The Fortnightly Review/Volume 77/Maxim Gorky and the Russian Revolt
MAXIM GORKY AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLT.
St. Petersburg, March 13th, 1905.
The war between Tsar and people has degenerated precisely into that form of savagery which, writing a month ago, I ventured to predict. The much-advertised Revolution, I then declared, was outside the plans of Autocracy’s most sanguine enemies. There was a general recognition that, for the time being at least, the collective protest had been suppressed, and that the insuppressible individual would rule the situation for some time to come. But when I predicted that “popular wrath will probably effloresce in the shape of bombs,” I little expected that the prophecy would be fulfilled so soon, and that in the brief interval between the hour of writing these words and the day of publication, the assassination of the Grand Duke Sergius Alexandrovitch almost on the steps of his palace would come to disprove the old saying that in Russia nothing can be predicted. I take this assassination this month merely as a text. For immediate influence upon the internal situation it cannot be compared with the Mukden disaster, nor does it mark any definite constitutional stage as is marked by the Manifest to the nation, the Ukase to the Senate, and the Rescript to the Minister of Internal Affairs, Buluigin. But it has revealed as nothing else could do the psychological factors which underlie the present situation.
Dostoyevsky was responsible for the profound remark, “The Nihilists arose amongst us because we are all Nihilists.” Were he alive to-day, he would be tempted to say, “assassinations are committed because we are all assassins.” The epigram would be literally untrue, for only a fraction of Russia’s malcontents are capable of plotting or executing murder. But it would not be an unjust characterisation of the rejoicing over all forms of anarchical lawlessness which is taking place in Russia to-day. The advent of the new era of protest in which bombs were to take the place of processions, and bullets of resolutions, was welcomed with unaffected joy. Not one of the responsible Liberal leaders desired—or dared—to abjure the assassin’s method. The Press was dumb or acquiescent. The two most advanced newspapers in the capital invited suppression by approving silence. The most ably edited of all, the Rus, without a word of regret or condemnation, pointed out that under Prince Sviatopolk-Mirsky’s rule political assassination had ceased, and hinted plainly that it was normal and natural under the rule of General Trepoff. Even the responsible, propertied reformers, scorning the cheap credit to be gained by imitation of the Constitutionalist Oppositions of all other countries, refused flatly to repudiate their assassin allies. “We can no more repudiate the murder of Sergius,” said one of them in my presence, “than we could repudiate lightning or earthquakes. The deed is outside the domain of moral casuistry. It issued from certain conditions, and while those conditions continue, the issue will be repeated.”
The mass of society, not being responsible, as are newspapers and party leaders, hailed the murder with unconcealed joy. An elderly, highly-respectable, and humane lady in no way connected with Terrorism, to whom I happened first to communicate the details, had no word of comment save “A very neat job!” (Otchen lofko!). Everyone rejoiced that the effect would be far-reaching. Nicholas II. would be terrorised into submission. Sergius was only the first of a long series of removals. Uncles and cousins, at least one female relative, the Governor-General of St. Petersburg, one or two ministers—said the public delightedly—were on the list. So for days after the explosion at the Nikolskoi Gate, St. Petersburg discussed these reports of coming removals with the same naïve interest as they had displayed a few days before over the problem what would become of Grippenberg, whether it was true that M. Witte was under arrest in his house at Kamennoostrovskaya, and whether Dr. Botkin had really left Moscow in a special train to enquire into the state of General Kuropatkin’s mind. The vision of Nicholas II., deprived of all maternal, avuncular, ministerial support, throwing himself into the arms of his reconciled subjects, who should proceed to do with him as they would, became the sole topic of conversation, being enlivened only with stories of the Grand Duke X. leaving his palace attired as a nun, and of General Y. driving from his quarters on the Morskaya to Tsarskoselsky railway station in the security of a Red Cross van.
