p In 1928, soon after his return to the Soviet Union from Sorrento after his long stay abroad, Gorky invited the poet Selvinsky and myself to come and see him at his place. The house in Malaya Nikitskaya Street which the Soviet Government gave Gorky for his private residence, had once belonged to Ryabushinsky, a millionaire who had fled abroad after the Revolution.

p I felt a touch of panic as I crossed the gravelled fore-court adorned with flower beds and entered the house. The world fame 50 of our host made me apprehensively tongue-tied during the first few moments of our meeting. When speaking with cclebrities—and I have met many famous people in my life: actors, writers and political leaders both at home and abroad—you often find your illustrious interlocutor trying to impress you with his superiority. And this always has the effect of inhibiting both the conversation and your memory of it. But I have had the great fortune in my time of meeting two men who had the gift of instantly lifting this embarrassment—the gift of natural democracy. These two men were Lenin and Gorky.

p Lenin was amazingly democratic by nature and there was not the slightest hint of affectation in his manner. There was more of the actor in Gorky and he could turn on his charm at will. One felt irresistibly drawn to him, fascinated by his wisdom and experience.

p Gorky, a tall man wearing a blue shirt, with the typical face of a Russian craftsman and a smile which lifted up his moustachewelcomed us at the dining-room door. We fell into conversation there and then, standing as we were. Gorky began by asking Selvinsky and me to explain constructivism to him (we both belonged to this literary group at the time) and to tell him our literary news. Perhaps no other Russian writer had ever had such a strong sense of proprietorship over the Russian Muses or of responsibility for them. Gorky felt he had to know all that was happening in Russian literature, and world literature too, for that matter. His sense of responsibility for literature was really quite astonishing.

p Gorky was a truly remarkable figure. The enormous range of his interests and the insatiable curiosity with which he studied life in order to re-organise it had no parallel among his contemporaries and bring to mind the legendary giants of the Renaissance, men like Leonardo da Vinci. Gorky took an interest in all the spheres of Russia’s art, science, technology and economy. As a novelist, publicist, critic and organiser of a literary movement, he established contact with thousands of his contemporaries, writers, scientists and workers (he penned no less than 8,000 letters in his time), and with millions of readers for whom he embodied their dream of a better future and whom he gave confidence in their own strength. One may say that the Russian people made of Gorky a symbol, a means of self-cognisance, an expression of their latent powers and talent.

p Maxim Gorky (the pen-name of Alexei Maximovich Pcshkov, 1868-1936) rose to the pinnacle of fame from the lowliest beginnings. His father, a cabinet-maker, died when Alexei was still very young, and he was brought up by his grandfather, an upholsterer, who was a morose and cruel man. Gorky began to earn his living very early in life, working as a dishwasher, then a 51 scribe and then a baker, and knew well what manual labour meant. As a young man he went wandering about the country, from the middle reaches of the Volga right down to the Caucasus. He stored up a wealth of impressions from his travels and came to know the life of the people intimately.

p His rich personality and penchant for fantastic and romantic imagery were not the main source feeding his art. He first gathered impressions and experience on his travels, and only then took up the pen to tell the world about Russia and her people, their life and their hopes, and the meaning of happiness. That is why philosophical reflections and description occupy so much space in his works.

p It so happened that Gorky embarked on his literary career at the same time as the Leninist party emerged on the historical scene in Russia. It was a period marked by a sharp upswing in the workers’ movement and a rapidly mounting revolutionary situation. Gorky’s stories reflected the psychology of a people roused to energetic action. In his early works he portrayed the lowest strata of society—artisans, tramps, dreamers and rebels—presenting them in vividly romantic images. His characters tend to argue about the purpose of life, to pose questions to the reader and answer them themselves.

p In a letter to Chekhov, Gorky wrote that a writer’s excessive fidelity to facts “kills realism”. The old method of realism no longer satisfied him. He was even less inclined to render the drab colours of life by naturalistic means. What he needed was to find a new method that would render life more romantic, that would raise the readers above drabness, awaken in them an interest in the beauty and goodness of life and spur them on to action. He began to introduce this romantic element in his works, especially in his revolutionary parables, poems and legends (The Song of the Falcon, The Stormy Petrel and others). It is always present when he is depicting characters from the “lower depths" of society, which as a rule have a fantastic appeal to the imagination.

