GORKI THE BITTER
Some day we shall be indebted to the clear-visioned critic who will expound for us the true place of the unpleasant, the terrible, even the horrible, in fiction; and the study would not be complete without a thorough-going examination of Russian literature generally, and the writings of Maxim Gorki in particular.
Such an inquiry—which I must only touch upon—would doubtless focus upon two factors of importance: the one a primary cause—the nature of the author as conditioned by self, environment, and nationality; the other a secondary cause—the ultimate purposes of fiction. Phrased differently, we have the two elements: what an author writes because he is what and where he is, and what he writes quite deliberately.
Reference has already been made, in these introductory studies, to the sombre, hopeless, and even tragic tone of Russian life—a tone sounded deeply in its literature. In fact, the broader the sweep of view, the more instances stand forth to support the statement that all Muscovite art feels the same impulse—witness in an exemplary and typical way the paintings of Verestchagin and the music of Tschaikovsky. It is an invitingtheme, this one of why one nation should drink fiery vodka, another phlegmatic beer, and yet another light wine. Are the national characteristics which plainly go with drinks and foods and pleasures causes, in the final analysis, or effects? Do servitude and stolidity and hopelessness on the one hand, and thin-nostriled freedom and lofty spirit on the other, arise from forces which the historian may trace clearly to their political well-springs, or are there certain imponderable potencies in the air of different lands which in the very beginning of things instilled a spirit of fatalism into the Moslem, nihilism into the Russian, emotionalism into the French, and a nervous need for action into the American? When outward national conditions change, or when nations are transplanted, precisely what is it in climate that breeds essentially the same strain cycle after cycle?
So we should have to dissect, weigh, and classify all available facts about Russia past and present in order to get an unclouded understanding of the national temper, just as a similar study of Gorki’s antecedents and life, for instance, would illuminate his literary expressions. Each of these studies would be consistent with the other, for Gorki is a national figure, though, as all such iconoclastic spirits will, he outrussias his ownmiddle-class countrymen in outspoken unfaith in and defiance of the god-of-things-as-they-are.
The second great factor for finding the place and potency of the unpleasant, the bitter, and the terrible in fiction consists in the purpose of fiction, which broadly is one of two: either to picture forth life or to interpret life. When the fictional artist—granted that he is clear-headed—sets out to hold the mirror relentlessly up to life, he becomes an extreme realist. When he faithfully paints life as he sees it, sincerely using his selective powers so as to presentwhat he conceives to betypes rather than mere personalities, and thus interprets life for those of less penetrative and constructive vision, we have a philosophical realist. When he takes liberties with thespiritof facts (not merely with the facts themselves, which may be just as real in one order as in another), he is a romancer. When he uses facts to support and enforce ideals of his own, he is an idealist.
Thus all fiction, so far as it has a respectable purpose at all, falls easily into one class or the other—that which merely represents life, or that which interprets life while it represents it. All the farther motives—amusement, teaching, excoriation, demagoguery, what not—line up behind these two prime purposes.
Now, how does all this bear upon the place of unpleasant fiction? Very vitally, and we are considering Gorki—a highly morbid and at times revolting writer—as a notable example of this rather Russian characteristic. In him we have a spirit who looks at facts, despises all palliations, dares greatly for his convictions, and in it all is Russian through and through. Such a man, of such a history, in such a period, in such a land, with such a motive of truth-telling, for such a purpose of reform,couldnot write pleasant, tinkly fiction. Russians read him because Russia must read him. An author draws men to his message either because they need it without liking it, or like it already. First of all, Gorki is himself—a soul sensitive to the tragic, the morbid, and the bitter—then he boldly gives Russia her own self-made wormwood to drink while she thirsts in the hour of her crucifixion.
With two classes I have no sympathy: writers who pander to morbid, dirty tastes, and readers who support gruesome, nasty writers for pure love of noisome pestilence. No more do we have need for the not-impure and not-revolting yet depressing and pessimistic fiction which serves no good purpose beyond that of producing revenue. The place for such unpleasant, unhappy-beginning, tearful-middle, and sorrowful-endingstories is precisely nowhere. But in Gorki we have a queer contradiction of conditions: some of his most revolting fiction is as important to the Muscovite land which bred it as light is vital to a dark place. Yet when some one of these poignant, dreadful diagnoses of Russian sicknesses is translated and spread abroad, say in English, it should be read only by those who are students of the writer and his country, and not by the young or the morbid. It is needful to expose ulcers in a clinic, it is indecent and disgusting to parade them on the street. In a word: the horrible in fiction needs be justified by a high purpose.
In “The Exorcism,” a thousand-word sketch, Gorki has produced a terrible illustration of how worse than useless such material may be for purposes of general reading in translation, while originally serving a tremendous moral purpose by showing his own people what beasts some of their fellows are.