“There is a complete demoralisation of public opinion,” was the plaintive acquiescence of one of the Tsar’s ministers in my remark that the public was rejoicing over the Moscow explosion. And the public retort, “who were the demoralisers?” cannot be taken as valid. Even from the mere point of view of picturesqueness, it is a bad come down from “provisional governments,” “barricades on the Nevsky,” “strikers seizing gun shops,” and other revolutionary items telegraphed from St. Petersburg on January 22nd to reliance on the casual bomb as society’s deliverer. Surely, asked many, it is a confession of political ineffectiveness that the united protest of society has fallen into the background and been replaced amid general jubilation by the action of reckless and desperate individuals? Thoughtful Russians answered affirmatively. They lament that with all its radiant Liberal aspirations and zeal for self-sacrifice, society is soaked through and through with a sense of its own weakness and unfitness for heroic effort. “The general emasculation, sickliness, incapacity for deep, concentrated passion,” which the critic Dobroliuboff lamented in his countrymen a generation ago, has spread over the soil of popular discontent, in other lands fruitful of great, united deeds, like a choking, parasitical weed. It has killed that instinct for mastery and greed for success which, even in crises in which self-sacrifice are necessary, are the precedent conditions of leadership, with the characteristic result that the nearest approach to a popular hero among the malcontents—Father Gapon—is by origin an Italian or Jew. There are no men of the first rank, and as I pointed out last month, there is no great religious or intellectual movement to inspire the people in their fight against despotism. A negative discontent holds every mind; and search is vain, either in the literature or in the common mental currency of the people, for any great, fructifying idea. In Russia, as elsewhere, revolutions must be made by ideas. But beyond the vague desire to attain the personal liberty and licence existing under the institutions of Western Europe, ideas Russia has none.
The social languor thus diagnosed affects only the educated classes, or so-called “intelligents,” a class which must not be confounded with the “intellectuals” of other countries. The lower orders of Russians suffer from no social diseases, merely because they have no social existence. In initiative, zeal, resistance, no one expects anything from them. But how is it, all ask, that the rich, cultivated, personally fearless classes which have lately united in hatred for the autocracy have effected so little—a little which has never transgressed the limits of passive resistance and pious, condemnatory resolutions? How is it that they have come down to a despairing acquiescence in murder as the only instrument of salvation—to a reliance on a small knot of reckless men who possess what they possess not, brain to plot and nerve to execute? To answer these questions, though obliquely, I propose this month to deal in some detail with the recent writings and speech of the one Russian who, as an intruder in the intelligent class, regards it objectively; who, being outside all cliques and parties, is not afraid to tell the truth.
Towards the close of last year, the Dramatic Theatre of Madame Kommissarzhevskaya in this city was the scene of such extreme demonstrations of good—and ill—will, that the mild-mannered, paternal Prefect who then ruled St. Petersburg was forced to interdict further performances. The offending play was Maxim Gorky’s Datchniki. As a play, Datchniki was in no way remarkable. It observed faithfully the principle first embodied, I believe, in certain strange productions staged at the Moscow Art Theatre, that the object of the drama is to reflect what Russians call nastroenie, that is, a certain moral, spiritual atmosphere characteristic of some particular class or clique. Such vulgar out-of-date things as plots, character-delineation, the operations of destiny, even specific social problems, these modern Russian plays severely leave alone. Gorky’s earlier play, Miestchanye, had painted the manners and sentiment of the petits bourgeois of Russian towns. The purpose of Datchniki was to expose the manners and sentiments of the “intelligent” class; and this purpose it accomplished with a brutality and frankness which made the more sensitive half of the “intelligents” dance with wrath.
Datchniki (which a respectable St. Petersburg News Agency mistranslates The Suburbians) are known only to Russia. They are a product of climate. Nobody lives in the Russian capital (or in any other large city) in summer. But while the wealthy upper classes forsake their stucco palaces for remote country estates, the professional men, authors, actors, artists, and well-to-do traders migrate to tiny wooden summer houses in the forests around St. Petersburg or on the serene coast of Finland. The wooden houses are datchas, and their occupants for the time being datchniki. The genuine datchnik lives, eats, almost sleeps in the open air; shuns all the dissipations of metropolitan life; and renders a service to society similar to that rendered by the American “summer girl” and the British seaside “pater-familias,” in providing a background for antediluvian wit in the comic journals Budilnik and Schut. The average datchnoe mesto represents all the professions and trades of middle-class society; and is a microcosm of the “intelligent” class which is now in revolt against the Autocracy.
