Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev E-Book

MAXIM GORKY

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 260

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In 1920, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published Maxim Gorky's Reminiscences of Tolstoy and it was recognized almost immediately as one of the few masterpieces of modern biography. 'It is one of the most remarkable biographical pieces ever written,' writes Leonard Woolf in his autobiography. 'It makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy and his character as if one were sitting in the same room – his greatness and his littleness, his entrancing and infuriating complexity, his titanic and poetic personality, his superb humour.' In 1934, the book was expanded to include Gorky's memoirs of two other great Russian literary figures, Anton Chekhov and Leonid Andreyev. Almost a hundred years later, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev is reissued in a superb new translation by Bryan Karetnyk.

Leseprobe

12345‘Portraits of three writers as the self-portrait of a fourth: Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev is a quick-handed plein-air masterpiece.’

—Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus

‘Like all the Russian writers, Gorky had a marvellous eye for the physical reality that intrudes upon thought and feeling. But where other Russians, even Tolstoy, have only one pair of eyes, Gorky is like a hundred-eyed man who sees dozens of things happening at every blink and who forgets none of them.’

—V. S. Pritchett

‘Gorky’s picture comes nearer than the others to completeness, because he makes no attempt to include everything, to explain everything, or to sum up all in one consistent whole. Here there is a very bright light, here darkness and emptiness. And perhaps this is the way in which we see people in reality.’

—Virginia Woolf

‘A profound and intimate portrait of literary genius, Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev offer a rare and deeply personal glimpse into the inner lives of three towering figures of Russian literature. More than a moving tribute from one great writer to his peers, this is a rich tapestry of philosophical inquiry, psychological insight and social commentary. Gorky explores questions of faith and doubt, the bonds and rivalries between creative minds, and the turbulent backdrop of pre-revolutionary Russia. At once an ode to the beauty of Russian literature, a study in human connection and a meditation on writing life itself.’

—Lea Ypi, author of Indignity

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Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev

maxim gorky

translated from the russian by bryan karetnyk

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CONTENTS

Title PageintroductionI.Leo TolstoyII.Anton Chekhov III.Leonid Andreyevtranslator’s notefitzcarraldo editions classicsAbout the AuthorsCopyright10

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introduction

by j. m. coetzee

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, pen name Maxim Gorky, was born in 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod, a provincial city on the Volga some 250 miles from Moscow. Nizhny had been a fairly small town, but after the imperial edict of 1861 newly emancipated serfs flooded in from the countryside, creating a floating population of down-and-outs, thieves and vagabonds, the bosiakion whom Gorky drew for his early stories.

Gorky’s father was a skilled craftsman, his mother the daughter of a well-off artisan family. His father died of cholera when Alexei/Maxim was three. His mother contracted a second (unhappy) marriage, then died of tuberculosis, leaving the boy to be brought up by his grandparents. The boy was particularly close to his grandmother, a noted skazitel’ (storyteller) with an endless fund of folktales.

The Russia of the times was undergoing rapid industrialization, and independent craftspeople were finding themselves in a steep decline. Maxim’s grandfather found it necessary to remove him from school and, at the age of ten, to apprentice him as a shoemaker. A succession of failed apprenticeships followed before at last the boy ran away and found a place on a Volga steamer as the cook’s helper. The cook happened to be an avid reader. Maxim devoured his collection of romantic fiction and by the age of thirteen was deep into the Russian pantheon: Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky.

At the age of sixteen he made his way to Kazan, a university town – Tolstoy had studied there, as had Lenin – hoping to enrol as a student. This dream was swiftly 12shattered: not only were the fees beyond his reach but even certification as a humble schoolteacher was barred because of his youth and lack of formal schooling. Reduced to the footloose life of a bosiak, he hung out with university students, reading literature frowned on by the Tsarist authorities, including the writings of Karl Marx.

