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Maxim Gorky's Polemic with Dostoevsky1

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Maxim Gorky's Polemic with Dostoevsky1 In the Interests of social Pedagogy: Maxim Gorky’s Polemic with Dostoevsky1 I remember an expressive gesture of Aleksey Maksimovich during a conversation about Dostoevsky. The talk was about the integral and monumental character of the novelist- tragedian’s work, about the verbal magic of his genius. Gorky sat silently, listening, and suddenly, threatening somebody with his fist, said: “Thus do various gracious sovereigns in Moscow convince themselves and others that Gorky doesn’t give a brass farthing for Dostoevsky”—and Gorky cast his head upwards, frozen in prayerful ecstasy—“that’s how he looks upon Dostoevsky.” —A. A. Zolatarev, Gorky, Denizen of Capri Three things may be said about the lifelong polemic of Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) with Dostoevsky. First, it had deep psychological roots in a confrontation with aspects of his own nature; overcoming Dostoevsky, for Gorky, was a process of self-overcoming. Second, this process of self-overcoming became linked with a central effort of Gorky’s literary and cultural writings—the task of overcoming Russian history, the painful legacy of violence and disorder in Russian man and life, all that he once called “our most implacable enemy—our past.”2 And third, this overcoming ultimately took on the dimensions of a struggle between worldviews, a struggle, as Gorky conceived it, over whether man is good or evil. “It is clear and comprehensible to the point of obviousness,” Dostoevsky wrote in a review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “that 1 From Robert Louis Jackson, Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 121-133. 2 M. Gor’kii, Novaia zhizn’ 5, April 23, 1917, in M. Gor’kii, Nesvoevremennye mysli. Stat’i 1917–1918, ed. G. Ermolaev (Paris, 1917), 29. Hereafter this work will be referred to as Nesvoevremennye mysli. 262 Critical Perspectives evil is more deeply rooted in mankind than the socialist quacks believe.”3 Gorky’s greatest fear, we suggest, was that Dostoevsky was right; a good deal of his life was spent trying to prove him wrong. One of Gorky’s lively concerns in the period between the upheavals of 1905 and 1917 was that Russian intellectual and cultural consciousness would get bogged down in what he regarded as the moral-psychological turmoil of Dostoevsky’s novels, and in particular in the ideology of that “preacher of passivism and social indifference,” Dostoevsky.4 Gorky, like many of his contemporaries, did not clearly distinguish between Dostoevsky and his heroes and heroines, between the artist-thinker and his complex statement, and the world he sought to decipher in his art. Thus, in a letter to the editor of Russkoe slovo in 1913, one accompanying his first article of protest “About Karamazovism,” against the staging of Dostoevsky’s The Devils (Besy, 1870), Gorky wrote, “I am deeply convinced that preaching from the stage Dostoevsky’s sick ideas can only further unsettle the already unhealthy nerves of society.”5 In his article, Gorky speaks out against the Moscow Art Theater’s announced plan to stage what he calls the “sadistic and sick” novel The Devils.6 The Moscow Art Theater earlier in 1910 had staged The Brothers Karamazov; it was now preparing a new Dostoevsky production under the title “Nikolai Stavrogin.” Gorky’s concern is frankly social and utilitarian in character. “Does Russian society,” he asks, “think that the depiction on stage of events and people described in the novel The Devils is necessary and useful and in the interests of social pedagogy?”7 “About Karamazovism” aroused a storm of indignation, inclu- ding charges of censorship. In a reply, “Once Again About ‘Karamazo- 3 Dostoevskii, PSS, 25:201. 4 Gor’kii, Istoriia russkoi literatury, ed. I.D. Ladyzhnikov et al (Moscow: Khodozhestvennaia literatura, 1939), 276. 5 Cited by the editors in their commentary on Gorky’s “O ‘karamazovshchine,’” in Gor’kii, O literature. Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i, ed. N. P. Zhdanovskii and A. I. Ovcharenko (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1953), 836. Hereafter references to Gorky’s two articles on “Karamazovism” will refer to O literature. 6 Ibid., 151. 7 Ibid. In the Interests of social Pedagogy: Maxim Gorky’s Polemic with Dostoevsky 263 vism,’” Gorky defended his position, arguing vigorously for society’s right to protest against the “tendencies of Dostoevsky and in general against any artist whatever his preachment.”8 At the same time, he insisted that “Gorky is not against Dostoevsky but against his novels being put on stage.”9 Gorky’s effort to join issues of social pedago- gy with questions of esthetics throws light on his own ambivalent attitude toward Dostoevsky. “As gestures, on the stage of a theater,” Gorky argues, “an author’s thoughts are not so clear.” Impoverished by cuts, Dostoevsky’s novels will emerge on stage as “nothing but nervous convulsions.”10 Gorky is especially preoccupied with the pictorial representation of Dostoevsky’s world. In the opening