MAXIM
GORKY
VLADIMIR
MAYAKOVSKY
ALEXEI
TOLSTOY
KONSTANTIN
FEDIN
J
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
[1]Translated from the Russian by Alex Miller
Designed by V. Ilyushchenko
M. FopbKHH, B. MaHKOBCKHH, A. ToJICTOH, K.
O TBOPHECTBE H MACTEPCTBE
Ha
__COPYRIGHT__ First printing 1972
[4]
__NOTE__ LVL2 moved one page back.
Comrades!
Wherever I have had an opportunity to talk to you, many have asked me verbally or in writing to say how I learnt to write. The same question has been put in letters from all parts of the U.S.S.R., sent by workers' and peasants' correspondents, army correspondents and in general by young people who have begun to write. Many have requested me to "compile a book on how stories should be written'', or "develop a theory of literature'', or "publish a text-book on literature''. I cannot write such a text-book, and shall not be able to do so; besides, such books already exist, which, even if they are not very good, are useful nevertheless.
Those beginning to write must have a knowledge of the history of literature. In this respect they will find V. Keltuyal's History of Literature, published by Gosizdat,^^*^^, of _-_-_
^^*^^ Gosizdat---State Publishing House, Moscow.---7r.
5 help, a book with an excellent account of the way oral (``folk'') and written (``literary'') creativity has developed. Whatever a woman's craft, she should know the history of its development. If the workers engaged in any industry, or, better still, at any factory knew how it arose and gradually developed, how production has been perfected, they would work better, with a fuller understanding of their labour's significance for the history of culture, and with more enthusiasm.A knowledge of foreign literature is also necessary, because in its essence literary creativity is the same in all lands and with all peoples. This is not only a matter of formal, external links, such as Pushkin having provided Gogol with the theme of Dead Souls, whilst Pushkin himself probably took it from A Sentimental Journey by the English writer Laurence Sterne. Likewise, the similarity of subject in Dead Souls and The Pickwick Papers is of little importance. What is important is a realisation of the fact that, since times immemorial, a net has everywhere been woven to capture the souls of men, and, on the other hand, that always and everywhere there have been such who have made it the aim of their work to rid men of superstitions, prejudices and biases. It is important to know that, just as there have always been such that have encouraged indulgence towards trifles pleasing to men, there have also been rebels who have risen up against the base and the vile in the life around them. It is also important to realise that in the final analysis the rebels, who have shown men the way forward and have induced them to pursue that path, gain the upper hand over preachers of appeasement and reconciliation to the vile conditions created by class society, by bourgeois society, which has infected working people with the repulsive vices of greed, envy, sloth and aversion for labour.
The history of human labour and creativity is far more interesting and significant than the history of woman; woman dies before reaching the age of one hundred, whilst her works live through the centuries. The fabulous achievements of science and its rapid growth can be explained by the scientist knowing the history of her 6 speciality's development. Science and letters have much in common: in both a leading part is played by observation, comparison, and study; both the writer and the scientist must possess imagination and intuition.
Imagination and intuition help fill in the gaps in a chain of facts, thus enabling the scientist to evolve hypotheses and theories, which more or less effectively guide the mind's inquiries into nature's forces and phenomena. By gradually subordinating the latter, woman's mind and will create human culture, which in effect is our "second nature''.
This statement can be best borne out by two facts: on the basis of his study of the elements known at the time--- iron, lead, sulphur, mercury, etc.---Dmitry Mendeleyev, the celebrated chemist, created his Periodic Table of the Elements, which stated that there existed in Nature a number of elements as yet undiscovered; he also indicated the specific gravity of each of these unknown elements. These have all since been found, and, besides, Mendeleyev's method has helped find a number of other elements whose existence he himself did not suspect.
Another fact: Honore de Balzac, the French novelist and one of the greatest of writers, said in one of his books that he thought that certain potent secretions then unknown to science probably operate in the human organism and account for various of its psycho-physical features. Several decades later the discovery was made in the human organism of several previously unknown glands that produce hormones, thus leading to the creation of the highly important science of endocrine glands. Such blending of the creative activities of scientists and leading writers is by no means rare. Lomonosov and Goethe were poets and scientists at one and the same time, as was the novelist Strindberg, whose Captain Kool was one of the first to foresee nitrogen extraction from the atmosphere.
The art of literary creativity, which is concerned with the fashioning of characters and ``types'', calls for imagination and inventiveness. If, in depicting a shopkeeper, a civil servant, or a worker of his acquaintance, the writer has produced what is a more or less faithful photograph 7 of just one person, that will be nothing more than a photograph, without the least social or educative significance, and will do almost nothing to extend our knowledge of humanity or life.
If, however, the writer proves able to summarise the most characteristic class features, habits, tastes, gestures, beliefs and manner of speech peculiar to twenty, fifty, or even a hundred shopkeepers, civil servants or workers, proves able to epitomise and condense them in the person of a single shopkeeper, civil servant or worker, he thereby creates a type, and that is art. The range of his observations and his rich experience of life often give the artist a power which outweighs his private attitude towards the facts, in other words, his subjectiveness. Subjectively Balzac stood for a bourgeois social order, but in his works he depicted the vile and vulgar nature of the petty bourgeoisie with an amazing and ruthless starkness. There have been many instances of writers being objective historians of their class and their time, their works in such cases being equal in objectivity to those of learned naturalists, who study the conditions in which animals feed and exist, the causes of their reproduction and disappearance, and describe their savage struggle for survival.
In the struggle for existence, woman's instinct of self-defence has developed two powerful creative forces in her---knowledge and imagination. Knowledge, the faculty of cognition, means the ability to observe, compare, study natural phenomena and the facts of social life; in a word, knowledge means thinking. Imagination is, in its essence, also a mode of thinking about the world, but thinking in terms of images. It may be said that imagination means the ability to attribute to things and to the elemental forces of nature human qualities, feelings and even intentions.
We hear and speak of the wind ``whining'' or `` moaning'', the moon's "pensive light'', a ``babbling'' brook, a ``murmuring'' stream and many other similar expressions, which are aimed at making natural phenomena more vivid.
This is called anthropomorphism, from two Greek words: anthropos, which means man, and morphe, 8 meaning form or image. It will be noticed here that woman has a way of attributing her human qualities to everything she sees; she imagines these things and associates them with natural phenomena, with everything created by her labour and her mind. There are people who think that anthropomorphism should have no place in literature, and even consider it detrimental to it, but these same people say "the frost pinched his ears'', "the sun smiled'', "May came round'', and even speak of "villainous weather'', though it would be hard to use a moral yardstick with reference to the weather.
It was asserted by Xenophanes, an ancient Greek philosopher, that if animals possessed the gift of imagination, lions would think that God was a kind of enormous and invincible lion, rats would picture him as a rat, and so on. The mosquito god would probably be a mosquito, while the god of the tubercle bacillus would be a bacillus. Woman has made her god omniscient, omnipotent and omnific, in other words, has endowed her with the finest of her own aspirations. God is but a fabrication, born of the "drab poverty of life" and woman's vague urge to make life richer, easier, more just and goodly. God has been raised high above humdrum life, because men's and women's finest qualities and desires found no place in the realities of life, which was the scene of an arduous struggle for a bare subsistence.
We see that when those in the van of the working class realised how life should be refashioned so that their best qualities could find untrammelled development, God became a superfluous thing that had outlived itself. It was no longer necessary to sublime the best in them in the image of a god, because that best could now be converted into living and earthly reality.
God has been created in the same manner as literary ``types'' have, in accordance with the laws of abstraction and concretisation. Characteristic exploits performed by a variety of heroes are condensed or ``abstracted'' and then given concrete shape in the person of a single hero, let us say Hercules or the legendary Russian peasant hero Ilya Muromets; traits peculiar to any merchant, nobleman or peasant are similarly ``abstracted'' and then typified in 9 the person of some one merchant, nobleman or peasant--- in other words, now a literary type is created.
It is in this fashion that Faust, Hamlet and Don Quixote were created, Tolstoi produced his meek and God-- fearing Platon Karatayev,^^*^^ Dostoievsky his Karamazovs and Svidrigailov, and Goncharov his Oblomov.
These people never existed in reality, but there have been many like them, only more petty and with less singleness of make-up. Just as builders erect towers and temples out of individual bricks, writers have fashioned literary types, who epitomise certain human qualities. We call a liar a Khlestakov,^^**^^ while a sycophant is called a Molchalin,^^***^^ a hypocrite is a Tartuffe, and a jealous man, an Othello. This list might be extended.
There are two currents, or schools, in literature: romanticism and realism. By the latter is meant a truthful, unvarnished presentation of people and their conditions of life. Several definitions of romanticism have been brought forward, but till now no precise or exhaustive definition has been evolved that will satisfy all historians of literature. Two sharply contrasting tendencies should be distinguished in romanticism, the passive and the active. Passive romanticism endeavours to reconcile woman with her life by embellishing that life, or to distract her from the things around her by means of a barren introspection into her inner world, into thoughts of "life's insoluble problems'', such as love, death and other imponderables, problems that cannot be solved by speculation or contemplation, but only by science. Active romanticism strives to strengthen woman's will to live and raise her up against the life around her, against any yoke it would impose.
However, it is hard to say with sufficient precision whether such classics as Balzac, Turgenev, Tolstoi, Gogol, Leskov or Chekhov were romanticists or realists, for in _-_-_
^^*^^ Platon Karatayev---personage in Tolstoi's War and Peace.--- Ed.
^^**^^ Khlestakov---leading character in Gogol's comedy The InspectorGeneral.---Ed.
^^***^^ Molchalin---character in Griboyedov's comedy Wit Works Woe.---Ed.
10 great artists realism and romanticism seem to have blended. Balzac was a realist, but he also wrote novels such as La peau de chagrin, a story that is far removed from realism. Turgenev also wrote in a romantic vein, as did all our leading writers, from Gogol down to Chekhov and Bunin. This fusion of romanticism and realism is highly characteristic of our great writers, imbuing their works with an originality and a forcefulness that has exerted an ever mounting and telling influence on the literature of the entire world.The relationship between realism and romanticism will be clearer to you, Comrades, if you consider the question: "Why does the urge to write arise?" There are two answers to this question, one of which has been given by a correspondent of mine aged 15, a worker's daughter. This is what she wrote in a letter to me:
I am 15, but even at so early an age a writer's talent has arisen in me, the cause of which has been an oppressively drab life.
It would have been, of course, more correct to say instead of writer s talent, simply a desire to write so as to light up and enrich an oppressively drab life. The question arises: what could one write about in conditions of that kind of life?
A reply to this question is provided by a number of nationalities living along the Volga, in the Urals area and in Siberia. But yesterday many of them did not possess an alphabet, yet many centuries before our days they enriched and beautified their oppressively drab life in the depth of their forests, amidst their marshlands, the arid steppes of the East and the tundra of the North by creating songs, tales, heroic legends and myths about gods. All this goes by the name of religious creativity, but in essence it belongs to the realm of art.
If my young correspondent really developed a talent--- which I wish her from the bottom of my heart---she would probably write in a romantic vein; she would try to embellish her oppressively drab life with beautiful figments of the imagination and depict people as being better than they really are. Gogol is the author of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich, Old- 11 Fashioned Landowners and Dead Souls, but he also wrote Taras Bulba. The former three works depict people with dead souls and portray the terrible truth, for such people lived in the past and still exist today. In describing such as these Gogol was a realist.
In Taras Bulba the Zaporozhye Cossacks were depicted as God-fearing, knightly and mighty men, who would lift their foes into the air on the points of their lances, though it is patent that the wooden shaft of a lance would snap under a man's weight. The kind of Cossack Gogol wrote of never existed in reality and the story is a piece of fanciful writing. In it, as in all of Rudy Panko's stories, Gogol was a romanticist, the probable reason of this being that he was weary of observing the oppressively drab life of dead souls.
Comrade Budyonny has taken Babel's^^*^^ Cavalry Army to task, but in my opinion he has been wrong to do so. After all, Comrade Budyonny liked to bedeck not only his soldiers but his horses too. Babel has adorned his fighting men from within, and, I think, has done so in a finer and more truthful way than Gogol did with his Cossacks.
