Summerfolk E-Book

MAXIM GORKY

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Maxim Gorky's magnificent response to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, written in 1904, the year Chekhov died. Summerfolk is a play about the Russian bourgeois social class and the changes occurring around them in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. It is set in a world of 'false hopes and unfulfilled promises', where dachas have been subdivided into summer colonies and the newly rich idle away their time in unhappy romantic alliances. Gorky's characters are still dreaming of a better life, but they are increasingly aware of impending revolution. Gorky's play premiered in November 1904 at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre in Saint Petersburg. This English version, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

SUMMERFOLK

by

Maxim Gorky

translated and with an introduction by

Stephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Gorky: Key Dates

Characters

Summerfolk

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)

It is difficult to imagine a more colourful life than that of Maxim Gorky, and that is not only due to his involvement in some of the 20th century’s most dramatic events, or his complex relationships with Lenin and Stalin. Born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on 16 March 1868 in the bustling Volga port of Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky led an extraordinary life almost from infancy.

Gorky’s maternal grandparents owned a small dyeworks in Nizhny, and after the death of his father, his mother abandoned the four-year-old Gorky to his grandparents’ care. The treatment he endured there was little short of child abuse, and soon after his mother’s death in 1879, Gorky, at the age of eleven, was sent out of the family home to earn his living.

The bare record of Gorky’s employment, over the next decade, makes fascinating reading – errand boy, birdcatcher, dishwasher on a Volga steamship, apprentice icon-painter, stevedore, bakery hand. During this time, Gorky sought constantly to expand his mental horizons, not only through books, but also people, engaging in the fierce political debate soon to bear fruit in revolution.

In that respect, Gorky’s experiences in Kazan were particularly formative. Gorky had gone there in the autumn of 1884, in the hope of entering the university, and though he failed to gain admission, he succeeded in mixing with a wide range of people, including political radicals, the future Bolshevik wing of the Social Democrats. Gorky was unhappy in Kazan, however, and tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the heart on 12 December 1887, at the age of nineteen. Fortunately, he missed his aim, but the bullet pierced his lung, leaving him permanently prone to ill health.

The following spring, working in a provincial village bakery, Gorky took a more active role in politics, joining a moderate reform group committed to raising peasant consciousness. The experience left him with a deep distrust of the peasantry, and he soon gave up the struggle to embark on a lengthy trek through South Russia. At Tsaritsyn in 1889, working as a railway nightwatchman, Gorky came under the spell of Tolstoy, and went so far as to write to the great man, begging him for land on which to create a ‘Tolstoyan’ utopian commune. He received no reply, and a visit to Tolstoy’s estate proved equally fruitless.

Gorky then returned to his home town of Nizhny, now a focus of radical politics, and was immediately placed under police surveillance. He was imprisoned for a time, and only his damaged lung prevented his conscription into the army. In April 1891, Gorky left Nizhny to begin another cross-country odyssey, stocking his capacious mind with the people and places which would soon nourish his writing.

At Tiflis (Tbilisi) in Georgia, Gorky’s first short story, Makar Chudra, appeared in a local newspaper on 12 September 1892, under his nom de plume, ‘Maxim Gorky’, i.e. ‘Maxim the Bitter’. Within a few months, his stories were appearing in the prestige Moscow News, and in February 1895 he joined the Samara Gazette as a columnist. There he married a proofreader, Yekaterina Volzhina, and in 1897, following the birth of their son Maxim, Gorky again returned to Nizhny.

Gorky’s literary fortunes now took a dramatic upturn, with the publication in Moscow of Sketches and Stories. He also published his first novel, Foma Gordeyev, at this time, manifesting not only his loathing of the petty bourgeois world of provincial Nizhny, but also his disillusionment with the politics of reform. Gorky dedicated the novel to Chekhov, who privately found it tedious, but the two men met in Yalta in March 1899, which was the beginning of what would prove one of his most cherished friendships. In December 1900, Tsarist troops crushed a student revolt in Kiev, and conscripted the alleged ringleaders into the army. Gorky joined a protest march in Kazan, and was once more arrested and briefly imprisoned. Meanwhile, The Petty Bourgeois, written at the urging of Chekhov, was already taking shape, to go into rehearsal at the Moscow Art Theatre.