To keep body and soul together he took a job in a bakery, where he absorbed the life stories of migrants who preferred the precarity of urban life to farm labour. In the spirit of revolutionary enthusiasm, he embarked with a friend on a ‘going to the people’ venture of the kind that was de rigueuramong populists (narodniki). They took up residence in a village and did propaganda work among the peasants, trying to persuade them to agitate for democratic government. Spurred on by local landowners, the peasants responded by setting fire to the hut where the young men were staying, nearly burning them to death.

From this chastening experience Gorky emerged mistrustful of populism as a political philosophy and disillusioned with village life, which he found gloomy and monotonous. As for the peasants themselves, he detected in them a ‘lupine’ quality that gave him the shivers. Antipathy to the Russian peasantry, dating back to these experiences, stayed with him all his life and found open expression in his scathing 1922 discourse ‘On the Russian Peasantry’.

On the other hand, his contacts with Kazan students were liberating. ‘I heard my own unspoken thoughts in [their] words,’ he wrote. ‘I regarded them with admiration, as a captive who was promised freedom.’

Gorky was an autodidact with a tenacious memory. Though Russian was the only language he knew, the 13range of his reading surprised everyone who met him. He had little capacity for, or interest in, abstract thought. If he was a Marxist, he later wrote, it was not from reading Marx but from what he had learned at the bakery. He could feel the emotional tug of populism, and was nostalgic about the old world of small craft workshops, but he could see that the steamroller of industry had rendered obsolete the populists’ claim that in an agrarian country such as Russia the historical phase of capitalism could be bypassed.

Despite his first-hand knowledge of the urban proletariat, Gorky could not claim a proletarian background for himself. His origins lay in the class of traders and shopkeepers and artisans, the meshchane; in his Tsarist passport he was identified as a member of the guild of house-painters. His non-proletarian identity was an embarrassment to him. On the other hand, he bridled at being patronized as ‘a son of the people’ by his student friends.

After Kazan, Gorky spent five years crisscrossing the Russian Empire on foot, moving from job to job, contributing columns here and there to provincial newspapers. On one of his returns to Nizhny he met and was taken under the wing of Vladimir Korolenko, a writer with populist leanings who encouraged him to write about his life experiences, and promoted his work with editors. Gorky later called these years ‘the Time of Korolenko’. In Tblisi, where he worked for a while on the railways, he was arrested by the Tsarist police – the first of several arrests in the 1890s – on grounds of ‘revolutionary activity’. He was released due to a lack of evidence but remained under police surveillance.

His first story, based on a folk tale he had heard in his wanderings, was published in 1892, in a Tblisi 14newspaper, under the name Maxim Gorky, Maxim the Bitter. His first book, a collection of essays and stories, came out in 1898. It dealt with the lives of people on the margins of society, exploring their hardships and humiliations but also their wisdom and inner humanity. It enjoyed an immediate success, particularly among left-wing youth and the intelligentsia, to such an extent that his name was put forward for membership of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. He was duly elected; it took the personal intervention of Tsar Nicholas II to have this scandalous honour annulled.

Unlike the populist writers who made the peasant the centre of their concerns, Gorky drew his characters from among the millions of men and women who had left their villages behind and were wandering the roads of turn-of-the-century Russia. A friend and later biographer commented appreciatively: ‘We, the young Marxists, were interested in Gorky Evident in his early writings was a refreshing departure … from the village to the city … [T]he bosiakwith his contempt for the stagnant, old mode of life was for us a welcome herald of the new.’

Among works completed in the 1890s were the novel FomaGordeyev, a critique of the rising bourgeois class, the play Nadne(The Lower Depths), which soon established itself in the European theatre repertoire, and the poems ‘Song of the Stormy Petrel’ and ‘Song of the Falcon’, favourites of the revolutionary youth.