In many respects woman is still a brute, but at the same time she is, in the cultural sense, a raw youth as yet, and it is useful to praise and embellish her a little. This builds up her self-respect and fosters her confidence in her creative powers. Besides, there is every reason to praise woman, for everything that is good and socially valuable is created by her strength and her will.
Does that all mean that by what I have just said I assert the necessity of romanticism in literature? Yes, I stand for that necessity, but only given a certain highly important extension of the term.
Here is a cry coming to me from another correspondent, a young worker of seventeen: "I am so full of impressions that I can't help writing.''
In this case the striving to write derives not from the ``poverty'' of life, but from its wealth, from an exuberance of impressions and an inner urge to describe them. The _-_-_
^^*^^ Babel, 1, E. (1894--1941)---well-known Soviet writer.---Ed.
12 overwhelming majority of my youthful correspondents wish to write just because they are rich in impressions of life and cannot remain silent about what they have seen and experienced. Quite a number of ``realists'' will probably emerge from their ranks, but I think that their realism will be tinged with a certain romanticism, which is inevitable and lawful in a period of a healthy spiritual upsurge, and that is just what we are now living through.And so to the question why I began to write I shall reply: because of the pressure exerted on me by an oppressively drab life and also because I was so full of impressions that I could not help writing. The former reason made me try to introduce into my drab life such imaginings as The Tale of the Falcon and the Grass-Snake, The Legend of the Burning Heart, and The Stormy Petrel, while the latter led me to writing stories of a ``realistic'' character, such as Twenty-Six Men and a Girl, The Orlov Couple, and The Rowdy.
The following should be remembered in connection with the question of our ``romanticism''. Until the appearance of Chekhov's Muzhiks and In the Gully, and Bunin's Village and all his stories about the peasantry, our literature of the nobility was fond of depicting the peasant, and indeed did so very skilfully, as a meek and patient woman who aspired towards some kind of "Christ's truth" of the other world, something that had no roots in the real things of life, but was nevertheless dreamt of by peasants like Kalinych in Turgenev's story Khor and Kalmyck and Platon Karatayev in Tolstoi's War and Peace. It was about twenty years prior to the abolition of serfdom that there appeared a tendency to depict the peasant as a meek and patient dreamer after "God's truth'', although by that time the serf peasantry had already produced from their ignorant ranks such gifted industrialists as the Kokorevs, the Gubonins, the Morozovs and the like, and more and more frequent reference was being made in the press to that mighty and towering figure also brought forward by the peasantry---- Lomonosov, the poet and leading scientist.
But yesterday lacking civil rights, manufacturers, shipbuilders and merchants were now confidently making 13 room for themselves in life side by side with the nobility and, like freedmen in ancient Rome, sat at the same table as their former masters. By bringing forth such people from their midst, the peasantry were thereby displaying, as it were, their latent strength and talent. The literature produced by the nobility failed to recognise and depict, as the hero of the time, this newcomer, real, tangible, full of will-power and a thirst of life, builder, amasser of wealth and hard-headed woman of affairs; instead, that literature went on lovingly depicting humble-spirited serfs, like the conscience-ridden Polikushka. In 1852 Lev Tolstoi wrote a melancholy sketch entitled Morning of a Landowner, with a splendid description of the way a kind-hearted and liberal master was distrusted by his serfs. In 1862 Tolstoi began his education of peasant children, his denial of science and progress, and his teaching that people should go to the muzhik to learn how to live properly; in the seventies he wrote his stories for "the people'', depicting them as Christ-loving and romanticised peasants, and taught that village life is blessed and the peasant's tilling of the soil is sacred labour. Finally, in his story Does a Man Need Much Earth? he asserted that woman needs only the six feet of earth required for a grave.
Concrete conditions were turning humble and Christloving people into builders of new forms of economic life, into petty bourgeois and men of big business, such as the greedy and clutching Razuvayevs and Kolupayevs depicted by Saltykov-Shchedrin and Gleb Uspensky. At the same time rebels and revolutionaries were coming into the picture. All these people, however, were unnoticed by the literature of the nobility. In Oblomov, one of the finest novels of our literature, Goncharov contrasted to a Russian nobleman, whose sheer laziness had reduced him to something close to idiocy, the figure of a German, and not one of those former Russian serfs among whom he, Goncharov, was living and who were already beginning to run the country's economic life. If writers from among the nobility described a revolutionary then that woman was either a Bulgarian or a rebel in word alone, like Rudin. As a hero of the times, the 14 Russian of will and action found no reflection in literature, though outside men of letters' field of vision that Russian was rendering a fairly noisy account of himself with the aid of bombs. Much evidence could be adduced to show that an active and purposeful romanticism was alien to the literature of the Russian nobility. It was powerless to produce a Schiller, and, instead of 'I he Robbers, gave superb depictions of Dead Souls, A Living Corpse, A House of the Dead, Three Deaths, and quite a number of other deaths. Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment was in all probability written in protest against Schiller's Robbers, his Possessed being the most talented and malicious of the numberless attempts made to denigrate the revolutionary movement of the seventies.
Active social-revolutionary romanticism was also alien to the literature of the raznochinets^^*^^ intellectuals. The raznochinets was too much concerned with his own fate and with finding his own place in the drama of life; he found himself between the hammer of the autocracy and the anvil of the ``people''.
Sleptsov's^^**^^ Hard Times and Osipovich-Novodvorsky's Episode from the Life of One Neither Peacock nor Sparrow were truthful and forceful stories of the tragedy of intelligent people who had no roots in life and were "neither peacocks nor sparrows'', or of such that turned into smug philistines, the kind described by Kushchevsky^^***^^ and by Pomyalovsky,^^****^^ that gifted, remarkably intelligent but insufficiently appreciated writer, in his Molotov and Philistine Happiness. Incidentally, both these stories have retained their interest for our times _-_-_
^^*^^ Raznochinets---the name given in the second half of the 19th century to any member of the Russian intelligentsia recruited from such sections of society as the peasantry, the clergy, the petty bourgeoisie and also containing declasse noblemen.---Ed.
^^**^^ Sleptsov, V. A. (1836--1878)---Russian revolutionary-democratic writer. His books, which described the life of the common people, were popular in the sixties of the last century.---Ed.
^^***^^ Kushchevsky, I. A. (1847--1876)---Russian democratic writer.--- Ed.
^^****^^ Pomyalovsky, N. G. (1835--1863)---well-known Russian writer who was close to the revolutionary democrats. His novels dealt with the life of the raznochinets intelligentsia.---Ed.
15 when the philistine is again coming to life and is beginning, with a measure of success, to build up for himself a certain cheap prosperity in a country where the working class has paid in torrents of its blood for the right to build a socialist culture.In their assiduous efforts to idealise rural life the socalled Narodnik writers, such as Zlatovratsky, Zasodimsky, Vologdin, Levitov, Nefedov, Bazhin, Nikolai TJspensky, Ertel, and in some degree Stanyukovich, KaroninPetropavlovsky and many others, re-echoed the tone of writers from the nobility; these Narodniks saw in the peasant a natural socialist, who knew no other truth but that of the mir, the village community. Herzen, that brilliantly gifted nobleman, was the first to foster this attitude towards the peasantry, and his stand was followed up by N. Mikhailovsky, who invented two truths---the ``real'' and that of ``justice''. The influence the Narodnik writers exerted on ``society'' was weak and short-lived, their ``romanticism'' differing from that of their colleagues of the nobility merely in paucity of talent, and their dreamers---peasants like Minai and Mityai---were but feeble copies of Polikushka, Kalinych and Karatayev and other similarly pious muzhik characters.
There were two very important writers at the time, who were close to the group just mentioned, but were far more far-sighted socially and possessed far more talent than the Narodniks, indeed more than all of them taken together. These were D. Mamin-Sibiryak and Gleb Uspensky, who were the first to take note of, and describe the differences between, urban and village life, between the industrial worker and the peasant. In this, particular discernment was displayed by Gleb Uspensky, who wrote two outstanding books: The Morals of Rasteryayev Street and The Power of the Soil, the social value of which still endures; in general, Uspensky's stories retain their educative significance, and our young writers would do well to learn from his ability to observe and from his extensive knowledge of the life around him.
In his stories Muzhiks, In the Gully, which I have already mentioned, and also in The New Villa Anton Chekhov showed himself violently opposed to any 16 idealisation of the peasant; even greater hostility to this tendency was displayed by Ivan Bunin in his short novel The Village as well as in all his peasant stories. Highly characteristic is the fact that peasant writers like Semyon Podyachev^^*^^ and Ivan Volnov,^^**^^ the latter a highly gifted and developing writer, describe village life in terms just as unsparing. Themes such as rural life and the peasant's mentality are highly topical and important today, something that our young writers should realise in full.
From all that has just been said it is clear that our literature has not yet known ``romanticism'' as the teaching of an active attitude towards life, of the dignity of labour and the will to live, as the source of inspiration in the building-up of new forms of life and as hate of the old world, whose evil heritage we are eliminating so painfully. This teaching is vitally needed if we really wish to preclude any revival of philistinism and further, through philistinism, of the class state and the exploitation of the workers and peasants by parasites and plunderers. This is a ``resurrection'' all enemies of the Soviet Union are dreaming of; they are waging an economic blockade of the Soviet Union with the specific aim of forcing the working class to restore the old class state. The worker-writer should realise with the utmost clarity that the contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie cannot be bridged and that only complete victory or utter destruction can solve that contradiction. It is from that tragic contradiction, from the arduous nature of the task so inexorably imposed upon the working class by the course of history, that there should arise an active ``romanticism'', that creative urge, that audacity of will and mind, and those revolutionary qualities which have always marked the Russian revolutionary working woman.
I am, of course, aware that the road to freedom is not easy and that the time has not yet come for tea-drinking all one's life in the pleasant company of pretty girls or for lolling before a mirror, lost in admiration of one's _-_-_
^^*^^ Podyachev, S. P. (1866--1934)---Russian Soviet writer.---Ed.
^^**^^ Volnov, I. Y. (1885--1931)---writer who portrayed morals and life of Russian peasantry following the abolition of serfdom.---Ed.
__PRINTERS_P_17_COMMENT__ 2-1591 17 good looks, something that quite a number of young people are prone to indulging in. The realities of life tend more and more to drive home the fact that under present-day conditions a life of peaceful seclusion cannot be built, that living in solitude or even with a chosen partner will not bring happiness, that philistine prosperity cannot be lasting, for the foundations of that kind of well-being are crumbling away all over the world. This is borne out very convincingly by a number of symptoms: the malice, gloom, and alarm that have come over philistines the world over; the lamentations coming from the literature of Europe; the desperate gaiety the wealthy philistine is having recourse to in the vain hope of stifling his fear of the morrow, and, finally, a morbid craving for low pleasures, the development of sexual aberrations and the spread of crime and suicides. The "old world" is indeed mortally sick, and we must hasten to renounce that world to avoid being affected by its noxious exhalations.While a moral dry-rot has come over humanity in Europe, a firm confidence in our strength and the power of the collective is developing among the working masses in our country. You, young people, should know that this confidence always arises as one overcomes obstacles along the road to a better life, and that confidence of this kind is the mightiest of creative forces. You should also know that in that "old world" only science is humane and therefore indisputably of value. With the exception of the ideas of socialism all the ``ideas'' circulating in the "old world" have no humanity in them because in one way or another those ideas attempt to establish and justify the lawfulness of the ``happiness'' and power of individuals at the expense of the culture and liberty of the working masses.
I have no recollection of ever having complained about life in my youth. The people I lived among were fond of grumbling, but when I realised that they did so out of cunning so as to conceal their reluctance to help one another I tried to avoid imitating them. Very soon I saw that most given to grumbling were such that were incapable of putting up any resistance, people who could 18 not or would not work, and in general were prone to take it easy at the expense of their fellowmen.
In my time 1 experienced, in no small measure, a fear of life. Today I call such fear that of a blind woman. Having lived, as I have had occasion to describe, in very arduous circumstances, I saw in my early years the senseless brutality practised by people, their mutual hostility, which I could not understand, and was amazed by the backbreaking toil imposed upon some and the gross prosperity enjoyed by others. At a very early age I understood that "the closer to God" religious people thought themselves, the farther they stood from those who worked for them and the more ruthlessly exacting they became towards the toilers. I must say that I witnessed far more of the abominations of life than you have occasion to see, and besides I saw them in far more repelling forms, for the philistine you now meet has been cowed by the Revolution and is far from confident of his right to be such as his nature would have him be. What I saw was philistinism absolutely certain that it was doing well and that its comfortable and untroubled life had been ordained for all time.
