From 1921 to 1928 he lived again abroad, chiefly in Sorrento—partly on account of his failing health, partly because of political differences with the Soviets. In 1928 he was more or less ordered back. From 1928 to his death in 1936 he lived in Russia, edited several magazines, wrote several plays and stories, and continued to drink heavily as he had done most of his life. In June 1936 he became very ill and died in the comfortable dacha put to his use by the Soviet government. A good deal of evidence points to the fact that he died of poison administered to him by the Cheka, the Soviet secret police.
As a creative artist, Gorki is of little importance. But as a colorful phenomenon in the social structure of Russia he is not devoid of interest.
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'On the Rafts' (1895)
Let us select and examine a typical Gorki short story, for instance the one called 'On the Rafts.'* Consider the author's method of exposition. A certain Mitya and a certain Sergey are steering the raft across the wide and misty Volga. The owner of the raft, who is somewhere on the forward part, is heard yelling angrily, and the man Sergey mutters for the reader to hear: 'Shout away! Here's your miserable devil of a son Mitya who could not break a straw across his knee and you put him to steer a raft; and then you yell so that all the river [and the reader] hears you. You were mean enough
[Sergey goes on to explain in monologue] not to take a second steersman [but make your son help me instead], so now you may shout as much as you like.' These last words the author notes—and God knows how many authors have used this particular turn—these last words were growled out loud enough to be heard forward as if Sergey (the author adds) wished them to be heard (heard by the audience, we add, for this kind of exposition looks uncommonly like the opening scene of some old faded play with the valet and the maid dusting the furniture and talking about their masters).
Presently we learn from Sergey's sustained monologue that the father had first found a pretty wife for his son Mitya and then had made his daughter-in-law his mistress. Sergey, your healthy cynic, mocks poor moping Mitya and both talk at length in the rhetorical and false style which Gorki reserved for such occasions. Mitya explains that he is going to join a certain religious sect, and the depths of the good old Russian soul are forcibly conveyed to the reader. The scene shifts to the other end of the raft, and now the father is shown with his sweetheart Maria, his son's wife. He is the vigorous and colorful old man, a well-known figure in fiction. She, the alluring female, twists her body with the movement of that much quoted animal, the cat (lynx is a later variation), and leans toward her lover who proceeds to deliver a speech. We not only hear again the author's high-faluting tones, but almost see him stalking this way and that between his characters and giving them the cue. 'I am a sinner, I know,' the old father says. 'Mitya my son is suffering I know, but is my own position a pleasant one?'—and so on. In both dialogues, the one between Mitya and Sergey, and the one between the father and Maria, the author is trying to make it all less improbable, is careful to make his characters say, as an old playwright would,
'we have talked about it more than once already,' for otherwise the author might expect the reader to wonder why on earth it was necessary to place two couples on a raft in the middle of the Volga to make them talk of their conflicts. On the other hand, if the constant repetition of such conversation is accepted, one cannot help wondering whether the raft ever got anywhere. People do not talk very much when they steer in a fog across a wide and powerful river—but this, I suppose, is what is called stark realism.
Dawn breaks, and here is what Gorki manages to do in the way of nature description: 'The emerald green fields along the Volga glittered with dew diamonds' (quite a jeweller's display). Meanwhile, on the raft the father suggests killing Mitya and 'a mysterious charming smile plays on the woman's lips.' Curtain.
We must note here that Gorki's schematic characters and the mechanical structure of the story are lined up with such dead forms as the fabliau or the moralite of medieval times. We must also note the low level of culture —what we call in Russia
'semi-intelligentsia'—which is disastrous in a writer whose essential nature is
*
This sentence begins handwritten text on page 5 of a manuscript, beneath a deleted incomplete passage remarking Courtenay's description of Gorki's
'lurid cheap style.' The preceding pages are not preserved. Ed.
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sentence that is not ready-made; it is all pink candy with just that amount of soot clinging to it to make it attractive. From here on there is but one step to so-called Soviet literature.
The conclusion of Nabokov's lecture on Gorki.
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Philistines and Philistinism
Nabokov's definition of 'philistine.'
A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said 'full-grown person' because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. 'Vulgarian' is more or less synonymous with 'philistine': the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms
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A philistine is not likely to exist in a very primitive society although no doubt rudiments of philistinism may be