In order to leave no doubt that in Datchniki he was girding at a whole class, Gorky overcrowded his canvas, preferring to spoil his play rather than have his homily incomprehensive. Thus, among the twenty-six dramatis personæ are an advocate, a doctor, an engineer, a literary man, a student, a retired business man, an emancipated woman—representatives in fact of the professions which are the backbone—as far as it has any backbone—of the urban anti-Governmental party. The two hundred pages in which these “intelligents” expose their inadequacy are in no sense a play. There is no hero or heroine, no interaction of characters, no genuine love interest, not even a moral or social problem. The numberless characters are marched on to the stage merely for the purpose of having their moral diseases examined, and of being thereupon dismissed with contempt. The middle-aged advocate, Basoff, at whose datcha the play opens, is merely stupid, rude, and intemperate, an embodiment of that queer mixture of culture and barbarism which is characteristic of Russia. He resembles his own house, which he characterises in the words, “Though it is fitted with electric bells, the walls have holes and the floors creak.” Varvara Mikhailovna, his wife, is the central figure round which Basoff and the other characters aimlessly revolve. She is the daughter of a laundress, and being, like Gorky himself, an intruder into “intelligent” society, is able to discern its vices. Varvara’s ambition is to find for herself a true social level, “where live simple, healthy men and women who speak a different tongue from ours, and accomplish something serious, something great, something necessary.” Throughout the play she is Gorky’s mouthpiece. Thus, when her friend, Yulia Phillipovna, herself a psychopath, makes the discovery that “we (the intelligents) live badly,” she thus compares the class in which she was born with that into which she was thrust by an aspiring parent:—
Yes, badly…. And we can see no way of living better. My mother worked all her life…. How good she was, how gay! Everyone loved her!… She gave me an education. How she rejoiced when I finished school!… She died tranquilly, and said to me “don’t cry, Varya: it’s nothing! My time has come. I have lived… worked. It must be so!” There was meaning in her life, not in mine. It is hard for me to live. It seems to me that I have come to a strange land, to strange people, whose life I cannot understand!… I cannot understand this life of our cultivated class. It is impermanent, unstable, made hastily for the occasion as are toys at fairs…. It is like ice over the living, river waves…. It is strong, it glitters, but in it is much filth, much that is shameful and evil….
Varvara fails to “understand life” because she is an exile from her own class. The born “intelligents,” says Gorky, live equally in vain. They are cursed “with hunch-backed souls.” Thus Olga Alexeyevna, doctor’s wife, though she has emancipated herself into despising her husband, and “desiring to live,” has failed to solve the simple problem of training her infants. “You cannot,” she unburdens herself, “understand this weighty, oppressive feeling—responsibility for one’s children. They will begin to ask me how they ought to live. What can I answer? What torture to be a woman!” A fourth character, Riumin, described by others of the dramatis personæ as a “philosopher,” can see nothing positive in life save deceit:—
(I speak of) the right of man to desire deception. What is life itself? When you use the word Life, it rises before me a gigantic, formless monster, eternally demanding the sacrifice of men. Day after day, it battens on men’s brains and muscles and drinks their blood…. I can see in it no meaning; but this I know, that the longer man lives, the more clearly he sees around himself only filth, baseness, coarseness, abomination…. Give him the right to avert his eyes from things that offend him!
