Along a village street a strange procession is moving slowly with wild howls. The dense, wave-like crowd surrounds a cart. Tied by her wrists to a rope attached to the cart is a slight, almost girlish woman—entirely nude. Dazed, halting, gazing into nothing with wide, lacklustre look, she staggers bleeding on. Now and again a tall peasant standing in the cart, his white canine teeth showing, his eyes bloodshot from fury, lays a lash upon the woman’s body, already covered with unspeakable slashes and bruises. And every fiendish brutality—detailed and repeated until the soul sickens—the men, women, and children of the mob acclaim!
“This,” he concludes, “which I have written above, is not an allegorical description of the persecution and torture of a prophet, who has no honor in his own country—no, unfortunately, it is not that! It is called an ‘exorcism.’ Thus do husbands punish their wives for infidelity; this is a picture from life, a custom—and I beheld it in the year 1891, on the 15th of July, in the village of Kandybovko, Government of Kherson.”
Need I say that I have toned down the horror of this presentment, and that I relate it, horrible still, to show the very futility of such pictures as pictures, and their very great worth, to those concerned, as pleas for reform?
The readers of modern fiction need to look this question full in the face and then make their feelings known to the magazines. There is a place for all pathological studies, whether of society, soul, or body, by priest, physician, sociologist, and novelist. But is that place either the market-place, or a fiction-printing magazine whose pages invite the scrutiny of children as well as morbid adults? If we segregate bodily pestilence, why should the public magazine and the public playhouse be allowed to spread contagion? Is there no difference between an earnest fictional presentation of moral problems which must be solved more or less publicly, and the mere skilful portrayal of lust and degradation and easy morals, with no possible resultant good? If a hatter took it into his head to be interested in smallpox, what would the authorities say? Well, shall magazines be exposed for general circulation because that same hatter, and a million of his like, love dirty, crime-teaching, and viciously morbid fiction? Some one must be brave enough to declare the difference between “frank” fiction in books for those who really wish to study social problems (and there are too many filthy books sold under the guise of social study) and the printing of such material in the magazines which make appeal to families for their circulation. We can keep such books out of the home and the library if we wish, but when vicious short-stories creep into otherwise clean magazines, the damage is great enough to be serious.
But Gorki’s fiction is not unclean, as a rule, even when it deals with “broad” subjects. He moves directly and simply among the facts of an unlovely and often brutalized life and tells the truth about it without interpretation or apology. For example, here is the story of “The Khan and His Son,” as told by a blind mendicant. It is more romantic than most of Gorki’s work.
Mosolaīma el Asvab, an old Crimean Khan, is possessed of many women in his harem, who love “the old eagle” for the noble fire of his spirit, which age has not quenched. One above all others is his favorite, a Kazak prisoner maid from the steppes of the Dnieper. Once when the Khan’s much-loved son, Alhalla, returns from a victorious raid on the Russians, the father exchanges with him words of affection and rashly makes the time-honored oriental promise: “What wilt thou take from the hand of thy father, Alhalla? Tell me, and I will give thee everything, according to thy desire.”
And the son asks of his father the one thing the old man loves best and leans upon in his old age—the Russian prisoner maid.
The Khan spake not—for a space he said no word, for so long as was required to crush the shudder in his heart—and, after this pause, he said, boldly and firmly:
“Take her! Let us finish the feast, and then thou shalt take her.”
The son knows what his request means, and soon they fall to talking of the sacrifice required. But to the pleadings of the old Khan the son returns only the argument of his own love for the girl. At length the young man proposes that “in mercy to each other” they fling her into the sea from the mountain, and in despair the Khan consents.