Essays on Russian Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

Resurrection teaches directly what Tolstoi always taught--what he taught less directly, but with even greater art, in Anna Karenina.

In reading this work of his old age, we cannot help thinking of what Carlyle said of the octogenarian Goethe: "See how in that great mind, beaming in mildest mellow splendour, beaming, if also trembling, like a great sun on the verge of the horizon, near now to its long farewell, all these things were illuminated and illustrated."

VI

GORKI

GORKI went up like the sky-rocket, and seems to have had the traditional descent. From 1900 to 1906 everybody was talking about him; since 1906 one scarcely hears mention of his name. He was ridiculously overpraised, but he ought not to be forgotten. As an artist, he will not bear a moment's comparison with Andreev; but some of his short stories and his play, The Night Asylum, have the genuine Russian note of reality, and a rude strength much too great for its owner's control. He has never written a successful long novel, and his plays have no coherence; but, after all, the man has the real thing--vitality.

Just at the moment when Chekhov appeared to stand at the head of young Russian writers, Gorki appeared, and his fame swept from one end of the world to the other. In Russia, his public was second in numbers only to Tolstoi's; Kuprin and Andreev both dedicated books to him; in Germany, France, England, and America, he became literally a household word. It is probable that there were a thousand foreigners who knew his name, to one who had heard of Chekhov. Compared with Chekhov, he had more matter and less art.

His true name, which comparatively few have ever heard, is Alexei Maximovich Peshkov. "This name," said M. de Vogue, "will remain forever buried in the parish register." He chose to write under the name Gorki, which means "bitter," a happy appellation for this modern Ishmaelite. He was born in 1869, at Nizhni Novgorod, in a dyer's shop. He lost both father and mother when he was a child, but his real mother was the river Volga, on whose banks he was born, and on whose broad breast he has found the only repose he understands. The little boy was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but ran away, as he did from a subsequent employer. By a curious irony of fate, this atheist learned to read out of a prayer-book, and this iconoclast was for a time engaged in the manufacture of ikons, holy images. As the aristocrat Turgenev learned Russian from a house servant, Gorki obtained his love for literature from a cook. This happened on a steamer on the great river, where Gorki was employed as an assistant in the galley. The cook was a rough giant, who spent all his spare moments reading, having an old trunk full of books. It was a miscellaneous assortment, containing Lives of Saints, stories by Dumas père, and fortunately some works by Gogol. This literature gave him a thirst for learning, and when he was sixteen he went to Kazan, a town on the Volga, where Tolstoi had studied at the University. He had the notion that literature and learning were there distributed free to the famished, like bread in times of famine. He was quickly undeceived; and instead of receiving intellectual food, he was forced to work in a baker's shop, for a miserable pittance. These were the darkest days of his life, and in one of his most powerful stories he has reflected the wretched daily and nightly toil in a bakery.

Then he went on the road, and became a tramp, doing all kinds of odd jobs, from peddling to hard manual labour on wharves and railways. At the age of nineteen, weary of life, he shot himself, but recovered. Then he followed the Volga to the Black Sea, unconsciously collecting the material that in a very few years he was to give to the world. In 1892, when twenty-three years old, he succeeded in getting some of his sketches printed in newspapers. The next year he had the good fortune to meet at Nizhni Novgorod the famous Russian author Korolenko. Korolenko was greatly impressed by the young vagabond, believed in his powers, and gave timely and valuable help. With the older man's influence, Gorki succeeded in obtaining the entrée to the St. Petersburg magazines; and while the Russian critics were at a loss how to regard the new genius, the public went wild. He visited the capital in 1899, and there was intense curiosity to see and to hear him. A great hall was engaged, and when he mounted the platform to read, the young people in the audience went into a frenzy.

Gorki has been repeatedly imprisoned for his revolutionary ideas and efforts; in 1906, at the very apex of his fame, he came to the United States to collect funds for the cause. The whole country was eager to receive and to give, and his advent in New York was a notable occasion. He insisted that he came, not as an anarchist, but as a socialist, that his mission in the world was not to destroy, but to fulfil. At first, he was full of enthusiasm about America and New York, and American writers; he was tremendously impressed by the sky-scrapers, by the intense activity of the people, and by the Hudson River, which, as he regarded from his hotel windows, reminded him of the Volga. He said America would be the first nation to give mankind a true government, and that its citizens were the incarnation of progress. He declared that Mark Twain was even more popular in Russia than in America, that it was "a part of the national Russian education" to read him, and that he himself had read every translation of his books.

Incidentally he spoke of his favourite world- authors. Shakespeare he put first of all, saying he was "staggering," an opinion quite different from that of Tolstoi. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the philosophers he liked the best. Byron and Heine he read in preference to most other poets, for there is an invincible strain of lyric romanticism in this Russian tramp, as there was in his master Gogol. Flaubert, Goethe, and Dumas père he read with delight.