I have said that in Datchniki there is no action, not even a coherent thread of sentiment. The greater part of the play is made up of tiresome, trivial discussions of abstract problems, in which the characters do their best to justify Valneyff’s sneer that Russians “love polemics not as a means but as an end.” “We do nothing and talk disgustingly much!” says Varvara. But in addition to talking, there is in one act—the third—a good deal of promiscuous love-making which is even more characteristic than the long-winded lachrymosities of the other three acts of what Gorky regards as the demoralisation of the intelligentsia. It is apparently so natural for the “intelligent” man to make love to his friend’s wife that, when Varvara Mikhailovna desires to reject the advances of the philosopher Riumin, she prefers to answer that she “is in doubt before life” rather than urge the practical objection (which both he and she ignore) that she has a husband in the next room. Riumin’s love-suit is based upon the strange plea that “life frightens me by the persistency of its demands.” When Varvara’s brother, Vlas, with almost equal incongruity, pays his addresses to the elderly widow, Marya Lvovna, he has the same unimpassioned motives. “I have soiled,” he exclaims, “my heart with all these insignificant people…. I want a fire which shall burn the dirt and rust from my soul.” When Shalimoff, Varvara’s first love, turns up in the datcha settlement, and behaves “intelligently” by making love to her, despite his own two divorced wives, he repudiates all desire for vulgar happiness, and wants merely to be “sincerer, better, cleverer.” The motives which ordinarily inspire great actions and great sins are beyond the comprehension of this outworn, passionless, decadent society. Feebleness of will and spiritual cowardice envelop all; and paralyse action to such an extent that when Riumin, driven to despair by the failure of his suit and by “the persistency of life’s demands,” attempts to shoot himself, he fails abjectly, and is carried wounded home, with the confession, “I live without success, and have not the capacity to die.”
The tedium of this oppressed atmosphere attains its worst in the third act of Datchniki, which, characteristically enough, opens with a picnic. The picnic resembles those farcical weddings and dinner-parties described in Tchekhoff’s earlier humorous tales, at which the guests, by some fatality, invariably began to discuss such problems as coffins, typhus, and the right of sentries to shoot intruders at sight. Gorky’s “intelligents,” in solemn seriousness, entertain themselves precisely as Tchekhoff’s do in solemn jest. Can anyone, unfamiliar with the social pathology of the Tsar’s Empire, credit that this is a faithful translation of the first page of the third Act?
Yulia Phillipovna. This picnic is tiresome.
Kaleria. Like our life!
Varvara Mikhailovna. It’s gay enough for the men.
Yulia Phillipovna. They’ve drunk a lot, and I expect are now telling improper stories…. I have also drunk a lot… but it does not make me gay; on the contrary… when I drink a glass of strong wine, I feel more serious… life seems worse… I feel I must do something mad.
Kaleria (thoughtfully). All is tangled… dim… it terrifies….
Varvara Mikhailovna. What terrifies?
Kaleria. People…. They are without hope… you believe no one.
Varvara Mikhailovna. Yes. Without hope. I understand you.
Kaleria. No you don’t! And I don’t understand you. And nobody understands anybody… or wants to understand…. People wander, like ice-flows in the cold northern sea, and collide….
Were Gorky the only Russian who painted thus the life of the Russian educated class, he might be suspected of malice and defamation. Unfortunately, he is not the first. To read Tchekhoff is even more painful; for Tchekhoff acquiesced in society’s feebleness and baseness with unconcealed glee, whereas Gorky, who has only of late raided the “intelligents,” uses them merely to throw into manly relief his former bold, lawless, masterful creations. Where Tchekhoff smiled sardonically, Gorky, optimist and regenerator, swears angrily, and calls for the surgeon’s knife. Again Varvara is his mouthpiece: “It seems to me,” she says, “that soon—to-morrow—there will arrive some others, some strong, bold men and women, and sweep us from the face of the earth like dust.” Again and again throughout the play, Gorky cries aloud that “intelligent” society is feeble, passionless, rotten. Outside the ranks of his own bossiaki and freebooters there is nothing in all Russia heroic even in wickedness. A mean-spirited desire for cheap comfort and a dread of responsibility and conflict inspire all actions. When Kaleria, after the manner of datchniki, reads aloud her trivial, sentimental verses, Varvara’s brother, Vlas, proceeds to parody them into the following characterisation of Russian society:—
Petty, insignificant mannikins
Wander over my native land….