In February 1902, Gorky was elected to the Russian Academy. When the news reached the Tsar, he forced the Academy to reverse its decision, and Chekhov resigned his own membership in protest. Gorky continued regardless, and his next play, The Lower Depths, was a spectacular triumph for the Moscow Art Theatre, a benchmark for theatrical realism. In the play that followed, Summerfolk, Gorky’s impatience at the slowness of reform was too openly expressed for his new friends at the Art Theatre, and Summerfolk was accordingly premièred by Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s company in St Petersburg in November 1904.

Gorky was meanwhile becoming ever more embroiled in radical politics, and a few months later, the infamous events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ were to determine the future course of his life. On Sunday, 9 January 1905, an Orthodox priest, Father Gapon, led a peaceful march of St Petersburg factory workers to the Winter Palace to deliver a petition. Nicholas II refused to meet them, and Cossack troops charged the unarmed demonstrators, leaving many hundreds dead and wounded.

Gorky published a furious denunciation of the government, which led to his imprisonment. Following widespread condemnation, however, at home and abroad, the authorities were forced to release him. Gorky used his brief sojourn in prison to some purpose, and emerged on 14 February with a new play, Children of the Sun, all but completed.

Gorky’s first meeting with Lenin took place in St Petersburg in November 1905, and although they disagreed on some crucial issues, Gorky was becoming increasingly identified with the Bolsheviks. When they called a general strike a few days later in Moscow, he helped distribute weapons to the strikers. The government response was to call in the artillery, and the insurrection was swiftly put down. At that point, Gorky decided to flee the country.

He also had personal reasons, having left his wife for the actress Maria Andreyeva, and the two arrived in New York on 10 April 1906. Gorky’s plan was to campaign against the Tsarist government’s appeal for aid in the aftermath of its ruinous war with Japan, and at the same time raise money for the Bolsheviks. In the event, he succeeded in neither. Given a hero’s welcome initially, the instant it was discovered that Maria Andreyeva was not Gorky’s wife the pair were unceremoniously ejected from their New York hotel. Thanks to the generosity of a wealthy intellectual couple, Gorky spent the summer months in the Adirondacks, where he completed another play, Enemies, and his proto-Socialist-Realist novel Mother. On 13 October 1906, he left New York for Naples, and on to the island of Capri, which was to be his home for the next seven years.

During these years, closer acquaintance with Lenin failed to resolve the differences between the two, and as the Russian economy entered a new period of growth, Gorky felt increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for change. Thus it was with mixed emotions that he returned to Russia at the end of 1913, taking advantage of Nicholas II’s proclamation of an amnesty. Back in St Petersburg, Gorky devoted his energies to political journalism, often as the voice of reason. He genuinely feared a return to barbarism, and frequently attacked the Bolsheviks in his newspaper, New Life, comparing them to mad scientists. Lenin’s response, after the October Revolution, which put the Bolsheviks in power, was to close Gorky’s newspaper down. Despite that, Gorky made heroic efforts to moderate the worst excesses of the new regime and, during the Civil War, he saved the lives of hundreds of artists and writers, whose only source of income was the work Gorky provided through cultural projects like his World Literature publishing house.

Sadly, Lenin was no more tolerant of dissent than Nicholas II, and Gorky viewed with dismay the growing power of the Cheka, the secret police, which was to change its name many times – OGPU, NKVD, MVD, KGB – but not its nature, or sinister purpose. Ill health forced him to return to Italy in the spring of 1924 – in a sense suspended between two worlds: he was a committed socialist, who despised Western capitalism, but had nothing in common with the other emigré Russians. However, his decision to return to his homeland, now in the control of Lenin’s successor Stalin, was not easily taken, and he required a great deal of persuading.