The years 1898–1904 were a time of triumph for Gorky: not only had he become one of the most widely read writers in Russia, but his reputation was spreading in Western Europe. At a banquet arranged in his honour on his first visit to Saint Petersburg in 1899, he raised the ire of the intelligentsia by criticizing the futility of the 15endless Marxist-versus-populist debate when, he said, the Russian people were crying out for action.

Gorky never felt at home among big-city intelligenty. To his wife he wrote: ‘They came to look at me as if I were an alligator, or a person with two heads.’ He remained ambivalent towards the intelligentsia throughout his life: he believed they had it in their power to lead Russia to an enlightened future, but was exasperated by their condescending treatment of him.

What was important about the early Gorky, wrote the critic Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959), was that ‘he had seen, known, and done things that no Russian writer had seen, known, or done before him’. As a phenomenon he could not be ignored. ‘Behind his stories … loomed the legend of his life. Postcards with his picture sold like hotcakes.’

‘[He] burst on the Russian literary scene,’ wrote the Gorky scholar Donald Fanger, ‘not a sage or prophet in the manner of his illustrious elders, but a phenomenon unseen in Russia before him: a celebrity in our modern sense … trailed by reporters wherever he went … [yet] modest to the point of diffidence.’

¶ In 1889, years before he had made a name for himself, Gorky and a group of young friends had decided to join the return-to-the-land movement that Tolstoy was promoting. Tolstoyan agrarian communes were springing up everywhere, their members generally trying to adhere to the master’s teachings on the perfecting of the self through agricultural labour and non-violence. Gorky was dispatched to Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy estate, to ask the famous writer for a grant of land. The day that Gorky arrived, Tolstoy was not at home. The Countess gave the young visitor tea and advised him that 16the estate had become the goal of all too many rootless wanderers wanting to attach themselves to her husband.

Gorky followed up the visit with a formal letter requesting a grant of land. The letter was never answered. Thus ended his first brush with the Tolstoys.

His first face-to-face meeting with the master took place a decade later, in Moscow, orchestrated by Anton Chekhov. Gorky was by now famous throughout Russia, and Tolstoy’s curiosity was piqued. After their meeting he wrote in his diary: ‘Gorky was here. A very good talk. And I liked him. A real man of the people.’

As for Gorky, his feelings were more complex, more intense, and more profound. To Chekhov he reported:

I had pictured him differently – taller, broader-framed. But he turned out to be a little old man … [W]hen he started speaking I listened in amazement. Everything he said was astonishingly simple, profound, and, though sometimes I thought it completely untrue, terribly good.… You look at him and it’s terribly pleasant to feel that you are also a man, to realize that it’s possible for a man to be a Lev Tolstoy. Do you understand? – you feel good for man in general.… I had never really believed he was an atheist, though I felt it, but now, having heard the way he speaks about Christ and having seen his eyes – too clever for a believer – I know that he is indeed an atheist, and a profound one.

The ambivalence expressed here holds true for his encounters with Tolstoy from beginning to end: on the one hand bemusement at finding himself face-to-face with a near-mythic being; on the other hand, an unsettled feeling that some kind of spell is being woven around him.

After Moscow, the two writers met again in the winter of 1901–02, when they were thrown together as 17neighbours in the Crimea, Tolstoy staying in the palatial villa of a friend, Gorky permitted for reasons of health to live there while serving a term of exile for subversive activities. It was in the Crimea that most of the conversations reported in Gorky’s memoir took place.

In the Tolstoy household there reigned a triangle of negative forces which Gorky either did not detect or else chose not to write about. For years Tolstoy had been under the thumb of Vladimir Chertkov, an aristocrat who had given up his military career to volunteer as Tolstoy’s secretary. Henri Troyat writes: ‘Chertkov had a narrow, systematizing mind, and was so attached to Tolstoy’s ideas that he would not suffer him to depart one iota from them himself. On any and every matter, however trifling, he would respectfully call the master to order in the name of Tolstoyism.’

At first amused, the Countess soon began to realise that in Chertkov she had a rival who was scheming to alienate Tolstoy from his family and tailor his own version of the old man’s legacy to the world.