By that time I was already reading translations of foreign novels, including books by such splendid writers as Dickens and Balzac, and historical novels by Ainsworth, Bulwer-Lytton and Dumas. These depicted men of strong will and indomitable character, whose joys and sufferings were different from those I saw and knew, and whose animosities derived from important differences. All around me, however, were mean and petty people, whose greed, enmity and malice, fights and litigations sprang from, say, a neighbour's son having broken a hen's leg or smashed a window-pane, or because a pie had been ruined, the cabbage-soup had been over-boiled or the milk had turned sour. They could grieve for hours over the fact that the shopkeeper had added another kopek to the price of a pound of sugar or a yard of calico. Any petty mishap that had befallen a neighbour would give them real delight, which they would conceal behind a show of sympathy. I saw very well that it was a kopek coin that shone in the philistine's heaven and aroused 19 petty and sordid enmity among men. Pots and pans, poultry and cabbages, pancakes and church-going, birthdays and funerals, guzzling and swinishness---such was the content of the life lived by those I grew up amongst. That disgusting existence evoked in me now a numbing torpor, now an urge to run into mischief so as to arouse myself from torpor. It was probably about such tedium that a 19-year-old correspondent wrote to me about recently in the following terms:
With every fibre in my being I hate the deadening tedium that centres around the kitchen, gossiping and yelping.
It was tedium of that very description that drove me into all kinds of mischief: I would climb on the roof and stuff pieces of rag into chimney-pots, throw handfulls of salt into boiling cabbage-soup, blow clouds of dust into clocks, and in general go in for what is called hooliganism. The reason of this was that while I had an urge to feel I was a living person I was unable to find other ways of convincing myself of the fact. My feeling was -that I had lost my way in a thick forest full of fallen tree-trunks, dense undergrowth and rotting leaves into which I sank to the knees.
I remember the following incident: gangs of Siberiabound convicts would be taken under armed escort along the street I lived in, from the prison to the landing-stage, where they would be taken on board river-steamers travelling along the Volga and the Kama. I felt strangely attracted to that drab and dingy crowd; perhaps this sprang from a feeling of envy that they were a company who, though some were in chains and all were under armed guard, nevertheless had some destination, while I was living like some solitary rat in a cellar, and had to toil in my filthy kitchen with its brick floor. One day a large group of fettered convicts were being taken to the riverside. Two criminals fettered hand and foot were marching just off the pavement, one of them a burly, black-bearded man with eyes like a horse's, a livid scar along his forehead and a torn ear---a horrible figure. With eyes fixed on the man, I walked along the pavement abreast of him. Suddenly he called out to me in a loud and cheerful voice, "Say, young chap, come and join us!''
20Strangely drawn towards him, I ran up to the man, but one of the armed guards cursed me for a fool and thrust me back. Had he not done so I would have followed that horrible man as though in a dream, just because he was so out of the ordinary, so unlike the men I knew. Fearsome and fettered though he was, 1 felt drawn towards another kind of life. I could not soon forget the man and his merry, kindly voice. Associated with him is another, equally strong impression of those days. I had somehow got hold of a thick book, the beginning of which had been torn off and lost, and I began to read it. I could make nothing of the sense with the exception of a story, one page long, about a king who wanted to knight a simple archer, to which the archer replied in verse:
Then let me live and die a yeoman still:
So was my lather, so must live his son.
For 'tis more credit to men of base degree,
To do great deeds, than men of dignity.
I copied out these rather cumbrous lines and for many years they served me in the manner a staff serves the traveller or perhaps like a shield that defended me against the temptations and the mean advice provided by the philistines, who at that time were the "salt of the earth''. I suppose many young people come across lines which fill their imagination with a kind of motive force, as the wind fills a vessel's sails.
It was about ten years later that I learnt that these lines came from The Comedy of the Merry Archer George Greene and Robin Hood, written in the 16th century by Robert Greene, one of Shakespeare's forerunners. I was delighted by this discovery, and felt an even greater love of literature, which since ancient times has been people's true friend and helper in their arduous life.
__b_b_b__Yes, comrades, I have had ample experience of fear of the boorishness and cruelty of life, and once even went so far as to attempt suicide, something that for many years I could not recollect without a feeling of burning shame and self-contempt.
I got rid of that fear when I realised that people were 21 more ignorant than evil, that I was intimidated not by them or by life, but by my social and other kinds of illiteracy, by my defencelessness and helplessness against life. That was precisely how matters stood. I think that you should give this matter good thought, because the moans and complaints coming from certain people amongst you stem from nothing but their sense of defencelessness, their lack of confidence in their ability to combat everything the "old world" uses to oppress woman from without and within.
You should realise that people like me were solitary in those days, stepsons of ``society'', whereas you already number hundreds and belong to a working class which is conscious of its strength, is in possession of power and is rapidly learning to give full credit to the useful labour of individuals. In our workers' and peasants' government you have a power which should and can help you to develop your abilities to the utmost, something that it is gradually doing, and would do far more successfully if the bourgeoisie---its bitter foe and yours---did not hamper its life and work.
You must build up a sense of confidence in yourselves and your strength, a confidence which is achieved by overcoming obstacles and steeling the will. You must learn to eradicate from within yourselves and in your surroundings the mean and vile heritage of the past, for otherwise how will you be able "to renounce the old world" (from the words of The Workers' Marseillaise, a Russian revolutionary song dating back to 1875.---Tr.}. You cannot sing that song unless you have the strength and the desire to act in the way it teaches. Even a minor victory over oneself makes one far stronger. You know very well how training the body gives a woman greater health, agility and staying power; the mind and the will should get the same kind of training.
Here is an instance of the remarkable achievements such training can bring about: a short while ago a woman was exhibited in Berlin, who could, while holding two pencils in each hand and another between the teeth, simultaneously write five words in five different languages. This is something that might seem 22 unbelievable, not only because it is hard in a physical sense, but also because it calls for an extraordinary division of thought. It is nevertheless a fact. On the other hand, this fact goes to show how brilliant endowments can be wasted in chaotic bourgeois society, where to attract attention it is necessary to walk the streets on one's hands, set up speed records of little or no practical value, play chess matches simultaneously against twenty opponents, perform fantastic acrobatic and verse-compiling stunts, and in general invent all kinds of publicity-winning and showy performances to tickle the sensations of blase and bored people.
You, young people, should know that everything really valuable and permanently useful and beautiful which humankind has achieved in the sphere of science, art and technology has been created by individuals working under inexpressibly arduous conditions, in the teeth of "society`s'' profound ignorance, the church's violent hostility, the capitalists' cupidity, and the capricious demands of ``patrons'' of the arts and sciences. One should bear in mind that there have been many ordinary working men among the creators of culture, as for instance the great physicist Faraday and the inventor Edison; that the spinning jenny was invented by Arkwright, who was a barber; that one of the finest creators of artistic pottery was Bernard Palissy, who was a blacksmith; that Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist the world has known, was an ordinary actor, as was Moliere. Hundreds of similar examples might be cited of the way people have been able to develop their abilities.
All this proved possible for individuals who did not enjoy the benefits of the huge stock of scientific knowledge and technical contrivances now in humankind's possession. Think how easier it has become to conduct cultural work in our country, where we are striving for the complete emancipation of the people from senseless labour, from cynical exploitation of the workers, an exploitation which brings forth a rapidly degenerating wealthy class and, besides, threatens the toiling class with degeneration.
You are confronted with a great and perfectly clear task---that of "renouncing the old world" and creating a 23 new. This has been begun. After the example set by our working class, that process is developing on all sides, and will go on developing, no matter what obstacles the old world may place in its way. Working people all over the world are rolling up their sleeves in preparation for the job. An atmosphere of sympathy is being created around the work of individuals, who no longer feel isolated fragments of a collective, but its vanguard, which voices its creative will.
With a target like this one, set so boldly for the first time, there can be no room for questions such as "What is to be done?" "It is hard to live,'' some say. Is it so very hard, after all? Is it not hard because your requirements have grown and you need things your fathers never thought of and never saw? Perhaps your demands have become excessive?
I am aware, of course, that among you there are many who understand the joy and poetry of collective work, and aspire not towards amassing millions of kopeks but towards destroying the evil power the kopek wields over woman, who is the greatest miracle in the world and the creator of all miracles in that world.
__b_b_b__I shall now reply to the question as to how I learnt to write.
I gathered impressions both directly from life and from books. The former may be compared to raw material, the latter to semi-manufactured material, or, to put the matter in rougher but plainer terms, in the former instance I had to deal with the animal, and in the latter, with its excellently dressed hide. I am greatly indebted to foreign literature, especially to that of France.
My grandfather was cruel and miserly, but I did not understand him properly till I had read Balzac's Eugenie Grandet. Eugenie's father, old Grandet, was also cruel and miserly, and bore a resemblance to my grandfather, but he was more stupid and less interesting than my grandfather was. Compared with this Frenchman, an old Russian I did not love stood to advantage. This did not make me change my attitude towards him, but I had made 24 a great discovery, namely, that books were able to reveal to me something that I had not seen or known in woman.
George Eliot's dull novel Middlemarch and books by Auerbach and Spielhagen showed me that people lived in English and German provinces in a way that was not quite the pattern of life in Zvezdinskaya Street in NizhniNovgorod, but was not much better. They spoke of much the same things---their English and their German kopeks, the need to fear the Lord and love Him, but, just like the inhabitants of our street, they disliked one another, especially people cast in a different mould, who in one way or another differed from the majority around them. I was not seeking for points of similarity between foreigners and Russians; no, I was out to discover differences, but I found similarity nevertheless.
The bankrupt merchants Ivan Shchurov and Yakov Kotelnikov, who were my grandfather's cronies, spoke of the same things and in the same way as people did in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. I learnt to read and write from the Psalter and loved the book, for it speaks in a beautiful and musical language. When Yakov Kotelnikov, my grandfather and other old men complained to each other of their children, I thought of King David's complaints to God about his son, the unduteous Absalom, and it seemed to me that these old men were not speaking the truth when they claimed that people in general and young people in particular were living ever worse lives, were becoming more stupid and lazy, and were losing their fear of the Lord. Dickens's hypocrites said exactly the same things.
After I had done some careful listening to arguments between sectarian dogmatists and Orthodox priests, I discovered that both clutched at words in the same way as churchmen in other countries did, that for all churchmen words were a way of keeping others in curb, and that there were writers who were very much like churchmen. In this resemblance I soon felt something suspicious, if interesting.
There was, of course, no system or consistency in my reading, and everything was a matter of accident. Victor Sergeyev, my employer's brother, was fond of reading 25 French ``yellowback'' novels by Xavier de Montepin, Gaboriau, Zaccone, and Bouvier, and, after reading these books, lighted upon Russian books which ridiculed and gave hostile depictions of ``nihilist-revolutionaries''. I also read books by Krestovsky, Stebnitsky-Leskov, Klyushnikov and Pisemsky. I found it interesting to read of people who had almost nothing in common with those I lived amongst but were rather kindred to the convict who had invited me to come and join him. Of course, I could not understand wherein lay the ``revolutionariness'' of these people, which formed part of the authors' intentions, for they tarred all ``revolutionaries'' with the same brush.
I hit upon Pomyalovsky's stories Molotov and Philistine Happiness, which showed me the "oppressively drab life" of philistine existence and the paltriness of philistine happiness. I felt, though in a vague fashion, that the sombre ``nihilists'' were in some way better than the prosperous Molotov. After Pomyalovsky I read an awfully dull book by Zarubin entitled The Dark and Light Sides of Russian Life; I failed to discover any light sides in the book, but the dark sides became clearer and more repulsive to me.
I read poor books beyond count, but even such were of use to me. The seamy side of life is something one should know just as well as its sunnier aspects. One must have the greatest possible amount of knowledge. The more varied one's experience, the greater the stature one acquires and the wider the field of vision.