Stalin’s motives for urging his return seem clear enough – a Gorky within his clutches could at the very least be silenced, and might even be recruited to add his voice to the sycophantic chorus. Gorky’s motives are more complex – financial, no doubt, but anxiety over the future of his son Maxim may also have influenced him. The young Maxim’s friends in high places would come to include the secret police, one of whose agents became Gorky’s personal secretary – proof of the extent of Stalin’s network of spies and informers. Gorky was also vain enough to believe that he could guide Stalin back to the true path, and, initially, Stalin took care not to disabuse him. A key stage in the process was the official proclamation in 1927, affirming Gorky’s status as a great proletarian writer. Even so, although Gorky visited the Soviet Union in 1928 and 1929, he did not return as a permanent resident until 1931.

Stalin had baited the trap well, and Gorky was understandably flattered by the sheer number of cultural projects which Stalin now placed under his direction. However, he was soon to discover that his power was illusory, and the last three years of his life, spent as Stalin’s ‘superintendent of writers’, have done untold damage to his reputation. The nadir was reached when he was persuaded to extol the ‘humanity’ of the labour camp regime, as well as Stalin’s brutal collectivisation programme.

Remarkably, Gorky’s own writing appears to have suffered little. His epic family saga, The Life of Klim Sanghin, remained unfinished, but he managed to complete three new plays, as well as revising his 1910 play Vassa Zheleznova. Other writers fared less well, as the new Writers’ Union, at whose first Congress in 1934 Gorky gave the keynote speech, rapidly became an instrument of State tyranny.

Gorky was a virtual prisoner for the last year of his life. The death of his son Maxim in 1934 affected him deeply, and his secretary Kriuchkov, in the pay of the NKVD, now became his jailer, denying him all contact, especially with visitors from the West. Later, the NKVD chief Yagoda and Kriuchkov, along with the doctors who attended Gorky in his final illness, were charged with conspiring to murder both Gorky and Maxim, and summarily executed.

Gorky died in Moscow on 18 June 1936, officially from influenza, though rumours persist that Stalin ordered the writer’s death, through the novelettish device of a gift of poisoned chocolates. What is certain is that Stalin used Gorky to the bitter end, even beyond the grave, and the writer’s hapless physicians, falsely accused, were only the first of many thousands about to be swept up in the worst purges of Stalin’s reign. Indeed, as late as 1953, the infamous ‘Doctors’ Plot’, markedly anti-semitic in character, revived the same fiction, and a new wave of purges was only forestalled by the dictator’s own death.

Summerfolk: What Happens in the Play

The play opens in the Basovs’ rented summer holiday home, with the lawyer Basov and his wife Varya in faintly bored conversation about various friends and relatives, the main topic of interest being the anticipated visit of a noted writer, Shalimov. Another holidaymaker, Suslov, an engineer, arrives to relay some gossip about the lawyer’s assistant Zamyslov. Varya’s younger brother Vlas then appears, to inform Suslov that his old uncle Dvoetochie, newly arrived in the village, is searching for him. Zamyslov is the next caller, and after correcting the details of the gossip, he leaves along with Basov and Suslov. Vlas meanwhile, exhausted, and working on legal papers for his brother-in-law, sidesteps his sister’s inquiries about his future with some facetious verses, and turns the talk to her own unhappy situation. Varya expresses her discontent with the empty lives they all seem to be leading, but looks forward to the forthcoming visit of Shalimov, the writer.

Basov’s sister Kaleria then arrives, and Vlas teases her about her literary pretensions. Kaleria informs Varya that she has just met Ryumin, who is reportedly in love with Varya, and they discuss the nature of his feelings. Olga Alexeyevna, the wife of Dr Dudakov, also renting a holiday dacha, then rushes in with a wearisome tale of domestic chaos, until she is interrupted by the emergence from the woods of Yulia Filippovna, Marya Lvovna, who is also a doctor, and her teenage daughter Sonya, along with Zamyslov and Ryumin. With little else to do, the dacha dwellers pass their time in philosophical argument and mild flirtation. Ryumin heatedly maintains his right to ignore unpleasant realities, in favour of the beautiful illusion, a view which Varya challenges. Dudakov then arrives to take his wife Olga home, complaining bitterly about his heavy professional commitments. Finally, Kaleria is persuaded to recite her latest prose poem, and does so with impressive solemnity, leaving her listeners for once silenced. At this point, the eagerly-awaited writer Shalimov enters, and the curtain falls.