It was not only Chertkov with whom the Countess was finding it hard to share her home. In his earlier life, before the conversion experience he underwent in 1881, her husband had been finicky about personal hygiene. Now he smelled like a goat. In order to live like a peasant, she pleaded, was it really necessary to go around unwashed? ‘My aversion to my husband physically these days is making me very miserable,’ she confided to her diary. ‘I cannot, I simply cannot get used to it, I shall never get used to the dirt and the bad smell.’

Tolstoy’s dislike of his wife was no less strong. To his daughter Alexandra he wrote blaming her mother for ‘perpetual spying, eavesdropping, incessant complaining, ordering me about … [for] her open hatred of me 18and pretence of love … [T]here is but one thing I want – freedom from her, from that falsehood, pretence, and spite with which her whole being is permeated.’

Years later, Chertkov would publish a book, translated into English as TheLastDaysofTolstoy, celebrating the great man’s flight from home and his death at Astapovo railway station as a personal victory over oppression at the hands of his wife.

The toxic air pervading the Tolstoy household does not figure in Gorky’s memoir. Nor does Gorky have anything to say about the unique position Tolstoy had created for himself in the world of Russian letters. He had turned Yasnaya Polyana into a fortress where he could insulate himself from the polemics of the rival journals and from the literary marketplace in general.

As long as he could treat Gorky as a curiosity, a writer without any schooling who had sprung up from the native earth, Tolstoy looked upon the younger man fondly. Yet he could not disguise flashes of condescension, to which Gorky was acutely sensitive. ‘Suddenly the old Russian lord, the arrogant aristocrat, would spring up behind the stage costume of muzhik beard and rumpled blouse,’ he wrote. In truth, ‘His interest in me is ethnographic. In his eyes, I am but a representative of some unknown race – nothing more.’

After the Crimean encounters, and in particular after TheLowerDepthshad achieved success in German theatres, Tolstoy’s attitude changed. His diary entries on Gorky acquired a negative, even spiteful tone. ‘[L]ike Nietzsche, [he is] a harmful writer,’ he wrote. ‘[A] major gift and the absence of any religious convictions at all – i.e. any concern with the significance of life – and, together with that a cocksureness, supported by our “educated world”, which sees him as its spokesperson.’ 19

After the failed revolutionary uprising of 1905, Gorky’s feelings about Tolstoy similarly hardened. Above all he rejected Tolstoy’s politics, the politics of pacifism and submission. He set Tolstoy and Dostoevsky side by side as ‘the greatest geniuses of a land of slaves.… With one voice they cry out “Endure”’. To a friend he wrote: ‘[Tolstoy’s] humility is hypocritical and his desire to suffer repellent! … For more than twenty years this old man has been talking of nothing but transforming young and lovely Russia into a province of China and young and gifted Russians into slaves.’ And to his mentor Korolenko: ‘I have always been repelled by his obstinate, despotic drive to transform the life of Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy into the life of Our Father the Blessed Boyar Leo.’

Reminiscences of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was first published in 1920 and republished in fuller form in 1923. Further additions were made in 1927 for Gorky’s collected works. The memoir gives the impression of having been artlessly thrown together from diary entries, but the impression is misleading. The critic Viktor Shklovsky recorded: ‘I have had occasion to see the manuscript and I know how many times [the constituent pieces] were rearranged in order to achieve … solidity.’ He calls the memoir ‘an original montage … a writer’s notebook, but one presented – and legitimately – as a finished work of art.’

Yevgeny Zamiatin, author of the dystopian novel We, describes a public reading from the memoir given by Gorky years after the death of Tolstoy:

He stood on the stage, tall, thin, stoop-shouldered; the reading glasses aged him by ten years.… When in reading he approached the end of his memoirs, something very strange 20started to happen.… He began to stammer and halt. Then he pulled off his glasses and you could see the tears rolling down his face. He sobbed aloud, muttered, ‘Forgive me,’ and walked off the stage … This Gorky was not the writer and not the old revolutionary, but simply a man unable to speak calmly about the death of another man.

