The Magical Chorus

Before the revolution the fame and influence of Gorky and Lenin were incomparable: one was an international cultural superstar, the other a marginal political radical. Naturally, Lenin was not an authority for Gorky, and after the overthrow of Nicholas II in 1917, their paths diverged sharply, since Gorky considered the Bolshevik seizure of power from the Provisional Government not only premature but dangerous—“the Russian people will pay for this with lakes of blood.”⁵

Immediately following the October 1917 revolution, Gorky was very negative about Lenin, even though he had already noted Lenin’s extraordinary abilities as a political figure: “A talented man, he has all the qualities of a ‘leader,’ and also the requisite lack of morals and a pure landowner’s ruthless attitude toward the lives of the masses.”⁶ In response, in 1918, Lenin shut down the newspaper Novaya Zhizn’, where the writer regularly printed similar and even harsher attacks on the Bolshevik government.

For a few more years Gorky got on Lenin’s nerves, constantly pestering him about the misery of the impoverished Russian intelligentsia and with pleas on behalf of many who were arrested. Lenin, himself from the intellectual class, felt nothing but contempt for the intelligentsia, expressing his opinion in a notorious letter to Gorky dated September 15, 1919: “The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing stronger in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and its helpers, the petty intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact, they’re not the brain, they’re shit.”⁷

Gorky’s innumerable appeals on behalf of persecuted intellectuals finally made Lenin lose his temper (in one letter to Gorky he called him “irresponsible”) and push the writer abroad using the excuse that he needed “to recuperate and rest.”

Gorky did not want to end his activities in defense of Russian culture from Bolshevik excesses, but Lenin added, “If you don’t go, we’ll exile you.” So when Gorky finally left Soviet Russia in 1921, his relationship with Lenin was badly soured. In 1922, Lenin had a stroke and in January 1924, he died.

Living in Germany and later Italy, Gorky through the second half of the 1920s gradually strengthened his relations with the new Soviet leadership, particularly Bukharin and Stalin. Ironically, it was Stalin (at Lenin’s urging, certainly) who had attacked Gorky viciously in the newspaper Rabochii Put’ in 1917, when Gorky vainly called on the Bolsheviks not to take power into their hands. Stalin lectured the famous author and recent ally: “The Russian revolution has overthrown quite a few authorities. Its power is expressed, incidentally, by how it does not bow to ‘famous names,’ but takes them into its service or throws them into oblivion.”⁸ Stalin warned Gorky that if he did not climb out of the “swamp of the intelligentsia’s confusion,” he would find himself in the “archives” of history.

The criticism of Gorky was not signed: this was typical of Stalin as a party columnist and a method he would use later (cf. his article “Muddle Instead of Music,” aimed at Shostakovich in Pravda in 1936). In 1951, when the writer had been dead for fifteen years, Stalin included this anti-Gorky pamphlet in the third volume of his collected works, revealing his authorship. But Gorky must have been informed at the time who had attacked him in 1917.

Stalin could have assumed that Gorky, who did not forgive easily, would hold that insult against him. Gorky, on the other hand, had learned early and personally that if you got Stalin angry, he did not care how famous the opponent was. As Stalin wrote: “The revolution does not know how to pity or how to bury its dead.”⁹

Undoubtedly, Gorky remembered Leo Tolstoy as he created his own relationship with the authorities. Tolstoy was an example of the Olympian heights a Russian writer could reach as a public figure. From an early age, when his ambition could have appeared unseemly and therefore was carefully hidden even from his friends, Gorky was already aiming at Tolstoy’s fame and influence.

The prose writer Konstantin Fedin, who knew Gorky well, noted a curious passage in the latter’s reminiscences of Tolstoy: “He was the devil and I was still an infant, and he should not have touched me.” Fedin commented: “I jumped up in delight, reading that ‘still’—‘and I was still an infant!’ What pride, I laughed, running around the room in my unbuttoned army coat, and look where it revealed itself! Still an infant!”¹⁰

Gorky had neither Tolstoy’s literary might nor his Yasnaya Polyana estate. But he started early to create a public forum for himself: at the age of thirty-two in 1900, the year he met Tolstoy, Gorky formed the Znanie Publishing House and began by printing his own works in huge numbers, followed by forty collections of works by writers of the realistic and progressive camp, usually edited by Gorky and instantly becoming best sellers.

The aesthete critics attacked the Znanie publications: “Everyone who loves Russian literature and the Russian language should fight the influence of these collections.”¹¹ Interestingly, in 1907 these books, quite uneven in quality but immensely popular, in their distinctive green covers (where you could find Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Kuprin’s The Duel, a sensational work about army life, and the latest by Bunin, but also a dreary naturalistic hodgepodge by someone like Yevgeny Chirikov), were defended by none other than the demanding poet Blok. His article supporting Gorky (albeit with many reservations) drew such indignation from Symbolist circles that Blok almost had a duel with his former best friend, Andrei Bely.

Blok had always considered Leo Tolstoy “the only genius of contemporary Europe.” But when they feted Gorky in starving 1919 Petrograd, it was Blok, famous for his directness and honesty, who essentially declared Gorky Tolstoy’s successor in social and political spheres: “Fate has placed a great burden on Maxim Gorky, as the greatest artist of our day. It has made him the intermediary between the people and the intelligentsia, between two countries which neither yet understand themselves or each other.”¹²

Even while praising Gorky, Blok still underestimated his ambitions. For Gorky, like Tolstoy, felt being the intermediary between the people and the intelligentsia was not nearly enough. Tolstoy, for all his proclaimed reverence for the people’s initiative, so vividly reflected in War and Peace, still understood that without the direct involvement of the regime, nothing gets done in Russia—thus his appeals by letter to Alexander III and Nicholas II.

Gorky, unlike Tolstoy, did not idealize the Russian people. He characterized them thus: “The most sinful and filthy people on earth, stupid about good and evil, intoxicated by vodka, disfigured by the cynicism of violence, hideously cruel and, at the same time, inexplicably good-natured—and at the end, this is a talented people.”¹³ So for Gorky, effective dialogue with higher-ups played an even more important role than for Tolstoy.

The emigre poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who knew Gorky well, recalled that “in the depths of Gorky’s soul there always lived awe of power, authority, with its external attributes, which Lenin despised. (You should have heard Gorky’s raptures when describing the visit of Emperor Alexander III to Nizhny Novgorod.)”¹⁴ (In 1932, Stalin renamed Nizhny Novgorod as Gorky in the writer’s honor; it became notorious in the 1980s as the closed city where Academician Andrei Sakharov was exiled. It is Nizhny Novgorod now once more. Sic transit gloria mundi.)

Understandably, the former tramp was much more fascinated by power than Count Tolstoy. But Gorky was also