Act Two begins with a discussion between two local peasants about the summer guests in their midst, and their strange entertainments. Suslov and Dvoetochie then appear, chatting about the latter’s plans for the future, while various other holidaymakers drift in and out. The writer Shalimov is among them, still smarting, he tells Basov, after an encounter with Marya Lvovna, who is determined to display her superior intellect. While the younger set go off boating, Shalimov complains that he no longer recognises his readership in the modern Russia. Basov, however, is more concerned about his wife’s persistent unhappiness, and naively invites Shalimov to flirt with her to cheer her up. Later, the unhappy Varya finds herself advising Dudakov’s wife to leave her husband, but Olga’s resentment of Varya’s ostensibly comfortable life wells up, and she finally accuses her of having had herself sterilised. Varya is furiously angry and asks Olga to leave.

Dvoetochie next appears, to take Varya out for a stroll, and while waiting, he has an amusing encounter with one of the amateur actors who are assembling for a rehearsal on the open-air stage. Varya, Ryumin and Kaleria emerge from the Basovs’ villa, in heated conversation about the absent Marya Lvovna, and her overbearing self-righteousness. Varya defends her, before heading off with Dvoetochie and Shalimov, gloomily observed by the jealous Ryumin. As they go out, Suslov catches sight of his wife, Yulia Filippovna, sharing an intimate moment with Zamyslov, and an ugly row ensues between the pair. Basov and Dudakov then appear, accompanied by Marya Lvovna, still expatiating on the duties of the Russian writer, and Shalimov’s shortcomings in that role.

As the two men go off to fish, Marya Lvovna encounters her daughter Sonya and Vlas, who strikes an answering chord in Marya with his confession of intense disillusionment over their empty lives. For much of the play’s length, small groups of characters drift in and out, and Varya, Shalimov and Yulia Filippovna are next to be heard debating the question of platonic love, before they are interrupted by Basov, who rushes in to tell his wife that he has just witnessed Vlas kissing Marya Lvovna’s hands. Basov is also keen to relay some gossip about Shalimov, but Varya silences him, as the amateur theatricals are about to begin.

Act Three opens with the company enjoying a picnic. Varya, sitting apart with Yulia Filippovna and Kaleria, is reminiscing about her childhood, and the hard life her mother endured to provide an education for her. Kaleria advises her to leave her husband, and Yulia Filippovna talks about her own unhappy marriage to Suslov. Shalimov then detaches Varya from her companions, and the pair go for a walk.

While the younger set amuse themselves by the river, Vlas tells Marya Lvovna that he is in love with her. She is shocked, insisting that she is too old for him. Later, Marya Lvovna tells Varya everything, including the fact that she is also in love with Vlas. Varya at first encourages her, but an ill-judged remark about Vlas’ need for a mother brings Marya Lvovna to her senses. Scarcely has she left, than Ryumin arrives, and after some hesitation, declares his love for Varya. She rejects him, though he insists that she is his only hope of inspiration to lead a worthwhile life.

Wine has loosened everyone’s tongue, and the various pairings discuss their feelings more openly. Dudakov and Olga appear once again reconciled to their chaotic domestic life, while Zamyslov and Yulia Filippovna unrepentantly pursue their affair. Suslov meanwhile outlines his own bleak philosophy of life to Ryumin. His contempt for almost everyone is plain, but especially so for his wife’s lover Zamyslov. Yulia Filippovna then bizarrely produces a revolver and threatens to shoot both Suslov and herself, before passing the incident off as a joke.

