin, 1930^[49]

Gorky was following Bulgakov’s literary career since 1925, when he first read The Fatal Eggs. According to his letters, even then he admired his talent. Partly because of Gorky Bulgakov’s plays The Cabal of Hypocrites and The Days of the Turbins were allowed for staging.^[50] Gorky also tried to use his influence to allow the Moscow Art Theater production of Bulgakov’s other play, Flight.^[51] However, it was banned because of Stalin’s personal reaction.^[52]

…I strongly support the publication by Academia of the novel Demons and other contrrevolutionary novels, such as Pisemsky’s’ Troubled Seas, Leskov’s No Way Out and Krestovsky’s Marevo. I do this because I am against the transformation of legal literature into illegal literature, which is being sold «from under the counter» and which seduces young people with its «taboo»… You need to know the enemy, you need to know his ideology… The Soviet government is not afraid of anything, and least of all can frighten the publication an old novel. But … Comrade Zaslavsky with his article brought true pleasure to our enemies, and especially to the White émigrés. «They ban Dostoyevsky» they screech, grateful to Comrade Zaslavsky.

.

Anti-formalist campaign[edit]

You have a big choice of weapons. Soviet literature has every opportunity to apply these types of weapons (genres, styles, forms and methods of literary creativity) in their diversity and completeness, selecting all the best that has been created in this area by all previous eras.^[54]

Socialist realism provides artistic creativity with an exceptional opportunity for the manifestation of creative initiative, the choice of various forms, styles and genres.

Shostakovich is a young man, about 25 years old, undeniably talented, but very self-confident and very nervous. The article in Pravda hit him like a brick on the head, the guy is completely depressed. <…> «Muddle», but why? In what and how is it expressed — «muddle»? Critics must give a technical assessment of Shostakovich’s music. And what the Pravda article gave allowed a bunch of mediocre people, hack-workers, to attack Shostakovich in every possible way.

— Letter to Joseph Stalin, 1936^[55]

Conflicts with Stalinism[edit]

Gorky’s relationship with the regime got colder after his return to the Soviet Union in 1933: the Soviet authorities would never let him out in Italy again. He continued to write the propagandist articles in Pravda and glorify Stalin. However, by 1934 his relationship with the regime was getting more and more distant. Leopold Averbakh, whom Gorky regarded as a protege, was denied a role in the newly created Writers Union, and objected to interference by the Central Committee staff in the affairs of the union^{[citation needed]}; Gorky’s conception of «Socialist realism» and creation of the Writers Union, instead of ending the RAPP «literary dictatorship» and uniting the «proletarian» writers with the denounced «poputchicks» becomes a tool to increase the censorship. This conflict, which may have been exacerbated by Gorky’s despair over the early death of his son, Max, came to a head just before the first Soviet Writers Congress, in August 1934.

His meetings with Stalin were getting more rare. At that time he gets influenced by Lev Kamenev, who was made the director of Academia publishing House because of Gorky’s request, and Nikolai Bukharin, who had been Gorky’s friend since 1920s.^[56] On 11 August, Gorky submitted an article for publication in Pravda which attacked the deputy head of the press department, Pavel Yudin with such intemperate language that Stalin’s deputy, Lazar Kaganovich ordered its suppression, but was forced to relent after hundreds of copies of the article circulated by hand.^{[citation needed]} Gorky’s draft of the keynote speech he was due to give at the congress caused such consternation when he submitted it to the Politburo that four of its leading members – Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, and Andrei Zhdanov – were sent to persuade him to make changes.^[57]

Yesterday we, having familiarized ourselves with M. Gorky’s speech to the Congress of Writers, came to the conclusion that the speech is not suitable in this form. First of all — the very construction and arrangement of the material — 3/4, if not more, is occupied by general historical and philosophical reasoning, and even then incorrect. Primitive society is presented as the ideal, and capitalism at all of its stages is portrayed as a reactionary force that hindered the development of technology and culture. It is clear that this position is non-Marxist. Soviet literature is almost not covered, but the speech is called «On Soviet Literature.» <…> …after a long talk he agreed to make some edits and changes. It seems that he is in a bad mood. <…> The point, of course, is not what he says, but how he says it. These talks have reminded me of comrade Krupskaya. I think that Kamenev plays an important role in shaping these sentiments of Gorky. <…>
Today we exchanged views and think that it is better, after making some edits, to publish it than to allow it to be read as illegal.