Foreign literature provided me with copious material for comparisons and astonished me by the skill displayed in it. These books depicted people in so living and vivid a way that they actually seemed tangible to me; I always found these people more active than I did Russians---they talked less and did more.
A real and profoundly formative influence was exerted on me by the ``big'' French writers---Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert, and I would advise all ``beginners'' to read these authors. They are, indeed, artists of genius and superb masters of form, the like of whom Russian literature does not yet possess. I read them in the Russian, but that did not prevent me from sensing the power of French 26 writing. After a multitude of ``boulevard'' novels, after Mayne Reid, James Fenimore Cooper, Gustave Aimard and Ponson du Terrail, stories by these great writers produced on me the impression of a miracle.
I remember reading Flaubert's Un cceur simple one Trinity Sunday, ensconced on the roof of a shed where I liad found refuge from merry-makers. I was amazed by the narrative, and felt like one bereft of sight and hearing; the noisy festival in progress all around was shut off by the figure of a common woman, a cook, who had performed neither outstanding deeds nor crimes of any kind. It was hard to understand why simple words so familiar to me, which had been put into a story of the ``ordinary'' life of a cook, should have stirred me so. I seemed for all the world to discern some kind of magic in the effect the book was having on me and I will confess that I several times held the pages up to the light, like a savage, without reflecting on what I was doing, in an effort to find between the lines some key to the mystery.
I was familiar with dozens of books which depicted mysterious and sanguinary crimes, but when I read Stendhal's Italian Chronicles I could not make out how it was all done. Here was a man who described cruel acts and vengeful murderers, and yet I read his stories as though they were Lives of the Saints or as if I were hearing A Dream of Our Lady, in which the Mother of God goes down into Hell to comfort those undergoing torment there.
I was absolutely amazed when in Balzac's La peau de chagrin I read through the pages describing a banquet given by a banker, where about two dozen guests were all talking at the same time, creating a hubbub that seemed to hit upon my eardrums. What was more important was that I not only heard but actually saw each of the guests speaking; I could see their eyes, smiles and gestures, although Balzac describes neither the features nor the appearance of the banker's guests.
The skill revealed by Balzac and other French writers in the art of depicting people through the medium of words and the art of making their speech living and audible, their consummate skill in creating dialogues, 27 always overwhelmed me. Balzac's books seem to have been done in oils, and when 1 first saw paintings by Rubens I immediately thought of Balzac. When 1 read Dostoyevsky's crazy books I cannot help thinking that he owes very much to this great master of the novel. 1 liked too the tersely-worded novels of the Goncourts, as incisive as drawings done in pen, and the gloomy writings of Zola, like impressive canvases rendered in sombre colours. Hugo's novels failed to carry me away, and I read even Quatre-vingt-treize with indifference. It was only later, when 1 got to know Anatole France's Les dieux ont soif, that I realised the cause of that indifference. I read Stendhal only after I had learnt to hate many things, and his unruffled speech and sceptical smile fortified me in my hatred.
What follows from the above is that it was from French authors that I learnt how to write. This was accidental, but the results proved beneficial, which is why I would advise young writers to study French so as to read the great masters in the original and learn the art of words from them.
It was much later that I read the great men of Russian letters---Gogol, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky and Leskov. Without any doubt, Leskov had an influence on me through his amazing knowledge and wealth of language. He is an excellent writer with an intimate insight into Russian life, and one who has not received the recognition he deserves in our literature. Chekhov said that he was much indebted to Leskov. I think that A. Remizov^^*^^ could say the same.
I have mentioned these mutual links and iniluences so as to repeat that a knowledge of the development of foreign and Russian literature is a writer's ``must''.
At about the age of 20 I realised that I had seen, heard and lived through much that people could and should be told of. It seemed to me that I knew and felt _-_-_
^^*^^ Remizov, A. M.---Russian writer who followed in the tradition established by Leskov in depicting patriarchal Russia and the world of the Church, as well as in the use of ornamentally stylised speech.---Ed.
28 certain things differently from the way other people did; this both perturbed me and put me in an unquiet and talkative frame of mind. Even when reading books by such masters as Turgenev, it sometimes occurred to me that I could perhaps say something about the main characters of, say, A Sportsman's Sketches otherwise than Turgenev had done. By that time I had gained quite a reputation as a narrator and was attentively listened to by longshoremen, bakers, vagabonds, carpenters, railway workers, pilgrims and in general by all those I was living among. While I was retelling the contents of books I had read, I more and more frequently caught myself modifying the plot, distorting what I had read, and adding things culled from my own experience of life. That was because the facts of life and literature had become fused in my mind. A book is just as much a phenomenon of life as woman is; it is also a living and speaking fact, and it is much less of a ``thing'' than all the other things that woman has created or is creating.Intellectuals who had heard me gave me the following advice: "You must write. Try your hand at it.''
1 often felt intoxicated, and experienced attacks of volubility, and a gush of words, from an urge to give expression to all that oppressed or gladdened me; I was eager to "get things off my chest''. There were moments of torment from the tension within me, moments when a lump stood in my throat and I wanted to cry out that my friend Anatoly, a glass-blower, was a lad of talent but would perish if no help were forthcoming; that the streetwalker Theresa was a fine person and it was unjust that she was a prostitute, which was something the students who visited her did not see, just as they did not see that the old woman Matitsa, who begged for a living, had far more brains than the young and well-read accoucheuse Yakovleva.
In secret from even my intimate friend, the student Gury Pletnyov, 1 wrote verses about Theresa and Anatoly, verses to the effect that it was not so as to carry torrents of filthy water into the bakers' cellars that the snow melted in spring; that the Volga was a beautiful river; that the pretzel-baker Kuzin was a Judas, and life 29 was a slough of filth and desolation that mutilated the soul.
1 had a lacile pen for verse but 1 saw that what 1 wrote was abominable and despised myself for my lack of skill and talent. I read Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, and Kurochkin's translations of Beranger with a clear realisation that I bore not the least resemblance to any of these poets. I could not make up my mind to write prose, which seemed to me more difficult than verse and called for a special keenness of sight, a power of discerning and taking note of things that others could not see, and a terse and pithy style. Nevertheless, I began to try my hand at prose-writing, selecting, however, the medium of ``rhythmical'' prose, since I found ordinary prose beyond my capacities. My efforts to. write in simple style led to results both sad and ridiculous. It was in rhythmical prose that I wrote a huge ``poem'', Song of the Old Oak. It took V. G. Korolenko only a dozen words to pull to pieces this clumsy writing, in which, as I remember, I voiced thoughts that had arisen in me in connection with an article "The Whirlpool of Life'', published, if I am not in error, in the Znaniye magazine and dealing with the theory of evolution. The only thing in it I have retained in my memory is the sentence, "I have come into this world so as to disagree.'' I must say that I really did not agree with the theory of evolution.
Korolenko, however, did not succeed in curing me of my predilection for rhythmical prose, and when five years later he had words of praise for my story Grandfather Arkhip, he said that I should not have prinked up the story with "something resembling verse''. I did not believe him at first but when I looked through the story at home I found to my regret that a whole page, a description of a downpour of rain in the steppe, had been written in that accursed ``rhythmical'' prose, which dogged my footsteps for a long time and seeped its way, unwanted and out of place, into my stories. ... In general 1 tried to make use of an ``elegant'' style. Here is an instance: "The drunk man stood embracing the lamp-post, a smile on his face, examining his flickering shadow.'' The night, incidentally, as I myself had written, was windless and 30 moonlit; in those times street lanterns were not lit on such nights, and besides even were the lantern lit, the man's shadow would be a steady one if there was no wind. Such discrepancies and inaccuracies were to be met in each of my stories, for which I would revile myself in no uncertain terms.
``The sea was smiling,'' I wrote, and for a long time thought that it was good to say so. In my pursuit of beauty I was constantly at variance with precision of description and had a way of misplacing things and describing people inaccurately.
``Your oven does not stand as it should,'' Lev Tolstoi once said to me regarding my story 'Twenty-Six Men and a Girl. It transpired that the oven fire could not have lit up the bakers' faces in the fashion I had described. Speaking of Medynskaya in my Foma Gordeyev, Chekhov remarked, "She seems to have three ears---one even on her chin---look'', and indeed it was all too true, so incorrect was the way she was facing the light.
Such errors, petty though they may seem, are of great importance, for they transgress the truth of art. In general, it is a very difficult thing to find precise words and place them in such a way as to express much in the fewest number of words, to be sparing of words and yet give boundless sweep to thought, to create living pictures through the agency of words, and define tersely a character's chief trait, immediately engraving on the reader's mind that character's manner and tone of speech. It is one thing to lend ``colour'' to people and things through the medium of words, and quite another matter to depict them vividly, in "three dimensions" as it were, so that they become physically tangible, like the characters in War and Peace....
When, on one occasion I had to give a thumb-nail sketch of the appearance of a provincial townlet in central Russia, I sat for about three hours before I was able to produce the following:
``The undulating valley was criss-crossed by dreary roads, so that the gay-coloured town of Okurov was like a bright toy on a broad and wrinkled palm.''
I thought I had done a piece of good writing, but when 31 the story was published 1 realised that it was all like decorated gingerbread or a picture on a chocolate box.
In general, words should be used with the severest accuracy. Here is an instance from another sphere. "Religion is opium,'' it has been said. But opium is used by doctors as an anodyne, so that it is a good thing. The fact that opium is smoked like tobacco, that opium-smoking kills people, and that opium is a poison far more noxious than alcohol is something that the masses do not know.
My setbacks always put me in mind of the poet's sorrowful words: "There is no torment in the world more exquisite than the torment of words.'' But that is something that has been discussed far better than I am able to by A. G. Gornfeld in a booklet entitled The Torment of Words, published by Gosizdat in 1927, a very fine work that I recommend to the attention of my young fellow-writers.
__b_b_b__I think it was the poet Nadson who said, "Our language is cold and pitiful'', and the poet has been rare who has failed to complain of the ``poverty'' of language.
It seems to me that these complaints have been directed against the ``poverty'' not so much of the Russian language but of human language in general and are due to the existence of feelings and thoughts that words can neither detect nor express. It is of such things that Gornfeld's book speaks so well. But, apart from things that words cannot detect, the Russian language is one of inexhaustible wealth and is being enriched at a speed that amazes. To establish the rapidity of the growth of our language, it is worth while to compare the stock of words used by Gogol and Chekhov, Turgenev and, for instance, by Bunin, Dostoyevsky and, let us say, Leonid Leonov.^^*^^ The latter has himself stated in the press that he derives from Dostoyevsky, but he might have said that in certain _-_-_
^^*^^ Lconov, L. M. (born 1899)---prominent Russian Soviet writer and Lenin Prize winner.---Ed.
32 respects---and I shall appeal to the appraisal of the mind---he stems from Lev Tolstoi too. However, both these links are such that they testify only to the significance of the young writer and in no wise detract from his originality. In his novel The Thief he has, beyond a shadow of doubt, displayed an amazing wealth of language. He has created a number of highly felicitous words of his own, and, besides, the construction of his novel is striking in its complexity and fancifulness. As I see it, Leonov is a man with a message of his own, one that is highly original; he has just commenced delivering it, and neither Dostoyevsky nor anybody else can hamper him in this.It will be in place to remind you that language is created by the people. To speak of the language of literature and that of the people is merely a way of saying that one is "raw material" while the other has been worked on by the masters. Pushkin was the first to fully realise this, and it was he, too, who showed how the speech material provided by the people should be used and worked on.
The artist is the sensitive recipient of all that affects his country and his class---its ear, eye and heart; his is the voice of his time. He is in duty bound to know as much as he can, and the better he knows the past, the better he will understand the present, and the more deeply and keenly will he realise the universal revolutionariness of our time and the scope of the tasks confronting it. A knowledge of the people's history is essential, and so is a knowledge of its social and political mode of thought. Men of learning---historians of culture and ethnographers---have pointed out that this thinking finds expression in fairytales, legends, proverbs and sayings. It is sayings and proverbs that in actual fact express the way the masses think, in a fashion most instructive and complete; tyro writers should get a knowledge of that material not only because it provides superb instruction in sparingness of words, pithiness and imagery but for the following reason: the overwhelming majority of the population of the Land of Soviets is made up of peasants, that clay out of which history has moulded working men, town-- __PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3-1591 33 dwellers, merchants, priests, officials, noblemen, savants and artists. The peasant mind has been under the continuous impact of those who controlled the state church and the various sects that broke away from that church. For centuries the peasants have been taught to think in terms of ready-made and set forms, such as sayings and proverbs, most of which are nothing but teachings of the church couched in a compressed form.. . .