¶ From the time he was exiled from Nizhny Novgorod to the Crimea until the overthrow of the house of Romanov in 1917, Gorky was involved in revolutionary politics and at times in subversive activities. He had by this time relaxed his hostility to Marxism, which he had earlier found too abstract, too little engaged with people’s lives. He became close to the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, and, when that party split, to its Bolshevik faction, which he supported to the tune of 5,000 roubles per annum, paid out of his very considerable royalty income. Most of this money was ploughed into Lenin’s journal Iskra(The Spark). Gorky did not play an official role in the Party, preferring to support it from the fringes. He maintained a steady distance from the more radical Socialist Revolutionaries – he opposed their use of terror – but did assist them financially.

Though the police kept him under surveillance, they were reluctant to act against of him, given his huge popularity (‘Gorky, Bard of Freedom!’) among the working class.

In 1904 he moved to Saint Petersburg and set up house with the actress Maria Andreyeva, who would be at his side for the next eight years and would, after 1917, occupy various offices in arts administration under the Soviets.

Within days of his arrival in Saint Petersburg, in January of 1905, a procession to the Tsar’s Winter Palace 21took place: thousands of workers marched to present a petition requesting reform. They were met with a fusillade of bullets. Gorky witnessed the slaughter; in its wake he changed his stance from progressive moderation to active militancy.

The next day he was arrested and locked up in the Peter and Paul Fortress, charged – along with colleagues – with conspiracy to overthrow the government. News of his arrest led to an outcry at home and abroad. Petitions arrived from one European capital after another. The Tsar capitulated, releasing him on bail. He at once withdrew to Finland. His home in Finland would in due course be used by the Bolsheviks as a staging post for arms shipments.

There was a new uprising in December of 1905, soon quelled. Gorky, back in Russia, was closely involved, and in the aftermath again had to flee the country.

To raise money for the revolution, he agreed to undertake a mission to the United States. His arrival in New York, in April of 1906, was greeted by cheering crowds, but the mission was cleverly undermined by the Russian ambassador, who let it be known to the media that Gorky’s companion Maria Andreyeva was not in fact his wife. Gorky and his party were kicked out of their hotel; Mark Twain, who had chaired the organizing committee for the visit, withdrew his support; and the tour had to be aborted. It had raised no more than $10,000 for the revolutionary cause.

Gorky stayed on in the United States for several months. His novel Mat’(Mother) was written in upstate New York. He also wrote a set of sketches criticizing the American people for allowing themselves to be transformed into an obedient, machine-like mass. The sketches aroused general ire among his hosts. 22

From the United States Gorky and Andreyeva moved to Italy, where they settled on the island of Capri. Here they stayed for seven years. Among other activities they organized and funded a school for the training of underground party workers. Lenin was opposed to the existence of such a school outside the control of the Party and set about undermining it. Graduates of the school who went back to Russia were rapidly apprehended by the police.

After splitting with Andreyeva in 1912, Gorky returned to Russia, planning to devote himself to writing and to the task of educating the Russian people. By this time he had formulated a philosophy of his own to which god-building (bogostroitel’stvo, a term he coined) was central: maybe God did not exist, yet religious experience was necessary to being human, therefore it was up to mankind to create God in its own image, that is to say, in the image of its ideal best. This having been done, mankind could look forward to ‘the defeat of the remnants of bourgeois metaphysics, the disintegration of “bourgeois soul” and the birth of a socialist soul’. In this way, while affirming his support of bolshevik Marxism-Leninism, Gorky measured his distance from Marxist atheism. His novel Ispoved’(translated into English as The Confession), written in 1908, provides a full exposition of his philosophy.