Wander, sadly seeking refuges
Wherein to hide themselves from life.
All are seeking cheap enjoyment,
Satiety, convenience, peace,
And, as they wander, all complain and groan….
Colourless cowards and liars.
Petty stolen thoughts….
Fashionable, pretty shibboleths….
Mannikins, dim as shadows
Creep quietly along life’s edge.
Datchniki, discursive and inconsequent as it is, contains no diagnosis of the social ailments, the external symptoms of which it exposes so pitilessly. It is made plain enough, however, that it is in the nature of a Russian “intelligent” of either sex to suffer from “nerves.” Thus, Riumin’s vehemence is excused by Varvara on the plea that he is “so nervous;” and Riumin himself explains the eccentricities of the doctor, Dudakoff, by exclaiming, “Nerves!” The hallucinations of Shalimoff, the author, Basoff explains to his wife in the words: “That’s his nerves;” and he charitably tells her that she also “must be treated for nerves.” Varvara describes her brother Vlas as “frightfully nervous,” and the play concludes with the summing up of Riumin’s attempt at self-destruction as “all his silly nerves.” In fact, these “hunch-backed souls,” who, according to Maxim Gorky, comprise the mass of educated Russians, join an incurable nervous decrepitude with a complication of other moral and spiritual ailments enough to turn Russia—were it not lucky enough to possess an unnumbered multitude of non-intelligents—into an Empire peopled entirely by lunatics. But “nerves,” says Gorky, are only a symptom of an evil rooted still more deeply. The ultimate cause is that educated Russians have for generations lived in unnatural severance from the vigorous, uncultured life beneath, and that the effete aristocracy has never been invigorated by infusion of blood from a sturdy parvenu class—in other words, that the “barbarian” has not come. “We,” says one of the relatively sound characters in the play, “we ought to be different. Daughters of laundresses and cooks, children of healthy workers, we must be otherwise. So far, Russia has never had an educated class united by blood with the mass of the nation. This blood alliance would inspire us with a burning desire to widen, reconstruct, enlighten the life of those who, related to us, now slave, sunken in darkness and filth. We must do this not out of pity, not out of grace… we must do it for ourselves… in order to deliver ourselves from this accursed isolation.” In other words, for Russia’s intelligent class to be saved from the impending decrepitude, and equipped for leadership of a resurgent nation, the barbarian lower orders must be summoned from the depths, to merge their blood, their vigour, their healthy social instincts, their laboriousness, and faith with the exhausted intelligents now on top. For lack of this, we have the decadence of Russian intellect, its failure in the present revolt, and the demoralisation now displayed in its reliance upon the anarchical elements to blow a path to freedom.
It is a serious thing to indict a whole class. Before the diagnosis of Datchniki is accepted, the obvious question will therefore be asked: To what extent is Maxim Gorky, the romancer, a serious critic of affairs; how far is he qualified to judge a class from which he is alien by birth and sympathies? Many Russians, and I believe many foreigners, would reply that Gorky has none of the necessary qualifications at all. They regard him as an intruder among the intelligents, as lacking the training for the part of social critic, as temperamentally incapable of judging any serious problem outside the domain of imaginative art. The public may rave over Tchelkash and go into hysterics over The Falcon. But Maxim Gorky, in his new rôle of politician and social pathologist, is too great a joke. Gorky, runs the legend, is by nature a vagabond of anti-social instincts; he has written hitherto only of rogues, murderers, and bad women; and as a typical subjective writer he must be identified with his bossiaki as intimately as Byron was with Childe Harold and Lara; he is an uncurbed individualist, a Nietzschean, and with all these, an enemy of culture, a herald of barbarism, and a quite irresponsible spoiled child of popularity. I have myself heard ordinarily well-informed Russians denounce Gorky as splenetic, unpractical, and inhuman, and affirm that he was so eaten up with pragmatical self-complacency that he “refused to receive anyone who, unlike himself, wears a collar or necktie.” To still further discredit him, certain admirers of weak judgment lately spread abroad ludicrous stories of his political ambitions; he appeared as prospective “Minister of Education,” member of a mythical “provisional government,” and repudiator of National Debts. Indeed, in view of the astounding revelations made, it was hardly surprising that the Tsar’s police—perhaps benevolently intent upon preventing his smothering in unwonted laurels—promptly arrested him, and held him for a month under lock and key in the Petropavlovsk Fortress.