p Gorky’s famous play The Lower Depths (1902) is alive with this spirit of revolutionary romance. It has been staged by theatres in all the world’s largest cities. In Russia, the tsarist censors put up a stubborn opposition to the staging of the play although none of the characters in it actually call for the overthrow of the established order. But in his portrayal of the “lower depths”, Gorky showed such a thirst for beauty along with crushing poverty that his play became an indictment of a society where such conditions were possible. The main characters—thieves, prostitutes, a declasse Baron, a former actor—these dregs of society living in the stench of a basement doss-house, all seemed to cry out to the audience: “This mustn’t go on!" Small wonder that Luka, the old man preaching 52 meakness and acceptance is disliked by most of the inmates and especially by Satin, the rebellious drunkard who refuses to take his fate lying down.

p Gorky’s equally famous novel Mother is permeated with the same romantic spirit. The novel is about working-class life and the class struggle waged by the Russian workers at the beginning of this century. Gorky’s purpose was to show how people developed spiritually in the course of revolutionary struggle. In this respect, the book is of basic importance, for it enables us to see how the method of socialist’ realism drawing its material from life itself was originally conceived. Prior to Gorky, beginning with Schiller’s Die Rduber, revolutionaries had usually been portrayed in literature as destroyers of society. Gorky presented an entirely new view that: initiation into revolutionary struggle enriches and straightens out a man spiritually. It is on this principle that he moulded the characters of Pavel Vlassov and his mother Nilovna. It is interesting to note that the main characters had real, living prototypes. Pavel Vlassov, for instance, was based on Pyotr Zalomov, a Sormovo worker, who died only recently.

p Gorky’s role as a sort of live bridge between Russia’s two literary epochs is perhaps most evident in Mother. The basic idea of the novel is that the aim of historical progress should be the good of man. In this sense Gorky was following the emancipatory traditions of 19th-century Russian literature. But there is a new angle in his treatment of the theme: he does not only show suffering men (as Dostoyevsky did) but also men who work changes in the world and become all the more human for it.

p Gorky’s Mother has proved to be one of his most popular works with workers both in Russia and abroad. It has been reprinted time and again in millions of copies. Gorky wrote it during his American trip in the summer of 1906, and it was first published in English in the Appleton Magazine in 1906-07. In May, when Lenin met Gorky at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in London, he congratulated him on the novel which he had read in manuscript. Gorky records this conversation in his reminiscences of Lenin. “I told him that I had been in a hurry to write the book, but before I could explain why, Lenin nodded and himself explained the reason: it was very good, he said, that I had hastened to write it. It was a much needed book. Many workers had joined the revolutionary movement spontaneously, instinctively, and would find reading Mother very useful. ’It’s a very timely book,’ he said. That was all the praise he gave me, but it was extremely valuable to me.”

p Gorky devoted a large place in his works to the portrayal of the former masters of Russia—factory owners, merchants, and 53 intelicctuals linked economically and spiritually with the wealthy classes. During his wanderings Gorky came close to understanding those “men of iron" or “masters of life”, as he called them. Very often they were interesting, gifted people, self-made men in many cases. Gorky was by no means prejudiced against them simply because they were capitalists. If anything, he actually showed something like admiration for those heroes of his, whose seething vitality found an outlet in drinking orgies, eccentricity and frenzied moneymaking. But he showed the harmful effects of this life on the “private owner" himself: how it cripples his soul, cultivates greed and cruelty, teaches him to lie and fills him with dissatisfaction and boredom. This subject reoccurs in a number of Gorky’s plays (Vassa Zheleznova, Yegor Bulychev and Others) and in several of his novels and stories The Three, Foma Gordeyev, The Life of Matvei Kozbemyakin, and The Artamonovs (1925). The latter novel covers the life of three generations in a Russian merchant-class family. The head of the family is Ilya Artamonov—a man as mighty as an oak reared in its native soil. There is something fine about this man of boundless energy, ever launching new plans. He wants to use his money to transform the sleepy provincial town where fate has brought him. But his activities are based on exploitation, and his sons and grandsons degenerate and become smaller men, wallowing in the ugly slough of accumulation, indolence and aimlessness.

p While romantically extolling Man (Gorky wrote the word with a capital M) he was emphatically opposed to individualism. Gorky’s well-known article “The Destruction of Personality" (1909) is a passionate philosophical treatise against the “tape-worm of individualism".