In his speech he calls Fyodor Dostoevsky a «medieval inquisitor», however, he admires him for «having painted with the most vivid perfection of word portraiture a type of egocentrist, a type of social degenerate in the person of the hero of his Notes from Underground» and notes him as a major figure in Russian classic literature.^[59] After the end of the congress Central Committee of the Party, in which maintained that writers the likes of Panferov, Ermilov, Fadeyev, Stavsky, and many other writers who were approved as the «masters of Socialist realism», were unworthy of membership in the Union of Soviet Writers, obviously preferring Boris Pasternak, Andrei Bely, Andrei Platonov and Artyom Vesyoly (Gorky took the latter two in his «writers brigade» because of their inability to be published,^[60] although he criticized Bely and Platonov for their techniques). He also wrote an article about Panferov’s novel Brusski: «One could, of course, not note the verbal errors and careless technique of the gifted writer, but he acts as an adviser and teacher, and he teaches the production of literary waste».^[61]

Gorky also tried to fight the Soviet censorship as it was growing more power. For example, he tried to defend an issue of Dostoevsky’s Demons.

As the conflict was becoming more visible, Gorky’s political and literary positions became weaker. Panferov wrote an answer to Gorky, in which he criticized him. David Zaslavsky published an ironical response to Gorky’s defense of Demons.

According to some sources (such as Romain Rolland’s diary), because of Gorky’s refusal to blindly obey the policies of Stalinism, he had lost the Party’ s goodwill and spent his last days under unannounced house arrest.^[62]

Death[edit]

With the increase of Stalinist repression and especially after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Gorky was placed under unannounced house arrest in his house near Moscow in Gorki-10 (the name of the place is a completely different word in Russian unrelated to his surname). His long-serving secretary Pyotr Kryuchkov had been recruited by Yagoda as a paid informer.^[63] Before his death from a lingering illness in June 1936, he was visited at home by Stalin, Yagoda, and other leading communists, and by Moura Budberg, who had chosen not to return to the USSR with him but was permitted to stay for his funeral.

The sudden death of Gorky’s son Maxim Peshkov in May 1934 was followed by the death of Maxim Gorky himself in June 1936 from pneumonia. Speculation has long surrounded the circumstances of his death. Stalin and Molotov were among those who carried Gorky’s urn during the funeral. During the Bukharin trial in 1938 (one of the three Moscow Trials), one of the charges was that Gorky was killed by Yagoda’s NKVD agents.^[64]

In Soviet times, before and after his death, the complexities in Gorky’s life and outlook were reduced to an iconic image (echoed in heroic pictures and statues dotting the countryside): Gorky as a great Soviet writer who emerged from the common people, a loyal friend of the Bolsheviks, and the founder of the increasingly canonical «socialist realism».^[65]

Bibliography[edit]

Source: Turner, Lily; Strever, Mark (1946). Orphan Paul; A Bibliography and Chronology of Maxim Gorky. New York: Boni and Gaer. pp. 261–270.

Novels[edit]

• Goremyka Pavel, (Горемыка Павел, 1894). Published in English as Orphan Paul^[66]
• Foma Gordeyev (Фома Гордеев, 1899). Also translated as The Man Who Was Afraid
• Three of Them (Трое, 1900). Also translated as Three Men and The Three
• The Mother (Мать, 1906). First published in English, in 1906
• The Life of a Useless Man (Жизнь ненужного человека, 1908)
• A Confession (Исповедь, 1908)
• Gorodok Okurov (Городок Окуров, 1908), not translated
• The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin (Жизнь Матвея Кожемякина, 1910)
• The Artamonov Business (Дело Артамоновых, 1925). Also translated as The Artamonovs and Decadence
• The Life of Klim Samgin (Жизнь Клима Самгина, 1925–1936). Published in English as Forty Years: The Life of Clim Samghin
  • Volume I. Bystander (1930)
  • Volume II. The Magnet (1931)
  • Volume III. Other Fires (1933)
  • Volume IV. The Specter (1938)

