The Magical Chorus

the French writer and Communist Henri Barbusse; July 23, 1934, H. G. Wells; and June 28, 1935, Romain Rolland. They all came away charmed by Stalin.

After Gorky’s death in 1936 Stalin had only one more meeting with a prominent foreign writer (Lion Feuchtwanger, January 8, 1937). It was the last such dialogue in Stalin’s life. Without Gorky’s helpful hints on how to deal with people like that, Stalin apparently decided not to risk it. And he must have been tired of playing the role of the “great humanitarian” and controlling himself.

Nobel laureate Rolland’s impressions of Stalin were typical: “Absolute simplicity, straightforwardness, truthfulness. He does not impose his viewpoint. He says, ‘Perhaps we were mistaken.’”⁸ One can imagine Stalin’s hidden laughter when he told Rolland: “It is very unpleasant for us to condemn and execute. It is dirty work. It would be better to remain above politics and keep our hands clean.”⁹

Gorky seems to have been sincere in believing that his influence could “humanize” Stalin. Their correspondence, declassified in the late 1990s, shows that the writer showered Stalin with requests (as he had earlier done to Lenin) to help countless cultural figures. This had to have annoyed Stalin at some point, as it had Lenin. Moreover, Gorky had lost some of his aura as world luminary in Stalin’s eyes. This happened when the writer, despite enormous support from the Soviets, did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the early 1930s a serious battle broke out among the Western literati over which Russian writer would be the first to win the Nobel Prize. Neither Leo Tolstoy nor Chekhov had become Nobel laureates (Chekhov had died too soon, and Tolstoy irritated the Swedish Academy with his radical political views and “hostility toward culture”). The prize had grown to be the most prestigious literary award in the world. Inevitably, political considerations as well as aesthetics went into the decision-making process. One of the polarizing political issues was the division of Russian culture after 1917 into two parts: the mainland—that is, Soviet—and the diaspora—emigre.

More than two million former citizens of the Russian empire were tossed outside the country’s borders by the Bolshevik revolution. These emigres settled in dozens of countries, literally all over the world, but the biggest centers of the diaspora were first Berlin (where more than half a million former Russians lived in the early 1920s) and then Paris.

The intelligentsia formed the majority of the immigrants, which was rather an exception for such mass resettlements. This explains the extraordinary cultural activity of the Russian diaspora. In Berlin alone there were dozens of Russian-language newspapers and magazines and close to seventy publishing houses.

Understandably, most of the immigrants were hostile to the Soviet regime. It repaid them in kind, having good reason to fear that the intellectual potential of these people would be used in the struggle with Bolshevism. This is exactly what happened. The Western states tried to create a “cordon sanitaire” around Soviet Russia, using the scattered elements of the White Army that had lost the Civil War to the Bolsheviks. The Russian cultural emigres gave ideological support for the military. In Paris, Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife, Zinaida Hippius, formerly prominent Russian Symbolists, were active in “White” circles.

Gorky had tense relations with these people. In 1906, Merezhkovsky had written: “Gorky deserves his fame: he opened new, unknown countries, a new continent of the spiritual world; he is the first and the only, in all likelihood, unique in his field.”¹⁰ But just two years later Merezhkovsky grumbled: “Once Gorky had seemed a great artist—and has stopped being one.”¹¹ It went downhill from there.

With some emigres Gorky was more friendly; he valued Vladislav Khodasevich, a truly great poet who wrote a precious few refined and profoundly pessimistic poems. Early on, Gorky considered him “the best poet of contemporary Russia” and raved: “Khodasevich for me is immeasurably higher than Pasternak.”¹² But later, in a letter to Stalin (1931), Gorky changed his mind: “He is a typical decadent, a man both physically and spiritually flabby, filled with misanthropy and hatred for all people.”¹³

Particularly complex were relations between Gorky and Ivan Bunin, the leading figure of the Russian literary diaspora. Introduced in 1899 on the Yalta boardwalk by Chekhov, they became fast friends, and Gorky published a lot of Bunin (especially his fine poetry) in the popular collections of his Znanie Publishing House.

Gorky was always impressed by Bunin’s craftsmanship, but he was more skeptical of his human qualities: “A talented artist, marvelous connoisseur of every word, he is a dried-up, unkind man, who is ridiculously careful of himself. He knows his own value, even somewhat exaggerates it, and he is demanding and vain, capricious to the people close to him, and tends to use them cruelly.”¹⁴

Gorky the tramp and Bunin the aristocrat had similarly unsentimental views of the Russian muzhik, which Bunin expressed most vividly in his novella (which he considered a novel), The Village (1910). Gorky wrote to Bunin in delight: “In every phrase there are compressed three, four objects, every page is a museum!”¹⁵ Gorky considered Bunin among the major figures of the Znanie circle (along with Leonid Andreyev and Alexander Kuprin). After the revolution, which the conservative Bunin abhorred, he distanced himself from Gorky, declaring that he considered their relationship “ended forever.”

In emigration, Bunin continually attacked Gorky’s pro-Soviet position, his work and even his image, mocking Gorky’s “crude fairy tales about his allegedly miserable childhood, sprinkled with thousands of adventures, his laughably innumerable travels and encounters, and his imaginary life as a tramp.”¹⁶

Bunin was jealous of Gorky’s bond with Tolstoy. He had met Tolstoy, whom he idolized, only a few times. Tolstoy had no interest in Bunin, either as a writer or a human being, and once made a very disparaging remark about him. His attitude toward Gorky was very different, he was curious about him, this vibrant person from a different world. (The perceptive Marina Tsvetaeva sensed this intuitively; she considered Gorky “bigger, and more human, and more exceptional, and more needed” than Bunin: “Gorky is an era, while Bunin is the end of an era.”) ¹⁷

In his reminiscences of Tolstoy, Gorky’s descriptions of the great elder are sometimes barbed, and Tolstoy could appear, as Eikhenbaum noted, as “a devious old man, a wizard, listlessly speaking of God, an obscenity- spewing mischief maker.”¹⁸ Gorky never felt himself to be Tolstoy’s devout ideological follower, so different were their cultural positions. At the end of his life, Tolstoy became a cultural anarchist in his rejection of high art for its pretense and falsehood. Gorky, on the contrary, adulated culture.

Gentlemen! If the world

Cannot find the way to holy truth,

Glory to the madman

Who can instill the golden dream in mankind.

Those simplistic verses from his play Lower Depths contain “Gorky’s motto that determined his entire life, as a writer, social figure, and personally,”¹⁹ observed Khodasevich. For Bunin, who was a Tolstoyan in his youth and in the 1930s wrote a book filled with the greatest piety, The Liberation of Tolstoy, in which he compared the writer to Jesus Christ and Buddha, Gorky’s position was alien. Now, their political and aesthetic disagreements were intensified by the ever-growing rivalry between Gorky and Bunin in the international cultural arena, centering on the Nobel Prize.

The prize was first awarded in 1901 in Stockholm in accordance with the will of the Swedish industrialist and inventor of