When we think of Maxim Gorky, the textbook image of the unmercenary proletarian writer, well-known from the school curriculum, rises before our eyes. However, the real Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov is infinitely far from this image.
3 biography questions
The clash of myths and reality dates back to the very childhood of the "petrel of the revolution."
Barchuk or a bum?
According to the official canon, the boy lived in poverty, worked as an "errand boy" and studied at a school for children from poor families. Moreover, he abandoned this very school after the ridicule of his classmates, who called him "a rogue" and assured him that Peshkov smelled like garbage.
However, in real life, the future writer spent most of his childhood in the house of his grandfather, a merchant in Nizhny Novgorod, and the position of "errand boy" was a kind of school of life, since the strict grandfather did not want to feed the parasite.
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Tramp or Messenger?
The second important detail in creating the image of the writer of the poor is the writer's wanderings "across Russia". Wanderings in; It is customary to present youth in Russia as a gesture of despair, as well as a desire: to find out the womb truth about how ordinary people live. However, there may be a more mundane motive.
At the end of 1889, Peshkov, who had not yet become Gorky, was imprisoned for the first time for ties with the revolutionary underground. So he goes to wander "across Russia" almost immediately after his release (perhaps there was a risk of being imprisoned for a more serious term?). Yes, and he “wandered” in a straight line to Tiflis, where he was warmed by his comrades in the revolutionary movement (maybe the revolutionary Peshkov had some specific mission?). By the way, there he published his first story under the pseudonym Gorky and soon returned to Nizhny Novgorod.
Patient or Doctor?
All critics assure that the main pathos of Gorky's creations is the dream of “new people”, fearless and free, possessing the highest intellect and physical abilities. Alexey Maksimovich read Nietzsche and dreamed of human immortality.
However, the writer himself, in the opinion of psychiatrists who indirectly studied the anamnesis of the writer himself, came to the conclusion that he had a "whole bunch" of mental illnesses. In particular, during his tempestuous youth, he tried to commit suicide. First, he shot himself a lung with a gun (which is why, as some researchers believe, he eventually died). And already in the hospital, having regained consciousness, he took a few sips from the bottle with chloral hydrate, but they managed to wash his stomach. Later, the writer himself called this the most difficult episode from his past. By the way, for attempting suicide and refusing to repentance, Gorky was excommunicated for four years.
Deal with the devil or the "wallet" of the revolution
A contemporary of Gorky, the writer Ilya Surguchev, in all seriousness believed that the writer once concluded an agreement with the devil “and he, the average writer in general, was given success, which neither Pushkin, nor Gogol, nor Leo Tolstoy knew during their lifetime, nor Dostoevsky. He had everything: fame, money, and female sly love."
Here, of course, notes of envy are clearly read, however, in fact, the rise of Gorky's literary career is phenomenal. Back in 1899, the writer first appeared in St. Petersburg and was published in modest circulation. And already in 1902 he had world fame and huge fees. He is elected to the honorary academicians of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, so that the shocked Nicholas II is forced to intervene with his own hands, to cancel the election, imposing a stinging resolution on this resolution: "More than original." He heads three major publishing houses, pays huge royalties to authors and is the leading playwright at the Moscow Art Theater.
However, there is every reason to believe that the forces that sponsored the revolution played an important role in his success. In the same 1902, the notorious "demon of revolution" Parvus became his literary agent, through whose efforts Gorky's plays were staged on the world's leading stages, and books were published in huge editions. Gorky himself admitted that a significant part of the money went to the needs of the revolution.
“During the period from 1901 to 1917, hundreds of thousands of rubles passed through my hands for the cause of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, of which my personal earnings amounted to tens of thousands, and everything else was scooped out of the pockets of the“bourgeoisie,”the writer wrote after the victory of the revolution. response to criticism for cooperation with the bourgeoisie.
All this time, Gorky has been living on a grand scale. Already in Nizhny Novgorod, he lives with his wife and children in 11 rented rooms of the Nizhny Novgorod house of Baron N. F. Kirshbaum, and then leads an equally social life in the capitals. After leaving Russia in 1906 due to political pressure, he sailed (on party business and at the expense of the party) to the United States, and on board the liner "Frederick William the Great" they reserve for him "the most comfortable cabin on board, which was best suited for writing. labor”, and then they were honored in America. And after the end of the American tour, the “poet of the poor” has been living in Italy for two years, stopping exclusively at comfortable villas, many of which still exist and are decorated with appropriate commemorative plaques.
What's with the antiques?
