Chelkash, and Other Stories, by Maxim Gorky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Maxim Gorky is the poorest and most uneven of the Russian writers. He is—or was—a pioneer. He came wailing from lonely roads where the vagrom man sleeps beneath the stars and wonders what there is to life. And his dull, bitter plaints with ferocity as their leit motif soon sounded over the world. When the majority of Russian genius was struggling to “go to the people” Gorky had the advantage of coming from the people.
Alfred Knopf’s collection of Gorky tales under the title of Chelkash is Gorky at his best and worst. I find in it some of his best tales abominably written, studded with crass “gems” of philosophy, broken up with unnecessary moralizings. For instance, his Twenty-Six of Us and One Other. In this Gorky writes of his immortal bakeshop. As a youth Gorky spent his days in a bakeshop. Time and again he has painted it, in other stories better than in this one. But in this instance the bakeshop is only a background; usually it is the main theme. Tanya, a little girl, stops every morning to say “Hello” to the twenty-six bakers. They give her little cakes. She is the only “ray of sweetness” in their lives. They look upon her as a daughter, a shrine. And Tanya it is who alone awakens in them for a few moments each day something approaching fineness. Along comes a terrible dandy, a ladies’ man. He seduces every lady he sets his cap for; it is his boast. The bakers like him: he is a “gentleman” and very democratic. But one day when he is boasting the head baker grows excited and mentions “Tanya.” The dandy boasts he will seduce her. An argument follows. After a month the dandy succeeds. The bakers witness the girl’s “undoing.” When she comes out of the dandy’s room, smiling, happy, they gather around her, spit at her, revile and abuse her. No names they can think of are bad enough. They fall into a frenzy of vituperation. But they do not strike her. Realizing dully that a “god” has died, they go back to work.
Chelkash, the first tale in the book, is Gorky on his “home ground”—the vagrom man, the pirate, the road thief. He paints him with a careful brush and a sureness of his subject. In The Steppe he does the same. A Rolling Stone, and Chums, the last the best story in the volume, are also variations of the vagrom man theme—the underdog. But it is in stories like One Autumn Night, Comrades, The Green Kitten, and Her Lover that Gorky reveals his greatest genius and his greatest weakness. He can feel them, imagine them, see them, but for some reason he cannot write them. One Autumn Night might have been one of the world’s strongest classics.
All the tales in the volume are the work of the “first” Gorky—the bitter one, the melodramatic, outraged Gorky. They are on a whole not as good as the collection of stories written during that same period and translated in a volume called Orloff and His Wife. Gorky still lives and he has learned how to write. His later tales, composed in Italy by the “second” Gorky, the consumptive, contemplative, clear-seeing Gorky, are mature, almost mellow. But they are no longer distinctive. Anyone could have written them, anyone with a bit of genius and a great deal of time on his hands. But the Chelkash tales and the tales in Orloff and His Wife—these no one but Gorky has written, and although they are inferior in workmanship to the products of Chekhov and Andreyev the American reader will find them perhaps more interesting.
Two Masters and a Petty Monster
The Little Angel, by Leonid Andreyev. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Russian Silhouettes, by Anton Chekhov. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
The Breaking Point, by Michael Artzibashef. New York: B. W. Huebsch.
“Charming fellows, those Russians,” said my friend. “When it comes to delineating the processes, mental and physical, of rape, suicide, incest, arson, butchery, and disease, they are without peers....” I therefore take this occasion to hurl two newly translated Russian books at my friend, hoping they land on his thick head.