p Gorky’s last and biggest work, The Life of Klim Samgin (a book in four volumes, on which Gorky worked the last ten years of his life) is also devoted to the theme which had always engaged his attention: how a person gets poisoned by Philistinism and individualism and what happens to him as a result. The main character of this story, which gives a panoramic view of Russia from the i88os to 1917, is Klim Samgin, a lawyer, a typical Philistine individualist. Since childhood Samgin had learnt never to commit himself, and never give a straight “yes” or “no” for an answer. He claims to be a defender of the poor, a champion of the people, but in actual fact he depends on the rich for his livelihood. He is a born chameleon and traitor. He takes good care of himself in everything: in joy, in sorrow, in his relations with the state and with the different political parties. He sides with everyone but belongs to no one. He poses as a good friend of the revolutionaries and of the capitalists, of the police and of the street walkers, of the students and the merchants. He is the larva of a man, a genius of adaptability. 54 Fortune is kind to him and he plays a certain role in society. But he is a dehumanised person, a typical child of that age when masquerade and manoeuvre became the guiding principle of behaviour. For its psychological depth, Klim Samgin, in which Gorky is polemicising with Dostoyevsky, is indisputably one of the masterpieces of world literature. In Gorky we find none of the sentimentalising over the “little men”, which we often do in Dostoyevsky.

p When Gorky began work on Klim Samgin, there were some who felt the subject and the period it covered were too remote from the times, and somehow incompatible with his brilliant publicistic writings. But this could only have seemed so to the superficial observer. In fact, Gorky the artist was not at odds with Gorky the publicist. Indeed, it is precisely this last work of his which, for the generations to come, may be of supreme importance in the struggle he waged against reactionary views and trends.

p Artists have a tendency to present the rout of fascism by the forces of progressive mankind as the killing of the dragon. But defeating the dragon is only half the battle. It still remains to examine thoroughly the field where the dragon had planted its teeth. Fascism must be defeated morally and politically. It is imperative that the majority of mankind should see the historical and psychological roots of fascism laid completely bare, exposing its nature from the larval stage.

p Gorky’s Klim Samgin does just this. Probably nothing as profound as this book has ever been written about the degeneration of man. In the years during which he was engaged in writing this fourvolume philosophical epic (which Gorky himself for some reason chose to call a short novel), he also wrote many brilliant articles on current political themes which were simultaneously printed in Pravda and Izvestia. Those that had the greatest impact were: “If the Enemy Will not Capitulate, He Must Be Destroyed" (1930), “Whose Side Are You On, Masters of Culture?”, and “The Answer to American Correspondents" (first published on March 22, 1932). The first was levelled at foreign aggressors who were preparing a war against the U.S.S.R. In it Gorky wrote: “This obliges the working class to actively prepare for self-defence, for the defence of their historic role, for the defence of all that it has already created for itself, and also for the instruction of the proletariat in all lands, in the course of its thirteen years’ heroic and dedicated endeavour in building up a new world.”

p Generally speaking, Gorky’s articles reflected his change of mood more strongly than did his words of fiction. In 1930, making the final changes in his essay on Lenin, he accurately defined the difference between Lenin’s and his own approach to life’s phenomena. He wrote: “He (Lenin—K.Z.) was a politician. He had that 55 perfectly trained, straight-forward vision essential for the helmsman of a huge, heavy ship, as unwieldy as peasant Russia.

p “I have a physical aversion to politics, and have little faith in the wisdom of the masses in general, and the wisdom of the peasant masses in particular. Wisdom does not make a creative force until it has been organised by an idea. In the wisdom of the masses there is no idea so long as they are not aware of the community of interests of every one of them.”

p Gorky’s words about having “a physical aversion to politics" sound rather surprising, of course, especially in an article on Lenin. For Gorky did take an interest in politics—and a very keen one, too, sometimes. There were his articles “Untimely Thoughts”, for instance, which appeared in the newspaper Novaya Zbizn (New Life) in 1918 and later came out in brochure form. Years later, Gorky himself condemned these articles as a mistake. Articles of this sort, often written under the impression of odd isolated incidents (like his article “Russian Cruelty”, 1922) are not infrequently used by anti-communist propagandists in the West as proof of their allegation that even Gorky agreed with some of the charges made by the bourgeois press against the Communists and the Russian people as a whole.