paragraph of his first article, he questions the significance of showing “pictures” from The Devils. The Moscow Art Theater, he writes, proposes to present Dostoevsky’s ideas “in images.” “Do we need this mutilating ‘performance’?”11 “This ‘performance’ is doubtful esthetically and unconditionally harmful in a social sense.”12 Thus, in staging Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1868)— a work produced by another Russian theater at the time—one witnesses in the foreground the “agony of the tubercular Ippolit, the epilepsy of Prince Myshkin, the cruelty of Rogozhin, the histrionics of Nastasya Filippovna, and other instructive pictures of all kinds of illness of body and spirit.”13 “Pictures,” “images,” “performance”—for Gorky, all this visual representation constitutes a disfiguration of the written work, “nervous convulsions.” In his second article, Gorky expands on his esthetic argument. He distinguishes between “reading the books of Dostoevsky” and “seeing images of him on the stage.”14 Reading, for Gorky, is not a passive performance. In reading the books of Dostoevsky, the attentive reader perceives the “reactionary tendency of Dostoevsky and all his 8 Ibid., 155. 9 Ibid., 156. 10 Ibid., 154. 11 Ibid., 153. 12 Ibid., 154. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 156. 264 Critical Perspectives contradictions.”15 He can “correct the thoughts of his heroes as a result of which they significantly gain in beauty, depth and humanity. But when a person is shown an image of Dostoevsky on the stage, even in an exceptionally talented performance, the skill of the artist, enhancing the talent of Dostoevsky, imparts to his images a particular significance and a decisive finality.”16 Gorky’s article has its subtleties. He acknowledges that the Dostoevsky novel as text, even one as tendentious as The Devils essentially does not offer a one-sided view of reality, come up with absolute conclusions. The novel of Dostoevsky read as text, he suggests, is open, or in the language used later on by Bakhtin, “dialogical.” The stage representation of a Dostoevsky novel, on the other hand, “carries the viewer away from the sphere of thought, one freely admitting argument, to the sphere of suggestions, hypnosis, to the dark region of the peculiar Karamazov-like emotions and feelings, emphasized and concentrated with malicious pleasure.” “On the stage the audience sees man created by Dostoevsky in the image of ‘a wild and evil animal.’”17 The Moscow Art Theater, “this gloomy institution,” Gorky wrote in the same vein to I. P. Ladyzhnikov August 29, 1913, “exhibits the naked Dostoevsky.”18 The sense of Gorky’s argument is ambiguous: On the one hand, he suggests that a stage performance distorts or narrows Dostoevsky’s novelistic universe through naturalistic or visual stage representation; on the other hand, he suggests that a stage representation brings out precisely Dostoevsky’s naked truth, that is, the notion that man is “a wild and evil animal.” The distinction between the novelist Dostoevsky’s truth and the naked Dostoevsky’s truth is one that is central to Gorky’s approach to his antagonist. It takes different forms in his writing. Thus, Lyutov, in The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936) at one point outlines the theory that the Russian people only want the kind of freedom that is given by priests: the freedom to commit 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 158. 17 Ibid. 18 Quoted by B. A. Bialik in “Dostoevskii i dostoevshchina v otsenkakh Gor’kogo,” in Tvorchestvo Dostoevskogo, ed. M. L. Stepanov, et al. (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1959), 68. In the Interests of social Pedagogy: Maxim Gorky’s Polemic with Dostoevsky 265 terrible sins in order to become frightened, and then find peace within themselves. “A strange theory . ,” remarks Turoboev, adding after a moment of apparent inner uncertainty and debate, “All the same, this is Dostoevsky. If not according to his thoughts, then according to his spirit . .”19 Lyutov’s theory, in short, is not in accord with Dostoevsky’s thoughts, that is, all that we may ascertain from a reading of his novels. This theory, according to Gorky, does find support in the world of Dostoevsky’s characters’ experiences and thoughts; a realm in which Dostoevsky, Gorky believed, invested his deepest fears and anguish; a domain, in Gorky’s view, where we encounter precisely the “spirit” of Dostoevsky, the “naked Dostoevsky,” the “permanent terror” of Dostoevsky, all that that writer sought to come to grips with through religion, but in reality, only “justified.” “Dostoevsky has been called ‘a seeker of truth,’” Gorky observed in a speech before the First All- Union Congress of Soviet Writers August 17, 1934. “If he searched for truth he found it in the bestial, animal element in man, and he found it not in order to refute it, but in order to justify it.”20 We are here at the core of Gorky’s polemic with Dostoevsky, one linked with Gorky’s despair over Russian history and brutalized Russian man, and his desire to redeem Russian man from the chaos of his past.
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