Along a village street a strange procession is moving slowly with wild howls. The dense, wave-like crowd surrounds a cart. Tied by her wrists to a rope attached to the cart is a slight, almost girlish woman—entirely nude. Dazed, halting, gazing into nothing with wide, lacklustre look, she staggers bleeding on. Now and again a tall peasant standing in the cart, his whitecanine teeth showing, his eyes bloodshot from fury, lays a lash upon the woman’s body, already covered with unspeakable slashes and bruises. And every fiendish brutality—detailed and repeated until the soul sickens—the men, women, and children of the mob acclaim!
“This,” he concludes, “which I have written above, is not an allegorical description of the persecution and torture of a prophet, who has no honor in his own country—no, unfortunately, it is not that! It is called an ‘exorcism.’ Thus do husbands punish their wives for infidelity; this is a picture from life, a custom—and I beheld it in the year 1891, on the 15th of July, in the village of Kandybovko, Government of Kherson.”
Need I say that I have toned down the horror of this presentment, and that I relate it, horrible still, to show the very futility of such picturesaspictures, and their very great worth,to those concerned, as pleas for reform?
The readers of modern fiction need to look this question full in the face and then make their feelings known to the magazines. There is a place for all pathological studies, whether of society, soul, or body, by priest, physician, sociologist, and novelist. But is that place either the market-place, or a fiction-printing magazine whose pages invite the scrutiny of children aswell as morbid adults? If we segregate bodily pestilence, why should the public magazine and the public playhouse be allowed to spread contagion? Is there no difference between an earnest fictional presentation of moral problems which must be solved more or less publicly, and the mere skilful portrayal of lust and degradation and easy morals, with no possible resultant good? If a hatter took it into his head to be interested in smallpox, what would the authorities say? Well, shall magazines be exposed for general circulation because that same hatter, and a million of his like, love dirty, crime-teaching, and viciously morbid fiction? Some one must be brave enough to declare the difference between “frank” fiction in books for those who really wish to study social problems (and there are too many filthy books sold under the guise of social study) and the printing of such material in the magazines which make appeal to families for their circulation. Wecankeep such books out of the home and the library if we wish, but when vicious short-stories creep into otherwise clean magazines, the damage is great enough to be serious.
But Gorki’s fiction is not unclean, as a rule, even when it deals with “broad” subjects. He moves directly and simply among the facts of an unlovely and often brutalized life and tells thetruth about it without interpretation or apology. For example, here is the story of “The Khan and His Son,” as told by a blind mendicant. It is more romantic than most of Gorki’s work.
Mosolaīma el Asvab, an old Crimean Khan, is possessed of many women in his harem, who love “the old eagle” for the noble fire of his spirit, which age has not quenched. One above all others is his favorite, a Kazak prisoner maid from the steppes of the Dnieper. Once when the Khan’s much-loved son, Alhalla, returns from a victorious raid on the Russians, the father exchanges with him words of affection and rashly makes the time-honored oriental promise: “What wilt thou take from the hand of thy father, Alhalla? Tell me, and I will give thee everything, according to thy desire.”
And the son asks of his father the one thing the old man loves best and leans upon in his old age—the Russian prisoner maid.
The Khan spake not—for a space he said no word, for so long as was required to crush the shudder in his heart—and, after this pause, he said, boldly and firmly:“Take her! Let us finish the feast, and then thou shalt take her.”
The Khan spake not—for a space he said no word, for so long as was required to crush the shudder in his heart—and, after this pause, he said, boldly and firmly:
“Take her! Let us finish the feast, and then thou shalt take her.”
The son knows what his request means, and soon they fall to talking of the sacrifice required.But to the pleadings of the old Khan the son returns only the argument of his own love for the girl. At length the young man proposes that “in mercy to each other” they fling her into the sea from the mountain, and in despair the Khan consents.
Summoned by her lord, the girl divines all, and asks only that she be carried to the place of sacrifice in the arms of her “old eagle,” whom she loves. And so they slowly journey to the cliff, and by his arms she is flung into the sea.
The son at last turns away, but—
With swift strides the Khan approached the brink, and hurled himself down. His son did not hold him back, there was no time for that. And again nothing was audible from the sea—neither shriek nor noise of the Khan’s fall. Only the waves plashed on there, and the wind hummed wild songs.Long did Tolaīk Alhalla gaze below, and then he said aloud:“And grant me, also, as stout a heart, O Allah!”And then he went forth into the gloom of the night.... Thus perished Khan Mosolaīma el Asvab, and Tolaīk Alhalla became Khan of the Crimea.
With swift strides the Khan approached the brink, and hurled himself down. His son did not hold him back, there was no time for that. And again nothing was audible from the sea—neither shriek nor noise of the Khan’s fall. Only the waves plashed on there, and the wind hummed wild songs.
Long did Tolaīk Alhalla gaze below, and then he said aloud:
“And grant me, also, as stout a heart, O Allah!”
And then he went forth into the gloom of the night.... Thus perished Khan Mosolaīma el Asvab, and Tolaīk Alhalla became Khan of the Crimea.