p However, it is ridiculous to try and find in Gorky’s writings a barb aimed at his own people or the Communist Party. In his articles he really sings the praises of the Russian people and their great achievements after the Great October Socialist Revolution. This was the essential thing in Gorky. He was above all a people’s writer of the proletarian epoch in the true meaning of the word.

p Gorky can in full justice be called not just a social writer but a socialist writer. His aim was not simply to portray the society of his day in all its class aspects (like Balzac), but also to portray those processes in the life of society which determined its future.

p Gorky was a highly intellectual writer. In his writings, the intellectualism and the urge to fathom the world and world history, typical of world literature in the 20th century—take Anatole France, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and many others—found its traditionally Russian and yet entirely new expression. The newness stems from the inquisitivencss of the people who, feeling they are the masters of life now, are anxious to understand it, reorganise and beautify it in their own fashion. That is why Gorky always wrote about work with such genuine inspiration.

p “... I believe that never in the world, never in all history, has work revealed its fantastic power to transform people and life as vividly and convincingly as it is doing today, with us, in our state of workers and peasants,” wrote Gorky in his Correspondence with Readers in 1930.

p With Gorky, descriptions of everyday life and historical episodes, made in his usual bold manner and with enthusiasm for his material, alternate with dialogues and long discourses by the characters themselves. In view of this, his big novels have less compositional unity, to my mind, than his stories. His artistry is most apparent in his psychological studies. His Lev Tolstoi (in the article of the same name) has been painted by an artist as great as his model, while his portrait of Lenin is probably unequalled by anything else written or said about him by his contemporaries and friends.

p Gorky emerged on the literary scene at a time when it was customary for writers to present the people through a veil of compassion for their sufferings, almost as something holy which was being desecrated. Gorky rejected this tone of pity. He spoke in the voice of the people telling their own story. He criticised, describing Russia’s frightening philistine world, the poverty and the self-banishment of men from civilised society. His harsh criticism was as uncompromising as that of the critical realists of the past, yet through it broke a glowing faith in life, in himself, in Russia and the Russian people.

p Gorky raised his voice against the most highly esteemed names in world literature, Lev Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky, where their preaching of humility and non-resistance to evil acted as an obstacle in the struggle for the liberation of mankind from the world’s dark forces. “Submit, proud man,” said Dostoyevsky. But Gorky said: “Man! How fine! What a proud sound it has!" Father Zosima, Dostoyevsky’s beloved character in his Brothers Karamazov, used to say: “Indulge not and multiply not your needs and desires.” But Gorky taught: “Be greedy for life. Nature is yours to take and make into a beautiful thing!”

p In Russian literature Gorky with his hymn to Man, to culture, to peace and sunlight, was like a young bogatyr emerging from the ocean depths of the people and confidently stepping ashore. Of himself he used to say that he had come into the world to challenge the leaden sordidness of life, to challenge and defeat it. For a penname he chose the word Gorky, which means bitter, thus symbolising his bitter pain for the people and his desire to speak the bitter truth about it. This he did, but he also told people that Man is a splendid creature and that if all men joined together and built their own kingdom of reason and labour they would be able to do wonderful, extraordinary things in this world.

p Gorky did not believe in leaving things unsaid, in resorting to vague allusions or allegorical figures of speech. His emotions were strong and pure. He thought in terms of history, present and future, and his mind was occupied with the issues and ideas of the epoch. 57 His hatred for fascism came as natural to him as breathing. He once wrote to some school children in Irkutsk: “A fascist who knocks a worker’s head off his spinal column by kicking him in the chin, is not even a beast, but something incomparably worse than a beast, a mad animal that must be destroyed.”

p Gorky was the first author of his kind. And readers the world over felt it at once. In his writings he embodied all those progressive ideas and thoughts which had long been ripening in Russian literature, and led it forward. No Russian writer since Pushkin had been so brimming with optimism and love of life. No literary critic since Belinsky and Chernyshevsky had been so profound and versatile and as capable of organising the minds of men. Since Saltykov-Shchedrin Russian literature had not known a more merciless critic of old Russia’s evils. But apart from all this, Gorky had also enriched literature with new ideas drawn from the people, the workers’ movement and Lenin, and had developed them in his articles, novels, and plays—ideas engendered and fostered by the people’s revolution. He showed, more convincingly than did any of his predecessors, the inevitability of the socialist renovation of Russia.

Thus Gorky, the founder of the method of socialist realism, is rightly esteemed as the father of new Russian literature.