I’ve decided to tell in this spot about Aleksei
Maksimovich Peshlo- Maksim Gorky.
I first met Gorky in 1915, at the office of the Annals. He was tall, withy close-cropped hair – a little stooped,
blue-eyes, very strong-looking.
Before I say anything else about Gorky, I must say that Aleksi Maksimovich
saved my life several times. He interceded for me with Sverdlov* and gave me
money when I was about to die, and, toward the end, my life in St. Pete was
spent among several enterprises that he created.
I am writing this not as a character sketch of the
man, but as a fact of my own biography.
I was often at Gorky’s place.
I’m a witty man and I love other peoples’ jokes. At Gorky’s place we laughed a lot.
There was a special conversational tone – a special attitude towards life. An ironic non-recognition of it.
Something on the order of the tone of conversation
with the stepmother in Tolstoy’s Boyhood.
Gorky has an article in The New Life
about a French officer who saw that his unit had been decimated and who cried
out in the heat of battle, ‘Rise from the dead!’
He was French and consequently believed in fine
words. And because many frightened soldiers had lain down during the battle and
couldn’t stand up because of the bullets, the dead did rise.
The French have sublime faith and no fear of
heroics. But we Russians died spouting curses. Both we and the French have a
fear of the ridiculous, but we Russians fear specially the grandiose and the
dashing.
And so we die with a laugh.
Gorky has had a long life. Of all the Russian writers, perhaps he alone used
characters with the dashing quality of Dumas’s heroes. And in his first
stories, the dead did rise.
Gorky’s bolshevism is ironic, a bolshevism without faith in man. By Bolshevism,
I don’t mean membership in a political party. Gorky never belonged to a party.
It’s impossible to lead the dead into battle, but you can line them up, cover
them with a little sand and use them for a roadbed.
I’ve gone off on a tangent, but everything that organizes an individual is
external to him. He’s only the point where lines of force intersect.
A nation, however, can be organized. The Bolsheviks believed that it’s the
design that matters, not the building material. They are willing to lose today,
to lose biographies, in order to win the stake of history.
They wanted to organize everything so that the sun would rise on schedule and
the weather would be made in their chancellery.
They couldn’t understand the anarchy of life, is subconscious, the fact that a
tree knows best how it should grow.
It’s easy too see how the Bolsheviks made the mistake of mapping out of a plan
for the whole world on paper.
At first, they believed that their formula didn’t conflict with life, that the
mainstream of life was the ‘spontaneous activity of the masses,’ but regulated
by their power.
A now their words lie in Russia like so many defunct
rhinoceros and mammoths – so many of them!- ‘the spontaneous activities of the
masses,’ ‘local power’ and that ichthyosaurus ‘peace without annexations and
reparations’. Now the children laugh at the dead, but not yet decayed,
monsters.
Gorky was a sincere Bolshevik.
The World Literature Publishing House – A Russian writer mustn’t write what he
wants to: he must translate the classics, all the classics: everyone must
translate and everyone must read. When everyone has red everything, he will
know everything.
No need for hundreds of publishing houses: one will do –Gezhebin’s – and this
one publishing house will need a catalogue projected to one hundred years – a
catalogue one hundred printer’s signatures long, in English, French,
Indo-Chinese and Sanskrit languages.
And all the literati and all the
writers, neatly classified and supervised by none other than S. Oldenburg and
Alexander Benois, will work from diagrams and then shelves of books will be
born and everyone will read all these books and everyone will know everything.
There’s no room in this scheme for either heroics or faith in people.
Why should the dead rise since everything will be organized for their benefit?
It wasn’t chance that brought Gorky and Lenin together.
But Gorky was the Noah of the Russian intelligentsia.
During the flood, people were saved in the arks of World Literature, the Grzhebin Publishing House and the House of Arts.
They were saved, not to make a counterrevolution, but so that literate people in Russia wouldn’t die out.
The Bolsheviks accepted these concentration camps
for the intelligentsia. They didn’t break them up.
Without these centers, the intelligentsia would have
degenerated and never done anything but hack work. Then the Bolsheviks would
have gotten those who hadn’t died – the dregs, but their property in every
sense of the words.
Consequently, Gorky was ideologically incorrect, but he was practically useful.
He had a way of organizing energetic people – of singling out the leftists. The
last group he organized before his departure in the fall of 1921 was the Serapion
Brothers. He has a very easy way with people.
Gorki has absolutely no faith in mankind.