Of all his varied and acrid experiences the brain of “Maxim the Bitter,” as his pseudonym means, is a bursting note-book. From it heselects with entire artlessness—that is, without either the patience or the knowledge which true art presupposes—whatever he needs for his fictional work. Hence his longer productions, novels and plays, are not well constructed. Indeed, they are marvellous mixtures of idealism, realism, humor, shocking openness, and drivel, illuminated in sudden patches by exquisite descriptions and lofty beauties. The best example of his novels is “Fomá Gordyéeff,” and his strongest play is “The Night Asylum.”
The general tone of Gorki’s work is not so depressing, because not so hopeless, as that of his fellow fiction-writers of the younger generation; but none of them dives so deep into the sub-silt of the great Russian stream, for none is so native to its turgid, fetid flow. To witness before our eyes, for example, the dragging down of the girl in the short-story “Twenty-Six and One Other,” is so terrible as to revolt the hardened. Yet in his tramps, his thieves, his broken-down derelicts, there is a certain impudent bravery that strikes a new note of hopefulness for submerged Russia. It is this, I think, that endeared the young apostle of the proletariat when from 1892 to 1897 his greatest short fictional work was done. He not only had a message for revolutionary Russia, but the spirit of his characters was preciselywhat so many of the drifting, sodden wrecks needed—boldness to look up.
For many superficial English and American readers Gorki furnished what Professor Phelps has aptly compared to a slumming party—they were pleased to be nauseated. Naturally, they soon dropped the new toy. But others have continued to read him, some because they are in sympathy with the reform movement, some from sheer enjoyment of the terrible, others for the flashes of genius which are frequent enough to remind us that he has not lived up to the anticipations his earlier writings evoked. In this country, he has lost general sympathy, especially since his comparatively recent visit culminated in the disclosure of his illicit relations with his travelling companion, and much consequent newspaper gossip; so that on the whole we wait for another to wear the mantle of Tolstoi, which so many, six years ago, were ready to cast upon the shoulders of Maxim Gorki.
Gorki has had a wild and varied life,—but he may tell the story in his own words:
“I was born March 14th, either in 1868 or 1869, in Nijni Novgorod, in the family of Vassili Vassilezewitsch Kaschirin, dyer, to his daughter Warwara, and Maxim Sawwatjev Pjeschkow,who, according to his sign, was an upholsterer. Thenceforth I have borne honorably and without a stain the title of a member of the guild of artists. I was baptized by the name of Alexei, but in choosing a pseudonym I preferred my father’s name, Maxim.
“My real name is therefore Alexei Maximowitsch Pjeschkow. My father died in Astrakhan when I was five years old. After the death of my mother my grandfather placed me in a shoe-store. I was then nine years old, and my grandfather had taught me to read in the Psalter and Prayer Book. I ran away from my studies and became a draughtsman’s apprentice; ran away from him and entered the workshop of a painter of saints’ images; then I served on a steamer as a cook’s boy; then I became a gardener’s assistant.
“Here I remained till my fifteenth year, spending all my time in zealously reading the productions of known authors, such as ‘Guak; or, Unshakable Fidelity,’ ‘Andreas Fearnaught,’ ‘Jacschka, the Cut-throat,’ etc.
“While I was serving as cook’s boy on the steamboat, the cook, Smury, gained a powerful influence over my development. He persuaded me to read the ‘Legends of the Saints,’ Eckartshausen, Gogol, Gljeb Uspenski, Dumaspère, and various books on Freemasonry.
“Up to that time I had been a sworn enemy of all books and of all printed paper, even including my passport. After my fifteenth year I felt a passionate wish to learn, in pursuance of which I betook myself to Kasan, under the impression that knowledge would be imparted free to all who desired it. It turned out, however, that this was not the case; so I went to work in a pretzel bakery, at a salary of three rubles a month.
“Of all the kinds of work I have tried, this was the hardest. In Kasan I came into relations with the ‘Lost People’ and lived long with them. I worked in the villages on the Volga, now as a woodchopper, now as a porter, and during this time read every book I could lay my hands on, which various kind people supplied me with. I got along very badly, and in 1888 even tried to kill myself by shooting a bullet into my body.
“I lay a long time in the hospital, but finally recovered and went into the apple trade. I finally turned my back on inhospitable Kasan, to try my luck in Zarizyn, where I got a job as a railroad attendant. Then I returned to Nijni, where I had to go up for the army. But since they could not make use of fellows with holes in their bodies, I escaped the fate of becoming a soldier, and instead became a Munich beer seller. I soon exchanged this calling for that of a clerkin the office of Lanin, a lawyer of Nijni Novgorod.
“That was a turning point in my life. Lanin’s influence on my development was immeasurably great. I owe this cultivated and great-hearted man more than to any one else. But, however agreeable I found life with Lanin, where my soul could at last find room to breathe, I was again impelled to the life of a tramp. And I have tramped all over Russia. Where have I not been! What have I not seen and suffered! What kind of work have I not done!”