Novellas and short stories[edit]

• Sketches and Stories (Очерки и рассказы), 1899
  • «Makar Chudra» (Макар Чудра), 1892
  • «Old Izergil» (Старуха Изергиль), 1895
  • «Chelkash» (Челкаш), 1895
  • «Konovalov» (Коновалов), 1897
  • The Orlovs (Супруги Орловы), 1897
  • Creatures That Once Were Men (Бывшие люди), 1897
  • «Malva» (Мальва), 1897
  • Varenka Olesova (Варенька Олесова), 1898
  • «Twenty-six Men and a Girl» (Двадцать шесть и одна), 1899

Plays[edit]

• The Philistines (Мещане), translated also as The Smug Citizens and The Petty Bourgeois (Мещане), 1901
• The Lower Depths (На дне), 1902
• Summerfolk (Дачники), 1904
• Children of the Sun (Дети солнца), 1905
• Barbarians (Варвары), 1905
• Enemies, 1906.
• The Last Ones (Последние), 1908. Translated also as Our Father^[c]
• Reception (Встреча), 1910. Translated also as Children
• Queer People (Чудаки), 1910. Translated also as Eccentrics
• Vassa Zheleznova (Васса Железнова), 1910, 1935 (revised version)
• The Zykovs (Зыковы), 1913
• Counterfeit Money (Фальшивая монета), 1913
• The Old Man (Старик), 1915, Revised 1922, 1924. Translated also as The Judge
• Workaholic Slovotekov (Работяга Словотеков), 1920
• Egor Bulychev (Егор Булычов и другие), 1932
• Dostigayev and Others (Достигаев и другие), 1933

Non-fiction[edit]

• My Childhood. In the World. My Universities (1913–1923)
• Chaliapin, articles in Letopis, 1917^[d]
• My Recollections of Tolstoy, 1919
• Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev, 1920–1928
• Fragments from My Diary (Заметки из дневника), 1924
• V.I. Lenin (В.И. Ленин), reminiscence, 1924–1931
• The I.V. Stalin White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal, 1934 (editor-in-chief)
• Literary Portraits [c.1935].^[68]

Essays[edit]

• O karamazovshchine (О карамазовщине, On Karamazovism/On Karamazovshchina), 1915, not translated
• Untimely Thoughts. Notes on Revolution and Culture (Несвоевременные мысли. Заметки о революции и культуре), 1918
• On the Russian Peasantry (О русском крестьянстве), 1922

Poems[edit]

• «The Song of the Stormy Petrel» (Песня о Буревестнике), 1901
• «Song of a Falcon» (Песня о Соколе), 1902. Also referred to as a short story

Autobiography[edit]

• My Childhood (Детство), Part I, 1913–1914
• In the World (В людях), Part II, 1916
• My Universities (Мои университеты), Part III, 1923

Collections[edit]

• Sketches and Stories, three volumes, 1898–1899
• Creatures That Once Were Men, stories in English translation (1905). This contained an introduction by G. K. Chesterton^[69] The Russian title, Бывшие люди (literally «Former people») gained popularity as an expression in reference to people who severely dropped in their social status
• Tales of Italy (Сказки об Италии), 1911–1913
• Through Russia (По Руси), 1923
• Stories 1922-1924 (Рассказы 1922-1924 годов), 1925

Commemoration[edit]