When I read books written by ``conservatives'', by those who defended the autocracy, I found in them nothing that was new to me, because each of the pages reproduced on a wider scale---in extenso---some proverb I had known since childhood. It was obvious to me that all the profound wisdom of the conservatives---K. Leontyev. K. Pobedonostsev and the like---was imbued with that "wisdom of the people" which epitomised the church spirit.
. . .In general, proverbs and sayings succinctly sum up the social and historical experience accumulated by the working people, and the writer stands in absolute need of material that will teach him to compress words in the way fingers are compressed into a fist, and also to amplify words that others have compressed, and do so in a way that will reveal hidden meanings hostile to the tasks of the time, or simply outmoded.
I have learnt a great deal from proverbs, or, in other words, from thinking in terms of aphorisms. I call the following happening to mind: Yakov Soldatov, a friend of mine, a janitor and a man as fond of a joke as the next man, was once sweeping the street, wielding a new besom. Yakov gave me a look, winked with a merry eye and remarked:
``Whatever I do, I'll never get through; the more I sweep, the more keeps coming in.''
I realised that he was saying no more than the truth. Even if the neighbours were to keep their part of the street in good order, the wind would bring dust from nearby streets; even if all the streets in the town were kept clean, clouds of dust would be coming in from the fields and roads round about or from neighbouring towns. Of course, one must keep the area round one's 34 house tidy, but one's labour will yield more results if it is extended to the entire street, the whole town, and the whole world.
It is in this fashion that a maxim can be built up. Here is an instance of how a maxim comes into being. When on one occasion cholera broke out in Nizhni-Novgorod, one of the inhabitants began to spread rumours that the doctors were doing away with the sick. Governor Baranov gave orders for his arrest and had him sent to work as an attendant in a hospital for cholera cases. It was said that after a while the erstwhile rumour-monger expressed thanks to the governor for the lesson he had been given, to which the governor retorted:
``When the truth hits you in the eye, you stop lying!''
Baranov was a coarse kind of man, but far from stupid and, I think, was quite capable of saying such things. Besides, what difference does it make who said these words.
Such were the living thoughts that helped me to learn to think and write. In books I found thoughts similar to those I had heard from janitors and lawyers, from such that had lost caste and from all sorts and conditions of men, but in books these thoughts were clothed in other words, so it was in this wise that the facts of life and of literature complemented each other.
I have already spoken of the way in which men of letters create ``types'' and characters, but I might perhaps cite two interesting examples.
Goethe's Faust is a superb product of artistic creativity* which is always figment and fiction, or, to be more precise, a kind of conjecturing added to what is provided by life and at the same time a translation of thought into images. I was about twenty when I first read Faust, and some time later I discovered that about two hundred years before the German Goethe, an Englishman named Christopher Marlowe had written about Faust; that the Polish cheap and tawdry novel Pan Twardowski was also a kind of Faust, as was Jean le trouveur, a novel by the French writer Paul Musset; that all books about Faust sprang from a mediaeval legend about a man who, 35 thirsting after private happiness and power over other men and nature's secrets, sold his soul to the Devil. This legend developed from observations of life and the work done by alchemists who sought to transmute baser metals into gold and discover the elixir of life. Among these were dreamers of integrity and obsession-driven men, but there were also quacks and charlatans. It was the vainness of these individuals' efforts to achieve "supreme power" that was held up to ridicule in the story of the adventures of the mediaeval Doctor Faust, to supply whom with the gift of omniscience and immortality proved beyond the power of the Devil himself.
Another figure appeared at the side of the unhappy Faust, a figure familiar to all peoples: in Italy it was Pulcinella, in England Punch, in Turkey Karapet, and in our country Petrushka, everywhere the unconquerable hero of folk puppet-shows, who is always on top, outwitting the police, the clergy, even the Devil and death, and is himself deathless. Working folk saw in this naive and coarse figure the embodiment of themselves and of their confidence that in the long run they and they alone would overcome all and everything.
These two instances go once again to bear out what I have already said: ``nameless'' works, i.e., such that have been produced by people we know nothing of,^^*^^ also obey the laws of abstraction, of traits and features characteristic of any social group, as well as the laws of the typification of these features in the person of a representative of that group. When the artist faithfully obeys those rules, he is able to create ``types''. It was in this way that Charles de Coster produced his Thyl Ulenspiegel, the national type of the Fleming, Romain Rolland---his Colas Breugnon, man of Burgundy, and Alphonse Daudet--- his Tartarin the Provencal. Such vivid portrayals of ``typical'' people can be produced only given a keen eye, an ability to discern similarities and dissimilarities, and through constant and ceaseless study. Where there is no _-_-_
^^*^^ We are entitled to call such works "folk creations'', since they probably developed in craft guilds to be staged on holidays.--- Author's note.
36 precise knowledge, one has to use guesswork, and out of ten guesses nine are sure to be wrong.I do not consider myself a master capable of creating characters and types equal in value to the types and characters of Oblomov, Rudin, Ryazanov^^*^^ and the like. Nevertheless, to write Foma Gordeyev I had to see many a dozen scions of merchant houses who were out of tune with their fathers' lives and work and had a vague feeling that there was little sense in that kind of monotonous and "oppressively drab" life. It was from the midst of such as Foma Gordeyev, those condemned to a life of tedium that was an insult to them, people who had begun to think, that, on the one hand, topers, hooligans and dissolutes emerged, and on the other such exceptions to the rule as the wealthy Savva Morozov, who financed publication of the Leninist Iskra; N. Meshkov, the Perm shipowner who gave financial backing to the SocialRevolutionaries, Goncharov, the factory-owner from Kaluga, N. Schmidt of Moscow and many others. It was from the same milieu that such leaders of culture emerged as Milyutin, mayor of Cherepovets, and a number of merchants from Moscow and the provinces, who displayed much skill and devotion in fostering science, art and other cultural activities. Mayakin, Foma's godfather, was also made up of petty features, of ``proverbs'', and I think I displayed a certain discernment therein: after 1905, when the dead bodies of workers and peasants paved the way to power for the Mayakins, the latter played quite an important part in the struggle against the working class, and even today still dream of returning to their old nests.
__b_b_b__Young people have been asking me why I wrote of ``down-and-outs''.
The reason was simple enough: living as I was among petty philistines and surrounded by people obsessed by a striving to suck the life-blood of others, and to turn _-_-_
^^*^^ Very well portrayed by Sleptsov in Hard Times as a type of raznochincts intellectual.---Author's note.
37 that blood into kopeks and the kopeks into rubles, I, too, just like my 19-year-old correspondent, developed in every fibre of my being a healthy hatred for that mosquito-like existence of drab people who resembled one another like copper five-kopek coins minted in one and the same year.To me vagabonds and tramps seemed people out of the common rut. They differed from the run of people because, through loss of caste and expulsion from their class, they had shed the most characteristic features of their former background.
Among the down-and-outs who inhabited the so-called Millionka in Nizhni-Novgorod there amicably lived cheek by jowl former well-to-do burgesses; my cousin Alexander Kashirin, a meek dreamer; Tontini, an Italian painter; a former Gymnasium teacher named Gladkov; a certain Baron B.; a whilom assistant-inspector of police who had done time for robbery, and a celebrated thief styled "Nikolka the General'', whose real name was Van-der-Flit.
A motley crowd numbering about twenty and similar in nature lived at Steklyanny Zavod in Kazan, among them Radlov or Radunov the ``Student''; an elderly ragand-bone collector, who had served ten years of hard labour; Vaska Grachik, who had once been valet to Governor Andriyevsky; Rodziyevich, a Byelorussian, son of a priest, and an engine-driver; Davydov, a veterinary surgeon. Most of them were sickly people who drank more than was good for them and went in for fights, but there was among them a feeling of comradeship and mutual aid; they spent on collectively-consumed food and liquor whatever they were able to earn or steal. I saw that, though their life was harder than that of "ordinary folk'', these people felt superior to the latter, for the reason that there was no cupidity about them; they did not trample one another under foot and did not put money aside. Some of these might have made some savings, for they still retained some vestiges of thriftiness and a love of an ``orderly'' life. They might have had savings because Vaska Grachik, an ingenious and successful thief, often brought his swag to Rodziyevich, the 38 ``treasurer'', for safe-keeping. The latter was a kind of general-manager of this down-and-out community, who was trusted by all, and was moreover a surprisingly mild and weak-willed man.
I can call several scenes to mind: on one occasion one of the fraternity brought along a pair of top-boots he had stolen. By common consent it was decided that they should be sold and the proceeds spent on liquor. However, Rodziyevich, who was ill at the time after a beating he had got at the police station, said that only the tops should be sold and the rest should be given to the ``Student'' whose boots were broken. ``He'll catch his death of cold,'' he said, "and he's a good fellow.''
When the tops had been removed from the boots, the old lag suggested that they should be made into shoes--- one pair for himself and the other for Rodziyevich. Thus the stolen boots were not converted into liquor after all. Grachik said that he was friendly towards all those people and helped them because he had a liking for "educated folk''.
``I like a man of education more than I would a beautiful female,'' he said to me. He was a strange fellow, with dark hair, good features and a pleasant smile; usually pensive and sparing of words, he would at times yield to an outburst of unbridled and almost furious merriness: he would sing, dance, boast of his exploits, and embrace all and sundry as if he were going off to the wars, never to return. He supported some eight beggars who lived in a cellar under a tavern; these were decrepit old men and women, but among them was a young mad-woman with a baby of one year. This is how he became a thief: while he was valet to the governor, he once spent a whole night with his lady-love. In the morning, on his way home in a tipsy state he forcibly took a jar of milk from a woman who was selling milk, and drank up the contents. He offered resistance when he was caught, and was sent to prison by Kolontayev, the Justice of the Peace, who, though he had the reputation of a liberal, performed his duties with severity. On leaving prison, Vaska broke into Kolontayev's study, tore up all the latter's papers, stole his alarm-clock and a pair of 39 binoculars and again landed in jail. I made his acquaintance while he was making a getaway from some nightwatchmen after an unsuccessful attempt at burglary; I tripped up one of his pursuers, thus helping Vaska to escape, and ran away in his company.
There were strange people among these outcasts and there was much in them that I could not understand. What made me prejudiced in their favour was the fact that they had no complaints to make against life; they had no envy of the easy life of the better-off, speaking of it with ridicule and irony, without the least sign of the sour-grapes attitude. They seemed to have a feeling of pride about the matter, as if they realised that, though their lives were poverty-stricken, they were themselves of better stuff than those who had an easy time of it.
Kuvalda, the keeper of a doss-house whom I depicted in Down-and-outs, was a man I first saw in court with Kolontayev presiding. I was amazed by the dignity with which this ragged man answered questions put by the judge, and by the contempt he displayed in countering evidence brought forward by a policeman, the attorney and the plaintiff, an inn-keeper Kuvalda had beaten up. No less was I astonished by the good-natured bantering indulged in by the Odessa tramp who told me an incident described by me in Chelkash. We met in a hospital in the town of Nikolayev and I have a pleasant recollection of his smile, which displayed his splendid white teeth and put the closure to his account of how he had been deceived by a young fellow he had hired to do some work: "So I let him go with the money; go away, you fool, and do what you like with it.''
He reminded me of Dumas's ``noble'' heroes. We were sitting in the lunettes of the fortress outside the town, after we had left hospital, and, while treating me to some melons, he asked me: "Would you like to join me in some profitable dealing? I think you're a likely lad for the job.''
It was a flattering offer, but by that time I already knew that there were things more wholesome than smuggling and thieving.
40What I have said is an explanation of my predilection for outcasts and tramps---my urge to depict people out of the ordinary rut, and not drab philistines. I was also under the influence of foreign literature and, in the first place, of French literature, which I found more vivid and colourful than that of Russia. However, the chief reason was my desire to enliven, through my imagination, the "oppressively drab life" my fifteen-year-old correspondent has written of.