In the tumultuous years from his return to Russia in 1913 until his self-exile in 1921, Gorky tried to maintain a stand independent of the Bolshevik revolutionaries to the left and the liberal intelligentsia to the right. He was prepared to oppose Russia’s participation in the World War on pacifist grounds, though he thereby alienated wide sections of the Russian public. He cautiously approved the overthrow of the monarchy in February 1917, 23hoping it would be replaced by a democratic, constitutional order, but was appalled by the senseless violence of the October uprising that followed: ‘a riot of malice and hatred’, he called it, a capitulation to the anarchic urges of Russia’s peasantry.

In view of his international prominence, he could not be ignored by the new regime. In the modus vivendi that was arrived at, Gorky took as his brief the safeguarding of the cultural heritage of Russia and the protection of the rights of artists and intellectuals. This was agreed, on his side, in good faith; the events of the next three years revealed how naïve an actor he was in the political arena, how little he grasped of the cynicism and duplicity of Russia’s new ruling class.

The francophone Russian novelist Victor Serge met with Gorky in 1919 and wrote: ‘I saw him as the supreme, the righteous, the relentless witness of the Revolution, and it was as such that he talked with me. He spoke harshly about the Bolsheviks… [However] at present [he said] it was imperative to side with the Revolutionary regime, for fear of a rural counterrevolution which would be no less than an outburst of savagery.’ Gorky never lost his fear that the Revolution would devolve into a war between workers and peasants from which the peasants would emerge victorious.

Gorky’s rapprochement with the Bolsheviks earned him no friends among the liberal intelligentsia. Nevertheless, given his profound allegiance to Western European culture, it became his fate to, in the words of Eikhenbaum, ‘[serve] as a stand-in for the Russianintelligentsia, its representative and advocate before the harsh tribunal of the revolution.’

His most immediate efforts were directed to saving artists and intellectuals from persecution and penury. He 24set up a publishing house Parus (Sail), where the journal Letopis’ (Chronicle) was launched in December 1915, with the slogan ‘Russia must become Europe’. In 1917 he founded a newspaper called Novaiazhizn’(New Life). It was closed down by the authorities a year later. Gorky’s response was curiously passive: ‘I intend to work with the Bolsheviks but on an autonomous basis. I am tired of the helpless academic kind of opposition of Novaiazhizn’.’

Gorky was above all a benefactor to those in need. The poet Vladislav Khodasevich recalled his generosity:

A crush of people filled [his] apartment from early morning to late at night.… Writers and scholars from Petersburg and from out of town kept arriving; workers and sailors came, seeking protection from Zinoviev, the all-powerful commissar of the Northern Region; actors came, along with artists, speculators, former dignitaries, and high-society ladies. They asked him to intercede for people who had been arrested, to arrange for rations, apartments, clothing, medicines, cooking oil, railroad tickets, official trips, tobacco, writing paper, ink, dentures for the old and milk for the newborn – in short, for everything that couldn’t be gotten without influence. Gorky heard them all out and wrote innumerable letters of recommendation.

The situation became more dire as the grip of the Soviets tightened, and worst of all during the famine of 1921–22. Gorky banked on his international standing to plead the case of persecuted writers, even though this provoked the enmity of powerful members of the Central Committee. He became known as ‘the great interceder’, but his intercessions did not always work: he failed, for example, to save the poet Nikolai Gumilev, husband of 25Anna Akhmatova, who was accused of anti-revolutionary conspiracy and executed.

According to Yevgeny Zamiatin, ‘[W]hen the revolution turned to terror, Gorky was the last channel of appeal and the last hope, and the wives and mothers of those arrested came to him. He wrote letters, swore over the phone, and in the most serious cases travelled himself to Moscow to see Lenin.’ In his history of Russian literature D. S. Mirsky calls Gorky ‘practically the only independent public force outside the Government in the whole of Soviet Russia’ in those years, adding: ‘The debt of Russian culture to him is very great. Everything that was done between 1918 and 1921 to save the writers and other higher intellectuals from starvation was due to Gorky His great place in modern Russian letters is entirely due to his personal part in the salvaging of Russian civilization when it was in danger of going down.’ Even Akhmatova herself, a fierce critic of Gorky, conceded that ‘without his help at that time we would all have died of hunger’.

