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I found this biography of Maxim Gorky by Henri Troyat in a wonderful little secondhand bookshop in High St, Fremantle. The author Henri Troyat seems to have been a bit of a famous Russians buff, having also penned biographies on Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Catherine the Great, Alexander of Russia, Ivan the Terrible (or the Awesome, depending on your translation), Chekhov, Peter the Great, and Turgenev

Just check out Gorky’s photo album. There he is with Chekhov and there he is with Tolstoy

Over the page, and there he is with Stalin (not so cool) who may or may not have had him killed

It’s been about a decade since I read Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World (on my shelf it’s called My Apprenticeship), and My Universities. When I read them I had no idea that Gorky was a major political firebrand. I simply enjoyed his beautiful writing

So I picked this biography up, curious to know about Gorky’s political life. Was Stalin his friend and or murderer? Could Gorky really have been an apologist for that despotic regime?

Gorky wanted a revolution but when he finally got one, he didn’t like it very much, causing Trotsky to say, ‘Gorky has greeted the revolution with the anxiety of a museum creator’. Gorky ranted and raved against the loss of freedom of speech, the executions of many of Russia’s intellectuals, the looting, and the anarchic thuggery in general. He strongly criticized Lenin and Gorky only got away with it because he had been popularised as a ‘man of the people’ but even so, his magazine New Life , where much of his anti-Lenin vitriol appeared, was eventually closed down by Lenin

But at some point, presumably Gorky must have realised that the revolution was who he was. If he did not stand by it, then what did he stand by? It wasn’t at all what he had envisioned but maybe he could grow to like it. It seems he spent the rest of his life trying to convince himself that the new Soviet regime was a positive thing for his beloved proletariat

In 1923 when a list of forbidden books was drawn up, due to their anti revolutionary content, Gorky a book lover (he had approximately 10 000 books) became livid and declared, ‘I can’t believe that such spiritual vampirism really exists…’ but by 1934 he had changed so much that at a Congress of Soviet Writers he led everyone in denouncing works by Joyce, Proust, and Pirandello because they weren’t socially useful. He became a mouthpiece for government propaganda

‘What was going on inside him?… All his collaborators on the ‘New Life’ of 1917 were disappearing into jail and he said nothing. Literature was dying and he said nothing.’ (Victor Serge in Memoirs of a Revolutionary)

Even if you’re not familiar with Gorky’s work, this biography features just about every other major Russian writer from this period, with special attention given to Chekhov and Tolstoy. It’s an interesting if somewhat sad portrait of a free agent who ends up in a gilded Soviet cage

[I’m about to read Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and Other Stories and Troyat has also written his biography. Gogol was prone to burning his works and he finally went mad and starved himself to death although it’s possible he was accidentally buried alive]