Gorky doesn’t like everyone – just those who write well or work well . . .
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I guess I forgot to write about how we lived. I lived in a lawyer’s
bathroom, and when I couldn’t stay there, I settled in an apartment which
people had once used for hiding; now people arrived there bearing various
tidings, but they charged five rubles a night. Still, you could sleep. Hardly
anyone had any money. I was still getting paid by my unit. Hardly anyone had an
extra shirt.
And no one could figure out where the lice were coming from- such big ones!
The company was very fine. I remember one red-bearded former minister from
Belorussia. I don’t know his name; we just called him Belorussia. He was a very
fine man.
The Union got on everyone’s nerves. The party viewed its own military organization
with serious misgivings and the military organization felt the same way about
the party.
|People with any kind of connection joined the police
force. Things were serious now (Sept. 1918), since gangs of marauders armed with
machine guns were prowling the streets.
I attempted to work on a newspaper, but Pyotr Pilsky took it upon himself to correct my first review article. I took
offense and wouldn’t let him print it.
It was at the newspaper that I found out about the way Kolchak disbanded the National Conference in Ufa ( ending the
viable opposition of the Socialist Revolutionary Party to the Bolsheviks).
I was informed of this by a plump woman, wife of the publisher, who added, ‘That’s
right, the ran the others out. Serves them right. Good for the Bolsheviks.’
I fell on the floor in a faint. Completely out. For the first and only time in
my life, I fainted. I hadn’t realized that the fate of the Constitutional
Assembly meant so much to me.
By this time, the party had veered sharply to the left. You’d be walking down
the Kreshchatik and you’d meet a comrade.
‘What’s new?’
He’d answer: ‘Well, I’ve decided to recognize the
Soviet regime!’ And so joyfully.
There was more than one occasion when the civil war in Russia could have been stopped.
Of course, this can be blamed on the Bolsheviks. But they weren’t invented- they
were discovered.
And at our meetings, the right wing said: ‘Let’s try out hand at cultural work.’
In party jargon, this meant the same as the army command, ‘Stand in place and
smoke, if you want to.’
The ‘jig’ was up. It was ‘curtains’. You had to do something, so you did
something with no causal connection, or, to put it in our philological
terminology, something of another semantic norm.
I delivered a speech. My course wasn’t clear; I’m not quick to catch on. I too
am of another semantic norm- I’m like a samovar used to drive nails.
I said: ’Let’s recognize this triple-damned Soviet
regime! Like at the judgment of Solomon, let’s not demand half the baby. Let’s
give up the baby to strangers: only let him live!’
They shouted at me, ‘He’ll die; they’ll kill him.’
But what could I do? In this game, I could see only one move at a time.
The party repudiated its military organization. Herman proposed that the
organization be renamed the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly:
with that, he collected a few men and left for Odessa.
The others intended to head for the Don and fight with
Krasnov.
But I intended to head for Russia, to my dear, stern Petersburg.
Most people just fretted.
The Dardanelles were wide open. The Whites were waiting for the French; they believed in the allies.
And they didn’t believe, but a man with property has
to believe in something.
It was said that the French had already landed
in Odessa and blocked off part of the city with chairs. Those chairs marked the
territory of a new French colony and not even cats could get through.
It was said that the French had a violet ray with which they could blind the
Bolsheviks. Boris Mirsky wrote an article about this violet ray called ‘The
Sick Beauty.” The beauty was the old world, which needed to be cured with a
violet ray.
The Bolsheviks had never struck such terror as they did then. A somber draft
was blowing out of somber, empty Russia.
It was said that the English had already landed in Baku a herd of apes trained
in all the rules of warfare. The people who said this weren’t sick. It was said
that you couldn’t propagandize these apes , that they went into battle completely
without fear and that the could beat the Bolsheviks
People held their hands about two feet off the ground to indicate the size of
these apes. They said that when Baku was taken, one of these apes was killed and it
was buried with a band playing Scottish military music and the Scots cried.
That’s because the instructors of the ape legions were Scottish.
A somber draft was blowing out of Russia. The somber
spot called Russia was growing. The ‘sick beauty’ was delirious.
People were heading for Constantinople
If I don’t tell it here, then where else can I tell this fact?
* Sverdlov, Yakov Mikhaillovich ( 1885-1919). Chairman of the Central Executive
Committee of the Congress of Soviets and secretary of the Central Committee of
the Bolshevik Party. Died of Spanish flu.