The act continues with a series of conversational vignettes – Dvoetochie jovial as ever, Basov, emboldened by the wine, even more foolishly indiscreet, and Shalimov, like Ryumin, declaring his love for the beleaguered Varya, who rejects him, however, voicing her disillusionment with the kind of man he has become, so different from the bold writer she once hero-worshipped. Finally, Sonya endeavours to persuade her mother, Marya Lvovna, to take the lovelorn Vlas into their family – not as a lover, but as a son.

At the beginning of Act Four, Vlas is still professing his love for Marya Lvovna, though she begs him to forget her. Basov, a chance witness to this scene, scoffs openly at their affair, much to Varya’s disgust. Dvoetochie then arrives to say goodbye – Marya Lvovna, it seems, has convinced him to use his considerable fortune to build schools, and he is also taking Vlas to work with him. A little later, Olga tries to patch up her quarrel with Varya, but the latter is in no mood to be conciliatory. Next, Kaleria attempts to elicit Shalimov’s opinion of her literary efforts, but his interest is clearly feigned. Varya, in an untypically fierce outburst, then attacks the ‘summer folk’ for their empty, useless lives. Marya Lvovna adds her voice to Varya’s, calling on educated people like themselves to remember their working-class origins. Kaleria’s poetic recitation then comes almost as a relief, but Vlas wickedly satirises their pretensions with some verses of his own. Suslov then rounds on Marya Lvovna, whom he sees as responsible for encouraging Vlas’ impudence.

As the emotional temperature rises, Ryumin storms off into the woods, and a pistol shot rings out, unnoticed by the warring factions. Varya then overhears her husband and Shalimov making offensive remarks about the servile role of women, and is profoundly sickened. When the nightwatchmen bring in the wounded Ryumin, who has tried, and failed, to commit suicide, Varya announces her intention to leave Basov for good, and spend the remainder of her life working against these idle parasites, and everything they represent. The last word, though, belongs to the disillusioned writer Shalimov, to the effect that it’s all meaningless anyway.

Gorky the Dramatist

Gorky’s dramatic output is considerable, some fifteen full-length plays, though relatively few, among them The Lower Depths (1902), Vassa Zheleznova (1910), and Yegor Bulychov and Others (1931), have securely established themselves in the Russian repertoire. Remarkably, his first essay in the form, The Lower Depths, was staged after what was in fact his second play, The Petty Bourgeois, which the Moscow Art Theatre premièred in St Petersburg in March 1902.

From the authorities’ point of view, The Petty Bourgeois was dangerously subversive, with its thinly veiled contempt for the middle-class establishment, and it was passed by the Tsarist censorship for four performances only, while the theatre itself was ringed by police. By the time of its Moscow première that same autumn, Gorky was in exile in remote Arzamas, using his enforced leisure to rewrite The Lower Depths, which opened at the Moscow Art Theatre on 18 December 1902.

The spectacular triumph of The Lower Depths took everyone by surprise. Within months it was being performed all over the world, and it had sold 35,000 copies by the end of the year. Yet it is in many ways a flawed play, rambling and episodic, its semi-allegorical figures often caught up in an exchange of monologues, a technique Gorky perhaps learned from Chekhov, without the latter’s arrow-straight sense of purpose and economy.

Chekhov exerts a more direct influence on Gorky’s next play, Summerfolk (1904), which is heavily indebted to both The Cherry Orchard, and The Seagull, and is the first of four plays expressing Gorky’s disillusionment with the liberal intelligentsia. Throughout these plays, which include Children of the Sun (1905), Barbarians (1906), and Enemies (1906), Gorky presents a privileged elite, who talk endlessly about the need for change, but are either powerless or unwilling to effect it. Strangely, given the success of The Lower Depths, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko demurred over accepting Summerfolk – too close to home, it would seem – and it was first produced by Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s company in St Petersburg in November 1904, when it was received by many as a political declaration of intent, aligning Gorky with the Social Democrats.

That remains its weakness, and in that respect, Children of the Sun (1905) is much more even-handed, and the class divisions are blurred by the presence of genuinely caring individuals among the intelligentsia. Children of the Sun was premièred by Komissarzhevskaya in St Petersburg, on 12 October 1905, though the Moscow Art Theatre also staged it a few days later. Barbarians, set in a provincial town resembling Arzamas, Gorky’s place of exile in 1902, takes as its theme the conflict between Russia’s agricultural economy and modern industrial capitalism, but its large cast of now familiar types excited little interest from either of Gorky’s main theatres, and was premièred in Riga, in March 1906.