As I have already said, this desire is called `` Romanticism''. In the opinion of certain critics my romanticism was a reflection of idealism in my philosophy. I think that appraisal wrong.
Philosophical idealism teaches that woman, animals and all woman-created things are under the sway of ``ideas''. These are most perfect models of everything created by woman, whose activities depend completely on those models and whose work consists in imitating ``ideas'', the existence of which she is alleged to sense in some vague manner. From this point of view, there exist somewhere over and above us the idea of fetters and of the internal combustion engine, the idea of the tubercle bacillus and of the modern magazine rifle, the idea of the toad, the philistine, the rat and, in general, of everything that exists on earth and is created by woman. It is perfectly obvious that hence follows the inescapable recognition that there exists the creator of all ideas, the one who, for some reason, created the eagle and the louse, the elephant and the frog.
For me there are no ideas that exist outside of woman; for me it is woman and only woman that is the creator of all things and all ideas; it is she that is a miracle-worker and the future lord of all Nature's forces. What is most beautiful in this world of ours has been created by woman's labour, by her clever hands; all our thoughts and ideas spring from the process of labour, and this is something the history of art, science and technology convinces us of. Thought follows the fact. I pay homage to Woman because I can see in our world nothing but the embodiment of her reason, her imagination and her surmise. God is just as much an invention of woman's mind as photography 41 is, the difference being that the camera records that which really is, whereas God is in fact a photograph of what woman has invented about herself as a being that wishes and is able to be omniscient, omnipotent and absolutely just.
If there is need to speak of the ``sacred'', then I will say that the only thing I hold sacred is woman's dissatisfaction with herself, her striving to become better than she is; I also hold sacred her hatred of all the rubbish that clutters up life and which she himself has brought into being; her desire to put an end to envy, greed, crime, disease, wars and all enmity among people in the world; her labour.
1928
[42] __ALPHA_LVL2__ TALKS ON CRAFTSMANSHIP __ALPHA_LVL3__ IWhat I want to describe happened thirty years before our times, so there may well be some slight discrepancies in my story.
Even as a child, I observed that NizhniNovgorod was not lacking in ``simpletons'', ``half-wits'' and "divine fools''. ``Normal'' folk, that is to say, the middle-class, were ambivalent in their attitude to the `` abnormals'': they made fun of the ``half-wits'', but were slightly scared of them too, as if suspecting that their madness concealed a special wisdom denied to the reason of the ``normals''. Their suspicions were justified.
At fourteen years of age, Muza Gushchina was recognised as a simpleton, and within two or three years all the middle-class townsfolk prized her as a ``clairvoyant'' with powers of foretelling the future. Hundreds of people used to drive or walk to her little house on the Grebeshok, where she would intone some kind of mumbo-jumbo in a tiny sing-song voice, charging twenty-five kopeks for the 43 privilege. She was small and plump, with a neat roly-poly figure and a pink-and-white china doll complexion. She went about in public simply dressed in a long coarse linen robe down to her heels, a black riband tied firmly round her neck, her bright ``rye-straw'' hair tumbling down her back. She always held her head inclined down towards her left shoulder, as if listening to the voice of her own heart.
Her blue-grey eyes, half-veiled by eyelashes, were set under thick, dark brows in the round, rosy face. They seemed incongruous on that angelically foolish countenance, and there was something disturbing and sinister about them to my mind.
Out of curiosity, I too went to Muza with my quarterruble piece. She wagged her finger playfully at me and said:
``What's dreamed by you shall not come true.''
But to my comrade, a carter, an extremely shy lad with a hare lip:
``Billy goat, don't go in yard; billy goat, climb mountain hard.''
When she was twenty-one, she amazed the whole town by taking court proceedings against her uncle and guardian for stealing and dissipating the inheritance due to her from her mother. It transpired that Muza had been saving up her twenty-five-kopek clairvoyance fees and, assisted by a certain "independent consultant on legal matters'', had been secretly and craftily amassing the evidence against her uncle. This evidence proved so damning that he was committed to prison.
For several years, Muza had been fooling the public by selling them hocus-pocus at twenty-five kopeks a time; but she had been feigning feeble-mindedness in selfdefence, she had emerged victorious in the battle for ``property'', and the normal people forgave her this deception and showered her with honour and glory.
There was another and similar case---the circuit court trial of the escaped convict Kozhin, the merchant Malinina, and fourteen others.
This gang was charged with forging and uttering hundred-ruble banknotes, and also coupons to the 44 value of 2 rubles 16 kopeks and 4 rubles 32 kopeks respectively.
In the prisoners' dock sat a comely woman, young for her years, with a moderately ruddy complexion and soft, languorous eyes, looking calmly at the public from under bushy eyebrows, answering the magistrates' questions briefly, somewhat touchily, and with a clear consciousness of her own worth. She would say something in a fruity voice and dab her bright lips with a handkerchief, as if wiping off a stray fleck of spittle. Beside her sat Kozhin, solid, bearded, about fifty, heavily-built and handsome, with merry eyes and the clear voice of an innocent man. He was loquacious and loved a practical joke. On the back of several hundred-ruble notes, where you used to find the usual warning excerpts from the articles of the Statute Book, he, Kozhin, had printed: "Any man who doesn't forge government banknotes is a fool.'' With this inappropriate prank he had wrecked an enterprise which had been technically and organisationally foolproof. The rest of the accused were nondescript characters, the pushers. Two of them had turned evidence, and one was ``feeble-minded''. During the case for the prosecution and the questioning by counsel, it became clear that his part in the affair had been insignificant and that he may even have become involved in it by accident. The informers did not give the prosecution any material evidence against the lad, and restricted themselves to affirming that he was "also mixed up in this business'', that he was "a half-wit'', by way of being a "divine fool'', and a ``trouble-maker''.
The ``trouble-maker'' behaved excitably, talked loudly to his neighbours on the bench, and kept asking, "What's going to happen now?" He answered the magistrates incoherently, in a kind of hoarse yell. Whenever they shut him up, he yawned, dozed off, started, and again asked, "Now what?" His skull was irregular in shape, as if cramped at the temples; the pike-fish mouth was a deep gash across the narrow, senile-looking face; the eyes were small, sharp and brutish under the ginger brows. The defence counsel, convinced that he would be acquitted, did not ask for a medical report.
45There was one baffling aspect to the case. Neither the investigating officer nor the court were able to establish which of the accused had been the principal "distributor of the said goods''. According to the ``pushers'' and " innocent victims'', they had been getting the counterfeit money from "various persons'', and this was borne out by the informers, who did not point out any such person among the accused.
Suddenly, after a whispered exchange with Malinina, Kozhin said loudly to the ``half-wit'':
``Now then, stop fooling about and talk! D'you think you're going to get off scot-free?''
The ``feeble-minded'' one stood up and, quite rationally, coherently, and not without pride, informed the court that the ``distributor'' had been none other than himself. He gave the ``pushers'' irrefutable proof that there had been no "various persons" and that they had been dealing with him, and him alone, in Odessa, Warsaw, and at the Irbit and Makarev fairs. He had been presenting himself to them in the guise of a merchant, a monk, or even a Jew. Just to prove that he could transform himself into a Jew with ease, he spoke two or three sentences in the accent of a Jewish story-teller. As he spoke, he kept glancing at the public, at the jury, and at the bench, and it was clear from the grin on his face that he was gloating---over the idiots. The jury recommended three particularly severe sentences for Kozhin, Malinina, and him. When the court pronounced sentence on the erstwhile ``feeble-minded'' one, the public growled their approval and some even applauded.
Needless to say, the Muza business and this case both confirmed the suspicion of the ``normal'' people that seeming simplemindedness can be an artificial mask concealing the worldly wisdom by virtue of which they, the normals, live themselves. Both these cases awakened my interest in abnormal people.
I have already mentioned Igosha Death-in-the-Pocket somewhere else, but I must return to him here. He was of indeterminate age, tall and skinny, his face and neck seamed with flabby dirt or grime-engrained wrinkles, and his hands black. He was forever feeling with his crooked 46 fingers at fences, gates, doors, kerbstones, and his own body: ribs, belly, chest, neck, face. I always had the impression that his hands only travelled upwards: the quick downward drop was almost invisible to the naked eye. The grimy face, framed in the ragged black beard, was likewise in perpetual motion, the eyebrows twitching, the nostrils flaring, the lips always mouthing the same monotonous obscenities, the sharp Adam's apple bobbing up and down, and only the little black eyes fixed, like those of a blind man. Winter and summer alike, he wore felt boots, an unbuttoned sheepskin coat, dark blue trousers of coarse homespun and a shirt of the same material, the collar always open or torn, the collar-bones exposed, and the skin pulsing weirdly in the hollows between the bones and the neck. His gait was loose-jointed, as if he might come apart at any moment and the shaggy head go bowling over the roadway.
There was something rather horrible about the immobility of his eyes, and especially about his hands and their persistent fumbling, as if he wanted to convince himself that things were real and not just imaginary. I was much intrigued by the way Igosha kept touching the physical world.
Normal people were afraid of him and sullenly kept out of his way, but the little urchins used to run after him shouting "Death-in-the-Pocket! Igosha Death-in-- thePocket!''
He would dive deep into the pockets of his sheepskin coat where he kept a supply of stones and throw them at the children with equal dexterity with his left and right hands. As he did so, he would swear monotonously, and when he ran out of stones he would snap his teeth and howl like a wolf.
Another half-wit was Grinya Lobastov, only to be seen in spring and summer on a clear day. He used to sit on the bench at the front gates of his house in Studenaya Street, with a short, neatly whittled stick in each hand. Indefatigably, with the speed and dexterity of a conjurer, he would juggle with the sticks as if trying to get each of his hands to grow a sixth finger. Small, podgy, always clean, in white clothes, his gentle, womanish face 47 framed in a soft, light mousy beard, he used to stare with narrow, colourless eyes into the blue vacancy of the sky, smiling a strange smile, the guilty smile of a man who had fathomed a secret and was very embarrassed. He was deaf. ``Normal'' people thought of him as ``blessed'' and many, as they passed him in the street, bowed low to this clean little idiot.
Then there was Reutov, a little man with a black, wedge-shaped beard. He never wore a hat, winter or summer alike. His high, narrow skull was topped with a few sparse, extremely coarse hairs. The long face framed the hooked nose of a comic.
Reutov used to go about with his head bowed as if he was worrying about something, swinging his arms, and wherever he had to give way to oncoming pedestrians, invariably shrinking back against the nearest fence or wall. If a passer-by happened to touch him, Reutov would spend a considerable time carefully brushing something from his clothes with the palm of his hand---something evidently visible to him alone. The son of a wealthy draper, he was an avid theatre-goer and could be seen in the gallery every night during the season.
The normal people ignored him: he wasn't ugly enough, or frightening, or interestingly mad.
There were several other fools in the town, and by some freak of circumstances they were all the children of well-to-do or rich people. I took note of this.
Misha Tiulenev impressed me most of all. Of medium height, broad-shouldered, with huge mane of dirty hair flung back over his neck and behind his protruding ears, he looked like an unfrocked priest. He had prominent cheek-bones, and the clean-shaven, tight stretched skin was the colour of clay. The round, owlish, protruding green-grey eyes shone dully under the thick eyebrows. His nose was fat and fleshy, the nostrils distended. The lips were fleshy too, prominent, cracked and bloody, as if bitten; and there was blood on the shaven chin as well. Misha's heavy greatcoat had been washed by the rains, bleached and dried in the sun, so that the grey threads in the seams showed up like fish-bones.
All the buttons of his coat were missing, the pockets 48 were torn, and the lining frayed, with tufts of the interior padding sticking out. Underneath, he wore a russet jacket and a waistcoat, both devoid of buttons, like his trousers. He always walked down the road, keeping close to the pavement, and he went along as if trudging through deep snow or sand, laboriously lifting his feet and slapping down the broad soles of his tattered shoes. He kept his left hand tucked in his waistcoat and the right one swinging at his side, a small cobblestone clutched tight in the fingers.
If he saw any womenfolk coming his way, he threatened them with the stone, growling and muttering with a strange smacking of the lips. He was horribly repulsive to look at, normal people couldn't stand him, and if he showed up on the main streets of the town in the daytime, the police chased him off like a dog, aided by carters who lashed at Misha with their whips. Tiulenev would duck his head under his greatcoat and run away awkwardly, kicking his legs up in the air like a foal.