¶ In 1910 Lenin had visited Gorky on Capri with the aim of securing his support for the Bolshevik cause. The two continued to correspond until 1913, when Gorky published an essay that Lenin disapproved of. What Russia needed, Gorky wrote, was not violent revolution but a long and patient course of education to bring it into the modern world.

At this point relations between the two were broken off for some years. When contact was resumed, after the Bolshevik takeover, Lenin accepted an offer from Gorky to travel to the West to mobilize public opinion and plead for material help. Lenin’s real motive may well have been to rid Russia of the irritant that Gorky had 26become on the body politic.

Gorky left Russia for Germany in October 1921, but was never comfortable there: he was kept under surveillance by the authorities, while the Russian émigré community held its distance from him for his co-operation with the Soviet regime.

Nevertheless, while in Germany he embarked on a new enterprise: founding a literary-scientific journal with the title Putnik(Traveller), soon to be renamed Beseda (Colloquy). The plan was to publish monthly, in Berlin, and distribute in both the Soviet Union and the West. The journal’s aim would be to inform Russians about European literature and science. Both Soviet and European writers would contribute, free of censorship.

Between June 1923 and March 1925, seven issues of Besedacame out. Gorky had much to be frustrated about. Soviet writers were prevented by the censors from sending in work. There were few foreign contributors. But the most severe problem was that the Soviet authorities refused to allow the importation of the journal. So, in the end, circulation was confined to the Russian émigré community.

From Germany Gorky moved to Italy, where he rented a villa in Sorrento on the Bay of Naples. Money for its luxurious upkeep was surreptitiously channelled from the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment.

The news of Lenin’s death in 1924 saddened Gorky. He had admired Lenin’s intellect and was thankful for the protective shield Lenin had extended over him from the secret police. He wrote an affectionate memoir of their times together. Under Stalin this memoir would be withdrawn from circulation, revised and reissued with positive mention of Trotsky removed. 27

News reached Gorky in Germany that thirty-four members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, many of whom had served long prison terms under Tsar Nicholas II, were being put on trial for subversion. Incensed, Gorky wrote to Alexei Rykov, a close associate of Lenin: ‘If the trial … will end with a death sentence, then this will be a premeditated murder … [T]he crime will result in a moral blockade of Russia by all of socialist Europe.’ His protest met with an angry reaction from the Party leadership, including Lenin.

The leading SRP defendants were sentenced to death. However, after a flood of protests from abroad, the executions were postponed. When Stalin came to power, he had the executions carried out.

Gorky’s translator in Sorrento was Moura Budberg, born Maria Zakrevskaya, for some years Countess von Benckendorff, then briefly Baroness von Budberg, who had been planted in the household by the Soviet secret police. All his activities were recorded and his correspondence was scrutinized. Uneasy about her role, Budberg finally confessed all – or perhaps not quite all – to Gorky, who became her protector and later her lover. She stayed with him until 1932.

Gorky’s years in Sorrento (1924–28) were productive. His autobiographical trilogy MyChildhood,MyApprenticeship, My Universities has stood up well to the passage of time. MyUniversities, in particular, is impressive for its nervous, even hallucinatory narrative pace and shocking realism. As a whole, the trilogy offers an unsentimental portrayal of Maxim as an intelligent but touchingly innocent youngster trying to find his footing in the brutal jungle of Russia’s vast underclass. Along with his memoirs of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Alexander Blok, the trilogy stands out as Gorky’s best work. 28

In Sorrento Gorky also began work on a huge novel, TheLifeofKlimSamgin, never completed, through which – it appears – he hoped to make sense of his later life. English translations of the three volumes of KlimSamgin