Maxim Gorky

From Philosopedia

Gorky, Maxim (28 March 1868 - 18 June 1936)

Alexei Maximovitch Peshkov, who later renamed himself Maxim Gorky, was born in the village of Nizhny Novgorod, today called Gorky. After his father died when Alexei was 5, he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. His grandfather made him quit school at age 8 to go to work. At 12, he ran away, and endured so many bitter hardships trying to survive that he later adopted the name "Gorky," which means "The Bitter One."

After trying unsuccessfully at age 21 to commit suicide by shooting himself, Peshkov suffered from lifelong bouts of tuberculosis as the result of damage to his lungs. Gorky undertook a 2-year walking journey as a "tramp," becoming familiar with Russia's oppressed underclass.

At 24, he became a reporter and began writing sympathetically about the outcasts, derelicts, petty criminals and prostitutes he had encountered, thus becoming a folk hero. His first collection of short stories was published to great acclaim in 1898. Chekhov befriended Gorky, introducing him to theatrical producers, who invited him to write his first plays. The Smug Citizen (1902), created an uproar, although The Lower Depths (1902) has endured.

In 1906, he was invited by a host of writers and dignitaries to speak in the United States. When the New York World pilloried Gorky for traveling with a woman he was not married to, many sponsors, such as Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt, withdrew their support, although some, such as H.G. Wells, stood by him. Gorky had been living with the actress, Mme. Andreieva, since his separation from his wife. When the newspaper published the story about this, the manager at the Hotel Belleclaire on Broadway at 77th Street announced, "My hotel is a family hotel," and they were promptly evicted. Mme. Andreiva was the niece of an admiral who had been killed in the Crimean War, but the prudish doors of the city's fashionable hotels remained barred to the two.

Gorky, sympathetic to the Marxist cause to overthrow the government, was periodically jailed, and finally exiled from Russia for several years. Critical of the Bolsheviks and Lenin, he went on a self-imposed exile throughout the 1920s, until one of his harshest critics, Stalin, invited him home. Although Gorky was criticized for endorsing some of Stalin's policies, he is credited with saving the lives of several writers

Gorky once wrote,

• This "search for God" business must be forbidden for a time - it is a perfectly useless occupation.

Lenin used to lecture Gorky, “All worship of a divinity is necrolatry [worship of the dead]. . . . Any religious idea, any idea of any god at all, even any flirting with a divinity is the most inexpressible . . . [and] dangerous foulness, the most hideous ‘infection.’ ” Ironically, Gorky became known as a foggy God-builder.

J. M. Robertson, however, calls him “an absolute Naturalist,” and Joseph McCabe says Gorky was contemptuous of all religion. In Culture and the People (1939), Gorki wrote,

• Paradise is one of the crass fictions invented by high-priests and fathers of the Church, a fiction whose purpose it is to requite the hellish torments of people on earth with the soap-bubble of a hope of peace in another place.

The father of Soviet literature, he founded the literary doctrine of socialist realism, now completely passé.

Many have speculated that Gorky was murdered. It has never been established which anti-Soviet group, if any, assassinated him by poisoning his food. Some say that while he was under medical treatment he was killed by a group known as “The Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites.” However, the author of humanistic and rationalistic works may merely have succumbed to tuberculosis or died of natural causes.

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