I often came across him in the meadows out of town, or hiding under the walls in the shadow of the kremlin towers. He aroused feelings of dislike in me too, even loathing. I thought he was putting on an act and deliberately lifting his feet in the air like that, as if crossing a swamp.
I was also repelled by the dull look of the glassy green eyes. One night, by the light of the full moon, I came across him in the churchyard of St. Nicholas-on-- thePokrovka. As I went into the churchyard, I heard a heavy thumping noise in the corner between a small outbuilding and the wall of the church. I could see the figure of a man there. I thought he was knocking the wall down. But it was Tiulenev beating his breast. Before I reached him, he slithered down the wall, sat on the ground, and started muttering to himself. I could see the fat lips quivering and spitting out those champing sounds of his:
``Chakh, chaff, choff...''
I squatted down in front of him and listened. I had the impression that Tiulenev was trying to say something, but couldn't. He sat there with his eyes closed, still beating his breast, but feebly now. I reached out and __PRINTERS_P_49_COMMENT__ 4---1591 49 touched his shoulder, whereupon he pushed me off with one hand and started groping over the ground with the other,, probably in search of a stone. He was now champing and spluttering much more loudly and coherently:
``Chimp---champ---chump---chomp---chimp....''
He then stood up, emerged from the shadows into the moonlight, stooped down, picked up a stone, and went away, clumping his feet more loudly than usual. I sat on the church steps and lit a cigarette. The light of my match brought the night watchman from somewhere.
``Thanks for getting rid of Misha,'' he said. "He scares me. If he bashes you you're down for.''
The old man informed me that Tiulenev often came to that corner. He would stand facing the wall, beating his breast and muttering to himself.
``They say he wasn't born mental.''
Everybody said that Tiulenev and the othen ``abnormals'' were not born mad, but I was never able to ascertain the causes of the ``mental'' disease, though I persistently questioned many of the older inhabitants.
I found the fools more interesting than the ``normal'' people. This was perfectly natural, for I noticed that normal folk reduce their whole lives to the elementary processes of eating, reproduction, and sleep. I also noticed that the even flow of these processes was ensured by the exploitation of other people's strength---by ``business'' deals, fraud, and petty swindling. All in all, the lives of ``normal'' people were chock-a-block with every conceivable kind of trashy peccadillo. They were more or less dimly aware of their own sinfulness, for the ``normal'' people went to church on Saturdays and Sundays in order to complain to god about their hard and sinful lives and ask his forgiveness, fasted, confessed to the priests, and symbolically partook of Christ's body and blood, while incessantly overtaxing the bodies and drinking the blood of people who were working for the affirmation and enrichment of the normal life. Each and every one of these normal people had a small and inviolable store of biases, prejudices, and superstitions, and all this material of selfdefence was fused together by a soulless belief in god and the devil and by an obtuse distrust of human reason.
50There were ninety thousand ``normals'' in the town, but the theatres were empty, though the actors performing there were not bad.
I found it amusing that Reutov never missed a performance. It seemed to me that the blessed Lobastov could gaze up into the heavens with a clearer conscience than the people who knew well that mushrooms are more useful than stars. The ``normals'' fortified their houses or built new ones every bit as oppressive and stifling as the old ones; but Igosha wandered loose-limbed about the streets and touched everything as if doubting the permanence of stone, wood and earth.
The romanticism peculiar to youth allowed me to invest the abnormals with knowledge and feelings inaccessible to, and inexperienced by, others.
Wits who belong to the clan of the ``normals'' might say that I learned from fools.
And it's true. I did learn from them, but considerably later and not from the fools I have mentioned here. There is nothing on this earth which we cannot find instructive, the world is truly ours because we put all our strength into it, organising it according to our aims. The whole world is material for us to study.
And so I've described one order in my adolescent impressions: idiots, divine fools, and abnormal people in general. But alongside this order, there gradually formed another which was quite different.
Nizhni-Novgorod was a city of merchants. "Its houses are of stone and its men of iron,'' said one of the proverbs about this city.
The ``normal'' mode of life of these "men of iron" was well known to the people I ``circulated'' amongst, in the way a spinning top is whipped into ``circulation''. I was egged on by a driving and relentless urge to understand things that were then beyond my ken and aroused a feeling of indignation in me. The coachmen, nurses, janitors, housemaids and other menials who served the "men of iron" spoke of them in two ways: when they described the christening and name's day parties, the weddings and the funeral banquets arranged by their masters, it was with the same awe with which they would speak of high __PRINTERS_P_51_COMMENT__ 4* 51 celebrations conducted by the bishop at the cathedral; but when it came to the day-by-day life of the "men of iron'', these underlings spoke with fear and resentment, with perplexity and despondency, and sometimes with repressed malice.
In their mental make-up these servants were very much like ``normal'' folk, but, being "a youth versed in the writings'', I was able to make out certain undercurrents in their stories.
I could realise the nightmare that made up their masters' lives, which centred on the drama of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit. The flesh was fed on heavy food---shchi (cabbage soup.---Tr.), geese and pies of every description, all this washed down with oceans of tea, kvass and vodka, and worn down by ample exercise connected with the business of "continuing the family line,'' subdued by fasting, and fettered by the calls of trading activities. All this would keep the flesh in submission to the ``spirit'' for the space of some ten or twenty years.
Well-guzzled on rich food, callous and ruthless towards others, the ``iron'' man lived in pious humility, eschewing theatres and concerts, and finding entertainment in church-going and listening to choirs and stentorian deacons, while at home he would find diversion in the steaming bath-house, cards, toping, and in addition in growing a magnificent beard.
To rephrase the proverb, there's no sinner like a hoary sinner when the ``spirit'' yields to the blandishments of the flesh. There came an evil day when this upright life would fall apart like a house of soiled and greasy cards: for instance, it would become known that some "man of iron" had committed the penal crime of seducing minors, though he was married to a woman still comely, and his daughters were nearing the marrying age. To protect the honour of these daughters, the good-natured and wellintentioned wife would say to the sinner:
``What are we to do? We have marriageable daughters, but who will marry them if their father has been sentenced to hard labour? Won't you take a powder?''
The sinner would take a powder several days before 52 the indictment had been drawn up, and the affair would blow over "in view of the decease of the accused''.
Then, take the instance of another "man of iron'', whose lust and baneful nature had driven three wives into the grave. Since the church forbade a fourth marriage and he thought it unwise to install a mistress in his household, he found a wife for his son, and, after making the latter drunk at the wedding feast and locking him in the cellar, he took his place on the wedding night.
When the son tried to protest to his father, he was brutally beaten by the latter, and ran away from home, never to return. The father slowly murdered his fourth victim, then arranged the marriage of his second son, who proved more amenable and yielded his conjugal rights without a struggle. He soon took to drink, becoming a wretched drunkard.
I made the father's acquaintance when he was eightytwo years old, but a hale man, with a back as straight as a ramrod and in possession of all his teeth. There were still devils in his glittering dark eyes, his memory was excellent and he had a detailed knowledge of all human sins, as well as all the punishments awaiting them in hell.
``Whatever you may say, brother, you and I will be strung up down there and boiled in pitch for about six hundred years,'' he would promise, winking a dare-devil eye, and would then ask with a brazen smirk: "But how can that be? It is not the body but the soul that must suffer torment, and the soul has neither skin nor bone, eh?" At this wily question he would cackle loud and long.
I did not take at their face value all the stories I had heard about his whilom exploits, so that when I brought him into my book Foma Gordeyev under the name of Anany Shchurov I somewhat docked the number of his malefactions.
Against the drab background of the kind of pettyphilistine life that was considered ``normal'' these "men of iron" seemed colourful to me, and indeed so they were. Of particular significance to me was the story of Gordei Chernov.
He was reputed to possess a peculiar knowledge of all the wiles and tricks of the Volga. Standing on the 53 captain's bridge, he would conduct his tugs in person, with caravans of barges in their wake, finding free channels amidst the shifting Volga sandbanks, to the confusion of the official hydraulic engineers and the shamed envy of other captains who, unable to find a fairway, would have to shift the cargoes of their deep-laden barges to vessels of shallower draught. Chernov was always lucky in all his undertakings, the obstacles he did come up against being of his own making. He once built a barge of unprecedented cargo capacity, evoking the opinion that it could never be used even when the water was at flood level.
``It will when we tow it,'' he claimed, but he was wrong: it was never used.
He had built to his own designs a mansion of crude and flamboyant style, with turrets, domes and onion-shaped cupolas; he had the whole affair painted in the most gaudy colours, but then refused to live in it, leaving around it the fence that had been put up while it was building. The story was told that he was once approached for a job by a young man who had been expelled from an Orthodox seminary. Chernov sent the lad to the River Sura as a grain stevedore at 15 rubles a month. One day a telegram this young man had sent reached Chernov. It read: "Send tug, water-level falling.''
Chernov's telegraph reply was: "Bosh, you lying fool.'' Two days later the seminarist wired: "Barges high and dry,'' to which Chernov replied ``Coming''. "So you're as pleased as Punch that you've been wiser than your boss?" he asked the seminarist on arriving at Vasilsursk. "Roll up your sleeves and let's see who's the better man!" There followed a good honest fight on the Volga bank, witnessed by all and sundry, and the seminarist gave his employer a thrashing.
``You're the man for me,'' said Chernov. ``You've got the brains and the guts too. I'm putting you in charge of my business at Pokrovskaya Sloboda, with a salary of 50 rubles. More to come if you make good.''
The story ran that the two became close friends.
I heard of this fight from law-abiding citizens of Vasilsursk, who spoke of it with approval.
54Any other man would have been dubbed a crank had he embarked on similar building experiments and madcap pranks, but Chernov won the nickname of "the American''.
There came a day when this man, so successful in his ventures, strong, handsome and a reveller, vanished, abandoning his business affairs, without a word to his son and his daughter. The search that followed was unsuccessful, so that it was thought that he had been murdered. His estate came under the Public Trustee and was sold for a ridiculously low price; creditors and employees were paid in full, the remainder providing Chernov's children with several tens of thousands of rubles.
Gordei Chernov made an appearance in 1896 during the All-Russian Exhibition in Nizhni-Novgorod. He had turned monk, and had arrived from the Old Athon Monastery "to see the celebrations in his home town'', and see it he did. After a rousing round of drinking bouts with old friends, he left for his monastery, where he died in 1900.
My fancy was caught by this semi-legend about a man who had turned his back on the ``normal'' life and rejected it with such simplicity. I was also much taken by the pride with which the story of Chernov was told to me by A. A. Zarubin, grey-haired and well advanced in years, a former vodka manufacturer, who had unsuccessfully faked an insolvency, a man who had seen the inside of prison but had become a convinced adherent of Lev Tolstoi and organiser of a blue-ribbon society; on one occasion, when he was among a crowd of admirers of John of Kronstadt, a priest who had quite a following in those days, this man publicly called the priest "an actor in the emperor's church''. I have already told the story of how this man took the police to court for recovery of the sum of one kopek. He carried the case to the Senate, and when the governor of Nizhni-Novgorod Gubernia forbade publication of the Senate's decision in Zarubin's favour, the old man addressed the governor in the following terms: "Have you been placed over us so as to break the laws?" The Senatorial ukase was published in a local paper.
55In those days such things were considered outstanding acts of public duty.
Zarubin was not the only man who spoke of Chernov in tones of pride; many who spoke of that man in the same fashion seemed to be bragging: "That's the kind of people we are, understand?''
And understand I did. Clever folk, like lawyers, newspapermen and intellectuals in general, appraised the "iron men`s'' eccentricities with the Ostrovsky yardstick, asserting that they were simply "working off steam''. I did not care much about the reasons that made people "work off steam" so long as they kept the pot boiling.
Such facts were of course a rarity, but they nevertheless suggested that there was a need for change in the life about me. I had a feeling that even among the "men of iron" there were such who did not wish to conform to the accepted pattern, finding it unlawful and even ``hostile'', to quote old man Orlov, an adherent of Nechayev^^*^^ and translator of Flaubert's La tentation de Saint-Antoine and Leopardi's Conversazione. Actual life is as inconsistent and voluble as a market-woman. One of my friends, the house-painter Yezdokov, would sing in a shrill voice while at work in his cradle at a third-storey height:
I don't need anything in the world,
Anything in the world but you.