It was not until after this—his sixth enforced seclusion—that I had the privilege of meeting the real Maxim Gorky and learning how unlike he is to the flighty, irresponsible figure that looms so grotesquely in the imagination of Europe. Although my primary object in this letter is not to deal with Gorky, but with Datchniki, yet it seems to me that nothing save some description of what I saw of the author’s real character will give the criticism in that play the weight to which it is entitled. To sum up, in advance, I should say that the Maxim Gorky subjectively identified in Russia and abroad with certain outlawed vagabond types, is a myth, and that Alexeï Maximovitch Peshkoff, in his personal habits, his philosophy, his political leanings, his attitude to society, is as like a Volga bossiak as is the leader of the Liberal Opposition. Even Gorky’s physical type is maligned by most of the photographs published. In these photographs he looks nervous, anæmic, hunted, sentimental. The Maxim Gorky whom I left a week ago among the evergreen woods of Bilderlinghof, on the Baltic coast, is a tall, straight, deep-chested, large-boned man, who towered like a giant over the squat Germans and stunted Lettish peasants who are now struggling for racial dominion on the Livonian coast. In features, he is as far removed from the refined, weak-faced intelligents as from the submissive, apathetic muzhik. The forehead is broad, furrowed deeply when he talks, and surmounted by a mop of dark hair; the eyes grey, serene, slightly defiant; the nose big, not unlike Tolstoy’s, but even more shapeless; the mouth big, somewhat grim; and the jaw, now fringed with a scanty red-brown beard grown in gaol, square, massive, and resolute. You feel at once that this is a self-possessed, masterful man, a man in whom character is even more remarkable than intellect, who, even had he been born without that instinct for the natural and the dramatic, and that verbal deftness which have raised him among his countrymen to unexampled fame, would not the less surely have broken the bonds of birth and penury.
The restraint is no less unmistakable than the power. When Gorky, given the limited freedom compatible with the diurnal company of a Government spy, arrived in Riga, he was received by the few who knew of his advent with open arms. He was a local hero; he had suffered for his steadfastness and faith; his Datchniki had only lately been performed in the big Russian Theatre with remarkable success. The very hotel-keepers gushed over him, and poor underlings risked their posts and their freedom by coming to his room to warn him that police agents were listening outside his door. Had he appeared in the Riga streets, every German and Lett, and half the Russians in the town, would have rushed out to render embarrassing honours. But until the day he left Riga, he kept resolutely to his room, sacrificing in this his own inclinations and denying the imperative need for air and exercise the urgency of which had led to his release. Speaking of the anti-Governmental agitation in which he was involved, he showed the same wisdom and restraint. As regards himself, he spoke frankly enough. But the moment the actions or safety of others, or the issue of the struggle between Tsar and people became involved, he spoke cautiously, weighing every word, and, out of an almost excessive caution, forbade the repetition of the most innocent remarks. Qualifying everything with the remark that he spoke only as an individual, he again and again pointed out that Russian society was torn by conflicting political and intellectual tendencies, that what he said might therefore cause offence, and entangle others, or, by being represented as the deliberate opinion of the whole Liberal Party, compromise the emancipating movement. In all this Gorky embodies the antithesis of that flighty irresponsibility which has been associated with his name by those who, taking his creations for his mouthpieces, ignored the real moderation and dignity of his character.