In 1913, like many other writers who suffered from censorship, Gorky fell under an amnesty (in honor of the 300th anniversary of the accession of the Romanov dynasty) and returned to St. Petersburg.
And after the victory of the revolution, Gorky and his common-law wife, the famous Moscow actress Maria Andreeva, were appointed heads of the Evaluation and Antique Commission of the People's Commissariat of Trade and Industry.
Antique values confiscated from churches, palaces and private collections were supposed to be sold at auctions abroad. But since no one wanted to buy anything directly from the Bolsheviks, apart from their legitimate authority, the sale of confiscated valuables quickly became a semi-legal business.
According to the recollections of the poetess Zinaida Gippius, Gorky's apartment on Kronverksky Prospect acquired the appearance of a “museum or a junk shop”. By the way, you shouldn't imagine his home as a small room littered with requisitioned antiques. Gorky lived in an 11-room apartment, where more than 30 acquaintances, relatives, and sometimes just incomprehensible personalities lived with him.
Interestingly, the writer spent a total of more than 18 years in exile (15 of them in Italy), but he never learned a single foreign language.
Pretty soon Gorky himself became widely known in narrow circles as a collector of giant Chinese vases and rare books. So, it is likely that his some cooling in relations with the leaders of the revolution was caused not so much by the unsuccessful intercession for the Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich and the poet Nikolai Gumilyov (they were shot), but by the keen interest in this side of his activities. In the same 1919, the Cheka was investigating possible abuses in the sale of antiques - the official verdict said that "it was not possible to establish the personal greed of the head of the Evaluation and Antiquarian Commission," but Gorky became increasingly uncomfortable in Soviet Russia.
And soon he leaves for Germany, and then for his beloved Italy. It is curious that his ex-mistress Andreeva also follows him, but not as a civil wife, but for supervision, since Andreeva took with her a new lover, an employee of the NKVD, Pyotr Kryuchkov.
In Sorrento, he again lives on a grand scale - a villa, a servant, other attributes of a beautiful life …
Back in USSR
And when Stalin comes to power in the USSR in the battles of the apparatus after Lenin's death, the operation begins to return the "proletarian writer" to his homeland.
For some time he lives in two countries, and then finally moves to the USSR. By the way, supercomfortable living conditions are being created for him again.
For him and his family were assigned the former Ryabushinsky mansion in the center of Moscow, dachas in Gorki and in the Crimea (a specially equipped railway car was allocated to Gorky for trips there) - for example, according to estimates made in 1936, the Gorky family cost the budget 130 thousand rubles a month (expenses went through the NKVD).
Gorky received all imaginable and inconceivable honors - his native Nizhny Novgorod was named after him, his books were published in millions of copies (by the way, in those days the fee of an ordinary writer for a book was 2-3 thousand rubles with an average salary in the country of 200-300 rubles).
Gorky did not have any major disagreements with Joseph Vissarionovich. He supported the struggle against "bourgeois trends" in art, writing an article, the title of which became a catch phrase - "Who are you, masters of culture?" He became one of the editors of the book "White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Stalin", according to Solzhenitsyn's description, "the first book in Russian literature praising slave labor", wrote blissful notes about the life of prisoners in Solovki …
So there is not only no concrete evidence of Stalin's involvement in the death of Gorky, but even intelligible arguments in favor of this decision, except for the general malignity of the "leader of the peoples." Most likely, it really was about a neglected lung disease.
Foster-son
The elder brother of Yakov Sverdlov Zinovy (at birth Zalman) became Gorky's godson. Moreover, later he even took his last name. Unlike his brother, he accepted the revolution with hostility (even before the First World War, he emigrated to France and entered the Foreign Legion) and categorically did not want to know his brother. He rose to the rank of general and was a personal friend of General de Gaulle.
Only Pushkin is cooler
Gorky was the most published Soviet writer in the USSR: the complete collected works were 60 volumes, and the total circulation of 3556 editions amounted to 242.621 million copies. Only Tolstoy and Pushkin were able to outstrip Gorky in circulation.
5 nominations for the Nobel Prize
5 times was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Maxim Gorky was closest to receiving it in 1933, when there were persistent rumors that it would be awarded to a Russian writer for the first time. And so it happened, but it was not Gorky who received it, but Bunin.
PS And even the funeral of the "proletarian writer" was as magnificent as possible. So, the urn with Gorky's ashes was carried personally by Stalin and Molotov, and she was buried in the Kremlin wall.
Magazine: Historical Truth of the USSR No. 2 (2). Author: Alexey Ille