9. Maxim Gorky’s Childhood Beyond Good and Evil

In the monotony of everyday existence grief comes as a holiday, and a fire is an entertainment. A scratch embellishes an empty face

Maxim Gorky: My Childhood

Maxim Gorky (the pen name of Aleksey Maximovich Peshkov,1868-1936) was born in Nizhny Novgorod into a lower urban middle class family. His father died of cholera when Gorky was three, and his mother brought him back to stay with her parents, the Kashirins. But in 1879, when he was eleven, his mother died from consumption, and his grandfather, his dyeing business having fallen on hard times, put him out into the world to seek his own livelihood. Thus began Gorky’s wandering years across southern Russia, eking out a living as a menial labourer and gaining a first-hand knowledge of the Russian people at large. Though he had received some religious instruction at his grandparents’ place, he was by temperament totally set against formal instruction. His grandmother introduced him to the Russian oral folk tradition, his grandfather, his mother and, later on, an old cook on a Volga steamer taught him how to read and write. It did not take long before Gorky turned into an avid reader. But when his grandmother died in 1887, followed by his grandfather’s death in the same year, Gorky tried to commit suicide. It was only by chance that somebody heard the shot in the forest and thus saved Gorky’s life. In 1889, with the help of the writer Vladimir Korolenko, Gorky was able to break into Russian literature and, by the end of the nineties, he was a recognized writer in Moscow and St. Petersburg after the literary success of his stories “Chelkash” (1895), “Creatures that Once Were Men” (1897), “Twenty-six Men and a Girl” (1899) and his novel Foma Gordeev (1899). Gorky’s romantic stories established his literary reputation because they championed the underdog and the social outcast and thereby broke the traditional mold of nineteenth-century Russian literature. His sympathies with social outcasts, fruit of his wanderings across Russia, were also expressed in his play The Lower Depths (1902) which established his international reputation. 84 The Time before Death

His social experiences and inclinations pushed him increasingly in the direction of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. In 1900 he became a member of the collective publishing house Znanie which had a realistic and social focus, and in the following year he published his revolutionary “Song of the Stormy Petrel”. It was also natural for him to support the Revolution of 1905 and in the same year to join the Bolshevik Party. In 1906 Gorky went to the U.S. to collect money in support of the Bolshevik Party and, while there, he wrote what was to become his most famous revolutionary novel Mother. Though it became over time an ideological prototype for the proletarian novels of the 1920s and for the socialist realist novels of the 1930s, it was, ironically, more religious in essence than revolutionary. On account of the political reaction in Russia that followed the Revolution of 1905, Gorky did not return to Russia but settled instead on the island of Capri. This first exile in the West was also a time when he was drawn to religious and mystical ideas, an experience which found its expression in his novel A Confession (1908). It might be helpful at this point to remind ourselves that there was always a profound religious and spiritual side to Gorky. This explains why he tried to establish a school on Capri for Russian proletarians to promote the idea of what has been called “God-building” (bogosroitel’stvo) with its belief in the basic goodness of man and in his potential to transform the dreadful social conditions especially of Russian life which Gorky had experienced firsthand. F. M. Borras has given us a lucid description of what God-building meant to Gorky:

The fundamental position of the God-builders was that the idea of God was necessary to mankind, but that God, as presented by all established religions, had failed them, and that it was therefore time to create a new God; this new God would not bear the character of a divine being who created men in His image, but would instead be created by men out of the noblest qualities of which throughout the ages humanity had shown itself capable. The resultant composite figure would provide a model of perfection to which all individual men must aspire in their behaviour on earth …1

He lived in Italy until 1913 when a royal amnesty, celebrating three hundred years of Romanov rule, allowed him to return to Russia. It was also in 1913 that he published Childhood, the first and the best volume of an autobiographical trilogy whose second volume In the World came out in 1916 and the third, My University Years, in 1922.

1 F. M. Borras, Maxim Gorky the Writer. An Interpretation (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 55.