The anarchical, anti-social Gorky is similarly mythopoeic, and, it seems, similarly credited. “Gorky’s idea of society,” wrote a Russian newspaper critic not long ago, “is so corrupted by individualist, anti-human instincts that he would dissolve society into its original units. All those triumphs which are the outcome of the social instinct and of united labour, all culture, all art, would be swept away. Instead we should have the vapouring, picturesque barbarian, knife in hand, glowering defiant from a background of bloody sunset, splenetic, insatiable, morose….” Such is the Gorky of the subjectivity-hunters. It is true to the extent that the real Maxim Gorky is a strong individualist. Beyond that it is a ridiculous lampoon. With the exception of two remarks, both probably expressing profound truths, the Russian romancist never hinted that anti-social or barbaric instincts were anything but unnatural and a peril to mankind. The first of these remarks was that “the vagabond instinct is strong in all Russians;” the second , that “modern society is beginning to decay. It is tired, outworn, conscious of its in sufficiency. Like the later Roman Empire, it needs new blood—a barbarian irruption.” Having affirmed these two propositions, each outside the domain of polemics, Gorky appeared a man of modern, progressive, cultivated sympathies, passionately devoted to advancement, and enthusiastic in eulogy of those nations which in civilisation and citizenship have led the van. He has, indeed, never been out of Russia, and speaks no foreign language. But his survey of the comparative cultural conditions of Russia’s numberless races showed how his sympathies lie. Thus he contrasted sorrowfully with the stagnant backwardness of Russian cities the German progressiveness and cleanliness of Riga; he praised the intelligence and unremitting toil spent by the Lettish peasants on their marshy, barren farms; he was charmed with the Finns, and spoke of the beauty and civilisation of Helsingfors with an almost childish delight. Even his fierce opposition to Russia’s system of government seemed inspired less by wrath at the individual wrongs inevitable under irresponsible rule, than by a conviction that, under the present system, progress, culture, and national unity were impossible. The Government’s worst offence was that it was an enemy of civilisation, not that it was harsh and tyrannical. Indeed, Gorky seemed to have little hope for the redemption of Russia by any mild and benevolent system of rule. “I have seen too much,” he said, “and lived through too much to think that love between men as brothers can be relied upon as a basis for a reformed society. But each man must respect humanity.” All, therefore, he demanded from the Russian or any other Government was that it should respect human personality, and that it should not shackle the progressive instincts natural in all men. The Autocracy at present existed by disrespect for the individual, he said; and the untamed Gorky of legend seemed to flash out when he related how, on the night of the 21st January, a boorish, ill-bred governmental underling, like Rydzewsky, lolled back in his chair, puffing smoke, while half-a-dozen of the most famous living Russians were compelled to stand before him and humbly proffer their petition that innocent blood should not be shed. Speaking of his arrest, he related how he reproached his persecutors with their folly in these words: “My imprisonment will have two bad results. It will injure my health and it will increase my popularity.” The latter, he affirmed, with unquestionable sincerity, was a great personal calamity in a country where authors and publicists are the only voices of public opinion.