Following his involvement in the Moscow insurrection of December 1905, Gorky was forced to leave Russia, and his next play, Enemies (1906), was written in upstate New York. Its open declaration of class war had his sterner critics suggesting that he was now a mere mouthpiece for the Bolsheviks, and Enemies was not performed in Russia until 1933. Gorky continued to write for the theatre, even in exile, but his next play, The Last Ones (1908), also fell foul of the censorship, because of its unflattering portrayal of the Tsarist police. Interestingly, among the plays of Gorky’s last years, Somov and Others (1931), which treats the infamous 1929 show trials of alleged industrial saboteurs, is now viewed as tainted by Gorky’s portrayal of the keen-eyed hawks of the OGPU, Stalin’s secret police.

At this point in his career, however, the focus of Gorky’s drama shifts away from the intelligentsia, to the provincial merchant class, that dark power in the land, so well documented in the plays of Ostrovsky, over half a century earlier. The outstanding play of this phase is Vassa Zheleznova (1910), which was awarded the Griboyedov Prize by the Society of Russian Dramatists. Its heady mix of greed, jealousy and murder, centred on the efforts of a ruthless widow to secure her family’s future, gripped Gorky’s imagination sufficiently for him to rewrite it in 1935. Between the two versions, however, Socialist Realism had taken root in Russian culture, and the revised Vassa Zheleznova embodies a clearer message, including a new character, Vassa’s daughter-in-law, a revolutionary socialist.

Gorky returned from exile at the beginning of 1914, to the political turmoil preceding Russia’s entry into the Great War. As a pacifist, he naturally opposed Russia’s involvement, but when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk finally took Russia out of the war, Gorky saw it as a shameful betrayal. His polemical energies were better expressed in his journalism, however, and his plays of the Soviet period deal only rarely with the issues of the day.

Gorky was also out of touch with formal developments in the theatre, and as early as 1901, Chekhov had criticised The Petty Bourgeois for being old-fashioned. The innovations of directors like Tairov and Meyerhold thus passed Gorky by, as had those of the Symbolists earlier in his career. The Zykovs (1914) and The Old Man (1919) were staged in Petrograd, soon after the beginning of the Civil War, but neither was particularly successful.

Ironically, while the reactionary return to ‘realism’ in the arts worked to Gorky’s advantage, his last great play, Yegor Bulychov and Others (1932), owes much of its power to its symbolism, and the slow process of Bulychov’s death from cancer takes place in the context of February 1917, the first stirrings of the revolution which will sweep away not only his mercantile empire, but his entire world. Surrounded by his rapacious family, however, Bulychov is almost ready to welcome the revolution, but regrets the destruction of everything he has created. The theme of betrayal dominates Gorky’s later work, and the play’s true subject is perhaps Stalin’s perversion of the ideals Gorky tried unsuccessfully to sustain.

Dostigaev and Others (1933) may be seen as a sequel of sorts, dealing as it does with the disintegration of a bourgeois family following the Bolshevik revolution. Finally, in addition to Vassa Zheleznova, Gorky also reworked The Zykovs, and The Last Ones, from the period of his exile on Capri. Thematically, his concern is the familiar death of idealism, but The Zykovs is noteworthy for what appears to be an oblique portrayal of Stalin, in the guise of a vicious estate manager.

Gorky’s writing for the theatre is so bound up with the political events of his day, that is almost impossible to judge it fairly as drama, and any defence of his commitment to the social purpose of art nowadays sounds like special pleading. However, in Gorky’s best plays, the power of his characterisation, and the vigour of his dialogue more than compensate for an occasionally uncertain grasp of structure, while the contradictions of his personality emerge as fascinating ambiguity, challenging audience and performers alike.

Summerfolk: ‘A Well-Aimed Shot’