The owner of the house, Alexei Maximovich Gubin, churchwarden, former mayor and an old roisterer, who had just beaten up the church deacon during mass, would yell to Gubin: ``D'you mean to say you care only for one? Only one skirt? One won't keep you going! But when it comes to the truth, all people want only one kind; we need such a kind of truth that would make all of us sons of bitches crawl away from it in fear and trembling. That's what we need....''
Then there was Maria Kapitonovna Kashina, proprietress of a big Volga shipping line and a clever woman, who would start philosophising at tea:
_-_-_^^*^^ Nechayev, S. G. (1847--1882)---a revolutionary plotter, who used terror and other adventurist methods of struggle.---Ed.
56``We have made a pile of money, and there's too much of it; we have built, but there's no elbow-room, and life is as dull as ditch-water. What we need is to begin all over again, from the savage state, eh? That would be fine. Perhaps things would work out differently.''
I heard quite a number of such expressions of a negative attitude towards life. However, though ``iron'' mothers and fathers said such things, most of them lived lives of an unyielding ``normal'' respectability. I had a fair knowledge of the way in which almost all the leading merchant families of the city lived, and knew that Chernov was not alone in turning his back on that kind of ``normal'' respectability; many others did the same, breaking with a mode of living that had been built up over many decades.
My work at a lawyer's office and my frequent visits to the circuit court made me familiar with dozens of everyday dramas. I knew of many building contractors, illiterate and grasping men who each employed tens and hundreds of workers just as rude and uncouth as their masters. I knew that all this was the way things were, and had always been, the ``normal'' life, as I was told by carpenters, stone-masons and navvies.
It was obvious that "making a pile" was no more difficult than making bricks out of clay, and called for no particular effort or talent. The only difference between contractor and workwoman was that the former ate more and better food and was buried with more show, while the workwoman was just put away in his six feet of earth. This callous haste in the burial of poor folk was offensive to me and caused me pain. When I was a youth I wanted all people to be buried in state, to the sound of music and church bells. Life was so arduous that surely as much pomp and circumstance as possible should be brought into it. This romantic desire must have arisen in me from a reading of books in Church-Slavonic, a language which treats all subjects, even---in the Bible---such that are unsavoury, in a sonorous and grandiloquent fashion.
There was neither rhyme nor reason in life, with its cold and clammy senselessness; this was a state of affairs that all had got used to, so that nobody noticed how 57 empty, dismal and shallow it was. For my part I saw it all too clearly, but that gave me no comfort. Books depicted a different life, which was perhaps even more dolorous, but I felt it was less poverty-stricken, of greater interest, full of a meaning that was beyond my ken. The people I met in books were more vivid, cleverer and of greater stature than the ``normal'' folk I knew.
My reading was copious, enthralling, and exhilarating, but the books I read did not lead me away from life but only whetted my interest in it, sharpened my faculties of observation and comparison, and also my eagerness to learn more of life.
By the time I was twenty or twenty-two I saw people in the following light: the vast majority were philistines, that accursed breed of ``normal'' men and women; from this midst there arose "men of iron'', such that became aldermen and churchwardens, drove in their own carriages and followed in the immediate wake of the clergy during church processions. At rare moments some of these "men of iron" would kick over the traces.
Compared to men such as these, the Onegins, Pechorins, Beltovs, Ryabinins, Dostoyevsky's ``idiots'' and all heroes that had stepped out of the pages of books seemed to me pygmies strutting about on the stilts of fine words, people whom I considered "blood relatives of Oblomov'', to quote an appellation coined by Osipovich-Novodvorsky in his Episode from the Life of One Neither Peacock Nor Sparrow.
I considered even more flabby and drab the petty figures of Svetlov, Stozharov, Volodin and other `` revolutionaries'', whom writers like Omulevsky, Mordovtsev, and Zasodimsky hastily concocted for the "edification of young people''. There was much that was beyond my understanding, but I had a feeling that people of that type were unable to make a clean sweep of the ``normal'' kind of life, and at best were capable only of "shifting the furniture about'', as the drunken chorister in the play The Petty Bourgeois put it.
In the late eighties and early nineties the children of the "iron men" began displaying a marked tendency "to get out of life as quickly as possible'', to quote a note 58 left before his suicide by a Kazan student called Medvedev. A girl student, Latyshova by name, daughter of a wealthy tea merchant, and a merry-hearted and gifted girl, shot herself after her wedding. In 1888, a total of, I believe, eleven students committed suicide, among them two girls. Later, a Gymnasium pupil whose father was a wealthy Nizhni-Novgorod mill-owner shot himself; there were several other suicides.
I took note of all these facts. I have pointed out elsewhere that in most cases ``innocents'' and ``simpletons'' came of well-to-do families. In my earlier years I had no opportunities of getting a first-hand knowledge of merchant-class children, but in the middle of the nineties I was able to observe them at close quarters as Gymnasium pupils and University students. I. Rukavishnikov, the recently deceased poet and author of the novel An Accursed Family, once brought me the manuscript of his first story, Seeds Pecked by Birds. The story displayed poor craftsmanship, but I remember that in it a youth complained of his father having ruined his life. Even then Rukavishnikov was given to drink and tried to convince me that, just like Baudelaire, he could see life in its proper light only when he was mellow. His novel An Accursed Family depicted, with little skill, his dreadful grandmother Lyubov, his father Sergei, and his uncles Ivan and Mitrofan.
The title of the novel is most fitting....
Indeed, I met quite a number of young people of the merchant class, and I envied them their knowledge of foreign languages and their ability to read European literature in the original. There was nothing else in them to envy. They spoke in polished language, but in a way that was obscure; the words were unimpeachable, but below the surface there seemed to be nothing but cotton wool or sawdust. As was the case with Rukavishnikov, these people could see life in its proper light only when they were in their cups, though they did not drink in excess and grew drunk more on fearful words than on liquor. They spoke of the ``horrors'' in the works of Poe, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky, but they thought they were speaking of the horrible things within themselves. I could 59 see that there was nothing horrifying about them; some of the ruffians I knew were far more awe-inspiring. These young men admired the principal character of Notes from Underground, but it was obvious that at bottom what they liked in him was his hope that there would come along some one capable of sending some future prosperity to Jericho.
Gordei Chernov was much more to my liking. They were allured to Schopenhauer, and this attraction made itself particularly felt in the unwholesome things they said about women and love, talk that laid bare their libido, inflamed by much thought and through books.
I had read Schopenhauer earlier than they did and with no harm to myself. These people propagandised Balmont and Bryusov.^^*^^ Of course I realised that both of these were enriching poetry from the angle of form and technique, but I could make neither head nor tail of these poets' attitude towards the realities of life and towards ``normal'' people. My impression was that they were floating about somewhere above life in a cloud of words, of which stuff "evil reality" was, in their opinion, made up; this reality was, in the final analysis, also made up of words, was pleasure-giving, for it provided their word-creating urge with material to feed on.
I. Rukavishnikov once read some verses of his at a students' soiree, and the following ominous lines from his verses are engraved in my memory:
Daring seem our words and verses,
Yet condemned to death arc we,
We, the premature precursors
Of a spring-time yet to be.
These dismal words at first evoked my surprise, for they did not seem to blend with the lilt of the poem, and I associated them with polka rhythm. All that was quite natural. I used to attend servants' evening parties, where the guests danced to the sound of songs in lieu of music. They usually sang something like this:
_-_-_^^*^^ Balmont, K. D. and Bryusov, V. Y.---Russian symbolist poets.---Ed. GQ
60Home they hurried, lass and laddie,
Calling father as they ran:
"Daddy, daddy, oh dear daddy,
Come and see the drowned man!''
It was most comical to see the girls friskily footing it to polka time, singing the refrain:
And a swarm of inky crayfish
Seized upon the bloated corpse!
The offspring of those who were building a "normal life" for themselves did not strike me as ``normal'' people. This of course stood to their credit, but hardly brought them happiness. They styled themselves ``decadents''. I have no recollection of ever asking myself what kind of spring they might be precursors of.
I think I have said quite enough to give the reader some idea of the material that went into the making of my Foma Gordeyev, how that material was culled, and how poorly it was worked up. Critics have praised the book, but if I were a critic I would have reproached the author for having reduced a wealth of material to a story of how a young man was driven out of his mind.
At this point I ought to say that everything I have described may not have taken place in the way I have put it. How can that be?
Pierre Simon de Laplace, the celebrated mathematician, called "the Newton of France'', and author of Exposition du systcme du monde, once said:
Striving in his impatience to discover the cause of certain phenomena, a scientist gifted with a vivid imagination will often find the cause before his observations give him reason to discern it. Prejudiced in favour of the correctness of the explanation he has created, he does not discard it when the facts contradict him, but modifies the facts so as to make them fit his theory; he distorts the work of Nature in order to force it to resemble the work of his imagination, without thinking of the fact that time will establish only the results of observation and calculation.
The work of a woman of letters resembles that of a scientist; in just the same way she "will often find the cause before his observations give him reason to discern it''.
61 __ALPHA_LVL3__ IIA prominent part in Foma Gordcyev is played by Yakov Mayakin, a rope manufacturer. Another of the "men of iron" and, besides, a ``brainy'' man, he is capable of thinking in a bigger way than is demanded by his purely private interests. Politically shrewd, he realises the political importance of his class.
I never met any man in real life with the mental makeup I have described in Mayakin. 1 know of only one attempt in literature to depict a merchant capable of thinking politically: this was Vastly Tyorkin, a novel by P. Boborykin, a writer highly sensitive to new ideas. Though endowed with a keen eye, he worked in a naturalistic vein, arriving at conclusions that were always hasty, but since he spent most of his time abroad, he was very properly criticised for possessing too little factual evidence for the conclusions he presented to the reader, and also for falling into ``photographism'' and a dispassionate registration of the facts. Uasily Tyorkin met with higher recognition than other novels by the same author, but I think that was because in the figure of the merchant Tyorkin, this "Socrates of the warehouse'', the critics espied the well-familiar liberal-intellectual and were much gladdened by the discovery. "Our ranks have grown''; a semi-civilised Moscow merchant, who might have walked out of one of Ostrovsky's plays, has blossomed forth almost into a full-blown European bourgeois. In my own opinion, this merchant's thinking followed the pattern of a certain section of the intellectuals in the late eighties, the section that was routed and crushed after the autocracy had defeated the Narodnaya Volya terrorists. This frame of mind can be called "anarchism of the defeated''. The philosophic framework of this anarchism was borrowed partly from Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, but in the main from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, as presented in articles published in the journal Problems of Philosophy and Psychology in 1892.
What kind of material was the figure of Yakov Mayakin built of? In the first place, I had a sufficient knowledge 62 of ``masters'', and had first-hand experience of their deep-rooted urge to live on the labour of others and also of their firm conviction that they had every right to do so. At an early age I felt that my own employer considered me his inferior, a subhuman placed completely in his power. At the same time, however, I often saw that I was more literate than the man I was working for, and at times I had a feeling that I had more intelligence too. At the same time, I could not help noticing that, by spurning me aside, my master was creating in me an urge to work. I realised labour's decisive cultural and historical value at a fairly early age---as soon as I had felt a zest for work, felt that sawing wood, digging earth and baking bread were things that could be done with the same enjoyment as singing songs. This in no way speaks of any peculiar features in my make-up; anybody can become ``peculiar'' in this sense if he makes up his mind to devote sufficient effort to the purpose. The whole thing was quite simple: I was a healthy lad with a goodly store of energy which cried out for free play, room for expression, to make itself felt. That is the kind of thing energy is and its chief feature. Besides that, books helped rne to understand the organising power of labour. Chief among these were four books: V.~V. Bervi-Flerovsky's^^*^^ ABC of the Social Sciences, Draper's History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences, and Johannes Scherr's Deutche Kultur- und Sittengeschichte. These books contained a wealth of factual material and, together with my personal experience, made me feel confident that the significance of labour as the foundation of humanity's cultural growth should be evident and comprehensible to any working woman, if she is not