I have revealed enough, I think, of the real Maxim Gorky to show that, as a critic of affairs and men, he may be accorded respect; and to prove that, when he declared the Russian “intelligentsia” to be feeble and psychopathic, his diagnosis was made in no spirit of levity or malice. But, in addition to his natural gravity, and moderation, and keen interest in men, Gorky had other qualifications for his task. He has studied much. Though little more than a decade has passed since he was an unlettered wanderer over the broad face of Russia, he has read everything and apparently remembered everything that he has read. “Are you not surprised to find Alexeï Maximovitch such a cultivated man?” was the naïve question put to me in his presence by a third party. “Not at all,” answered Gorky himself, “why should he be?” And he laid stress enviously on the fact that, to an Englishman, there was nothing strange in an unschooled son of the people attaining great knowledge by his own efforts before reaching middle age. Gorky’s reading is exclusively in Russian; and, though he again and again lamented that he knows no foreign language, it is a tribute to the interest taken by Russians in foreign literatures that he should have been able, through the medium of translation, to read so much. He has, in fact, read in Russian as much English literature as nine out of ten educated Englishmen have read in English; and his judgments are characteristic of the sane, sympathising, joyous view he takes of life and of his fellow-men. He told me that, when a cabin-boy aged fifteen on a Volga steamer, he had read Shakespeare’s Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and that the first deep impression remained so strong that it obscured his judgment when, at the present day, he was asked to pronounce an opinion as to the comparative greatness of Shakespeare’s dramas. He condemned Tolstoy’s attitude to English literature and to Shakespeare in particular. It was a doctrinaire infatuation. But, as he loved the literature of England as a whole for its sanity and joyousness, he rejected everything tinged with asceticism or puritan restriction of human joy. Thus he could not appreciate Dante, or even Milton, though his failure to understand the English poet he attributed partly to the badness of the Russian translation. Admiring both, he compared Shelley to the vari-coloured, glittering Alps and Byron to the menacing Caucasus. For Bret Harte, for Mr. Kipling, and—among humorists—for Mark Twain he expressed unbounded love. But he could not understand the later Kipling, and denounced the excesses of Imperialism, whether British, American, or Russian, with vigorous contempt. “The national ideal,” he said, “should be to be strong, not to be perpetually proving one’s self strong. Strength is shown in restraint.” For revealed religion, and in particular for the religion of States and established churches, he had no respect. The Orthodox Church, he declared, was a curse to Russia; the sectarians whom it oppresses alone showed any vital religious force.
On Governments, on men, on books, the real Alexeï Peshkoff in no way resembled the legendary Maxim Gorky. The morbid, misanthropic, at the same time irresponsibly childish “Gorky,” disappeared, leaving a sane, mature man, a lover of human-kind and of all the social bonds which make for progress and knit men to men. But though the morbidity of the figure vanished, the picturesqueness remained. There is a real bond between Peshkoff the man and Gorky the writer in the love of Nature, in the innate, incommunicable instinct for all that is free, open, and joyous, in the contempt for the restraints of conventional religion and morals, in the adoration of strength, of mastery over self, of bravery in face of the world. Again and again in his conversations the attractive aspect of the legendary Gorky showed itself. I recall him now, trudging ankle-deep in snow over the frozen margin of the Gulf of Riga towards the slate-grey, horizonless sea beyond, contrasting his new freedom with his cramping cell by the Neva and his solitary fifteen minute tramps round the bath-house in the Fortress prison.
Accepting this picture of a sane, social, vigorous man as the real Gorky, what are we to say of the analysis of Russian educated society given us in his play? It is plain that, if Datchniki is a faithful transcript from life, the intelligentsia is unfit; and it is merely confirmatory proof of its unfitness that, having exhausted its power of collective revolt, it has come to depend upon assassination as the only effective weapon against a Government which, though weaker than even its foes in character and intellectual force, is by virtue of organisation and inertia still irresistibly strong. Possibly the crucial test will come sooner than is expected, for the collapse at Mukden may supply the impetus to revolution hitherto lacking. Peace and an angry Army back from Manchuria are the next perils to be faced by the Tsardom. But should military loyalty stand the final strain of admitted defeat, my prediction is that we shall be faced by a sort of Shaho stale-mate, in which the helplessness of society to move the Tsardom, and of the Tsardom to repress manifestations of discontent, will balance one another for a time. Though Russia is united against the Autocracy, it is not united in favour of Revolution. The longer-headed intelligents do not want revolution. Gorky himself expressed to me his forebodings on that score. He predicted bloodshed and outrage grim and shameful, followed by national disunion and military despotism. “France,” were his words, “produced one Napoleon; we might have the misfortune to produce twenty.” As I pointed out last month, these apprehensions are not confined to one man. Only the irresponsible “intelligents” desire the overthrowal of Autocracy coute que coute, and these only because they fail to realise that the first price paid will be the trampling of their own class under the feet of demagogues and butchers. They do not see that they are justifying Rostopchin’s bitter gibe that “Usually cobblers want revolution so as to emerge gentlemen; in our country, gentlemen want revolution that they may emerge as cobblers.”
R. L.