• In almost every large settlement of the states of the former USSR, there was^[70] or is Gorky Street. In 2013, 2110 streets, avenues and lanes in Russia were named «Gorky», and another 395 were named «Maxim Gorky».^[71]
• Gorky was the name of Nizhny Novgorod from 1932 to 1990.
• Gorkovsky suburban railway line, Moscow
• Gorkovskoye village of Novoorsky District of Orenburg Oblast
• Gorky village in the Leningrad oblast
• Gorkovsky village (Volgograd) (formerly Voroponovo)
• Village n.a. Maxim Gorky, Kameshkovsky District of Vladimir Oblast
• Gorkovskoye village is the district center of Omsk Oblast (formerly Ikonnikovo)
• Maxim Gorky village, Znamensky District of Omsk Oblast
• Village n.a. Maxim Gorky, Krutinsky District of Omsk Oblast
• In Nizhny Novgorod the Central District Children’s Library, the Academic Drama Theater, a street, as well as a square are named after Maxim Gorky. And the most important attraction there is the museum-apartment of Maxim Gorky
• Drama theaters in the following cities are named after Maxim Gorky: Moscow (MAT, 1932), Vladivostok (Primorsky Gorky Drama Theater — PGDT), Berlin (Maxim Gorki Theater), Baku (ASTYZ), Astana (Russian Drama Theater named after M. Gorky), Tula (Tula Academic Theatre), Minsk (Theater named after M. Gorky), Rostov-on-Don (Rostov Drama Theater named after M. Gorky), Krasnodar, Samara (Samara Drama Theater named after M. Gorky), Orenburg (Orenburg Regional Drama Theater), Volgograd (Volgograd Regional Drama Theater), Magadan (Magadan Regional Music and Drama Theater), Simferopol (KARDT), Kustanay, Kudymkar (Komi- Perm National Drama Theater), Young Spectator Theater in Lviv, as well as in Saint Petersburg from 1932 to 1992 (DB). Also, the name was given to the Interregional Russian Drama Theater of the Fergana Valley, the Tashkent State Academic Theater, the Tula Regional Drama Theater, and the Nur-Sultan Regional Drama Theater.
• Palaces of Culture n.a. Maxim Gorky were built in Nevinnomyssk, Rovenky, Novosibirsk and Saint Petersburg
• Universities: Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, Ural State University, Donetsk National Medical University, Minsk State Pedagogical Institute, Omsk State Pedagogical University, until 1993 Turkmen State University in Ashgabat was named after Maxim Gorky (now named after Magtymguly Pyragy), Sukhum State University was named after Maxim Gorky, National University of Kharkiv was named after Gorky in 1936–1999, Ulyanovsk Agricultural Institute, Uman Agricultural Institute, Kazan Order of the Badge of Honor The institute was named after Maxim Gorky until it was granted the status of an academy in 1995 (now Kazan State Agrarian University), the Mari Polytechnic Institute and Perm State University named after Maxim Gorky (1934–1993)
• The following cities have parks named after Maxim Gorky: Rostov-on-Don, Taganrog, Saratov, Minsk, Krasnoyarsk, Kharkiv, Odessa, Melitopol, Moscow, Alma-Ata

Monuments[edit]

Monuments of Maxim Gorky are installed in many cities. Among them:

• In Russia — Borisoglebsk, Arzamas, Volgograd, Voronezh, Vyborg, Dobrinka, Izhevsk, Krasnoyarsk, Moscow, Nevinnomyssk, Nizhny Novgorod, Orenburg, Penza, Pechora, Rostov-on-Don, Rubtsovsk, Rylsk, Ryazan, St. Petersburg, Sarov, Sochi, Taganrog, Khabarovsk, Chelyabinsk, Ufa, Yartsevo.
• In Belarus — Dobrush, Minsk. Mogilev, Gorky Park, bust.
• In Ukraine — Donetsk, Kryvyi Rih, Melitopol, Kharkiv, Yalta, Yasynuvata
• In Azerbaijan — Baku
• In Kazakhstan — Alma-Ata, Zyryanovsk, Kostanay
• In Georgia — Tbilisi
• In Moldova — Chisinaus, Leovo
• In Italy — Sorrento
• In India — Gorky Sadan,^[72] Kolkata

On 6 December 2022 the City Council of the Ukrainian city Dnipro decided to remove from the city all monuments to figures of Russian culture and history, in particular it was mentioned that the monuments to Gorky, Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lomonosov would be removed from the public space of the city.^[73] The monument of Gorky that been erected in 1977 was dismantled on 26 December 2022.^[74]

Philately[edit]

Maxim Gorky is depicted on postage stamps: Albania (1986),^[75] Vietnam (1968)^[76] India (1968),^[77] Maldives (2018),^[78] and many more. Some of them can be found below.

• Maxim Gorky postage stamps

• 

  Postage stamp USSR, 1932

• 

  Postage stamp USSR, 1932

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1943

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1943

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, «10 years since the death of M. Gorky» (1946, 30 kopeeks)

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, «10 years since the death of M. Gorky» (1946, 60 kopeeks)

• 

  Postage stamp, GDR, 1953

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1956

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1958

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1959

• 

  Postage stamp, the USSR, 1968

• 

  Postage stamp, Russia, «Rusiia. XX век. Culture» (2000, 1,30 rubles)

In 2018, FSUE Russian Post released a miniature sheet dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the writer.

Numismatics[edit]

• In 1988, a 1 ruble coin was issued in the USSR, dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the writer.
• In 2018, on the 150th anniversary of the writer’s birthday, the Bank of Russia issued a commemorative silver coin with a face value of 2 rubles in the series “Outstanding Personalities of Russia”.

Depictions and adaptations[edit]

• In 1912, the Italian composer Giacomo Orefice based his opera Radda on the character of Radda in Gorky’s 1892 short story Makar Chudra.
• In 1932, German playwright Bertolt Brecht published his play The Mother, which was based on Gorky’s 1906 novel Mother. The same novel was also adapted for an opera by Valery Zhelobinsky in 1938.
• In 1938–1939, Gorky’s three-part autobiography was released by Soyuzdetfilm as three feature films: The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, My Apprenticeship and My Universities, all three directed by Mark Donskoy.
• In 1975, Gorky’s 1908 play The Last Ones (Последние), had its New York debut at the Manhattan Theater Club, under the alternative English title Our Father, directed by Keith Fowler.
• In 1985, Gorky’s 1906 play Enemies was translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair and Jeremy Brooks and directed in London by Ann Pennington in association with the Internationalist Theatre at the tail end of the British miners’ strike of 1984–1985. Gorky’s «pseudo-populism» is done away with in this production by the actors speaking «without distinctive accents and consequently without populist sentiment».^[79]

See also[edit]

• FK Sloboda Tuzla football club from Bosnia and Herzegovina, originally called FK Gorki
• Gorky Park in Moscow and Park of Maxim Gorky in Kharkiv, Ukraine
• Maxim Gorky Literature Institute
• Palace of Culture named after Maxim Gorky, Novosibirsk
• Soviet cruiser Maxim Gorky, a Project 26bis (or Kirov-class) light cruiser, which served from 1940 to 1956 and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1944
• Tupolev ANT-20 aircraft, nicknamed «Maxim Gorky»
• Znanie Publishers

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

• Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43437-8.
• Benedetti, Jean (1999). Stanislavski : His Life and Art : a Biography (3rd, rev. and expanded ed.). London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-52520-1. OCLC 1109272008.
• McSmith, Andy (2015). Fear and the Muse Kept Watch, The Russian Masters – from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein – under Stalin. New York: The New Press. ISBN 9781620970799. OCLC 907678164.
• Moynahan, Brian (1992). Comrades : 1917 — Russia in Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-58698-6. OCLC 1028562793 – via Internet Archvive.
• Worrall, Nick. 1996. The Moscow Art Theatre. Theatre Production Studies ser. London and NY: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-05598-9.
• Figes, Orlando: A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 The Bodley Head, London. (2014) ISBN 978-0-14-024364-2

Further reading[edit]

• Figes, Orlando (June 1996). «Maxim Gorky and the Russian revolution». History Today. 46 (6): 16. ISSN 0018-2753. EBSCOhost 9606240213.
• Tovah Yedlin. Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography

External links[edit]

• Maxim Gorky Archive at marxists.org
• Works by Maxim Gorky at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Maxim Gorky at Internet Archive
• Works by Maxim Gorky at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Newspaper clippings about Maxim Gorky in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW