Alexey Maksimovich did not like the city where he was born. In a conversation with the writer Nikolai Shebuyev, who became famous for publishing the satirical magazine Machine Gun in 1905, he said: “Physically, I was born in Nizhny Novgorod. But this is the city that I hate. And spiritually I was born in Kazan."
Indicative suicide
Gorky was never distinguished by sincerity. In Kazan, he was also not at all high. Here he tried to commit suicide. However, most likely, Alyosha Peshkov wanted to draw attention to his person. The bullet, which was supposedly directed to the heart, acquired for some reason a completely different trajectory. It's hard not to get into the heart, and Gorky, in all likelihood, did not want this. True, in his autobiographical story "A Case from the Life of Makar," he claims the opposite.
Allegedly, his desire to die was quite meaningful. Makar-Alyosha Peshkov “in advance looked for a place on the high bank of the river, behind the fence of the monastery: snow was piled down the mountain, he figured that if you stand with your back to the cliff and shoot in the chest, you will roll down and, covered with snow, buried in it, you will lie unnoticed until spring, when the river opens up and carries the corpse to the Volga. He liked this plan, for some reason he really wanted people not to find and touch his corpse as long as possible."
But Gorky contradicts himself. He shot himself in the presence of the monastery watchman Mustafa Yunusov, with whom he had spoken before, begging to take the frozen kitten by the bosom. The watchman immediately reported to the police. The wounded was taken to the zemstvo hospital.
Before attempting suicide, Peshkov took Girtl's anatomical atlas from a student friend. Where is the heart, and where the lungs, he could not know. And the wound was not so serious. The baker Peshkov was discharged from the hospital nine days later. But what is most important is something else. In his supposedly suicide note, Gorky, willingly or unwillingly, revealed the reasons for his act. “I ask you to cut open my remains and consider what the devil has been sitting in me lately,” it said.
There were no remains. The doctor cut only the bullet stuck in the back. But the ministers of the church became interested in Peshkov's worldview. The minutes of the meeting of the Kazan Spiritual Consistory have been preserved, entitled as follows: "On the tradition of penances by the guild Alexei Maksimov Peshkov for attempted suicide."
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“During his stay in the hospital, no mental disorder was noticed,” the protocol said. If the suicide was not in himself, then this would be regarded as an accident. But here everything was different. However, the decision of the consistory was extremely mild: "Peshkov … to bring his parish priest to a private trial, so that he could explain to him the meaning and purpose of life here, persuade him to value it for the future as the greatest gift of God, and behave worthy of the Christian title." … That is, he was invited to a preventive conversation.
This provoked a stormy protest from the young Gorky, although the church did not exert any pressure on him. And the future Petrel refused to go to repentance to the parish priest Malov. The clergy were especially irritated by Gorky's verses, which he sent to the archpriest. They began like this: "Will the priest talk about the bullet?" This could already be regarded as a criminal offense, and since the young man persisted in his pride, the police brought him by force to the Feodorovsky monastery. But Peshkov did not answer a single question from Hieromonk.
Many years later, in a letter to his biographer Ilya Gruzdev, Gorky described this period of his life as follows: "I declared that they would leave me alone, otherwise I would hang myself at the gate of the monastery fence." And in the spring, in the village of Krasnovidovo, the sergeant presented Gorky with a document of the Spiritual consistory, which stated that he was "excommunicated from the church for seven years." And again Gorky is insincere. He was not excommunicated for seven years, but only for four years. It was this period that the first legal wife of Alexei Maksimovich, Ekaterina Volzhina-Peshkova, called in her memoirs.
On the list of masons
Gorky harbored a grudge against the church. His poems contained direct attacks on the clergy. The verses are completely weak, but they contained, for example, the following line: "In the bosom of the church there are many all kinds of beasts …". For her, according to the laws of the time, one could go to jail.
The hatred of the churchmen, the shura-muras of the Petrel with evil spirits are explained by his connections with the "free masons" - the Masons. The archives of the Russian police department contain a certificate on the activities of the so-called "International Parliamentary Union". It contains a list of Russian Masons. Gorky is also listed there. It also appears in the book "Freemasonry in the Russian Emigration", which was published in Sao Paulo in 1966. So it is not surprising that, like all "free masons", Petrel was simply attracted by the demonic and mystical world.
This world doesn't like people at all. “People are disgusting to me,” Gorky wrote. There is a version that it was he who took the most active part in the Masonic campaign against Rasputin and the royal family, that it was Aleksey Maksimovich who invented the title of Iliodor's scandalous book about Rasputin - "Holy Devil", and edited the text. "It seems to me," he wrote in March 1917 regarding the idea of this work, "moreover, I am sure that Iliodor's book about Rasputin would be very timely, it is necessary that it can bring undoubted benefit to many people … I undertake to arrange it abroad." …
Sorcerer from the ship "Dobry"
When Gorky's personality was still being formed, he was influenced by many people. These were masters-masters in the icon-painting workshop, cooks and sailors on the ship "Dobry", where Alyosha worked as a cookware. Alas, they all lost the battle for his soul. She was taken by retired non-commissioned officer Mikhail Akimovich Smury. Although it is difficult to say whether he actually existed. Perhaps the devil himself was courting the future writer in his appearance?
Gorky first mentions Smur in 1897. “He aroused my interest in reading books,” wrote Alexei Maksimovich. - Smuriy had a whole chest filled mostly with small volumes in leather bindings, and it was the strangest library in the world. Eckarthausen was lying next to Nekrasov, Anna Radcliffe with a volume of Sovremennik, there was also Iskra for 1864, The Stone of Faith and books in Ukrainian."
“This chest offers him many answers to the painful questions of life,” writes Pavel Basinsky in his book Passion for Maxim. Nine days after death, "- and Smury tests Alexei with them, as the devil tempted Christ in the wilderness. However, the difference is that the devil asked Christ tempting questions, to which Christ had exact answers, and Smury offers dubious answers that induce Alexei to ask tempting questions."
So who is Smurry? Witch? Or the Prince of Darkness? The answer is given by Gorky himself: “He constantly inspired me:“You read! If you don't understand a book, read it seven times, if you don't understand it, read it twelve. And everything becomes clear: 7 and 12 are magic numbers. Seven in numerology means not only happiness. This is also disputes, pride, this is a person on his own mind, withdrawn, overly suspicious of others. The number 12 can be decomposed into two digits. One contains everything: good and evil, light and darkness, beginning and end, creation and destruction, love and hate. Two is also an eternal confrontation: plus and minus, day and night, life and death, light and darkness, warmth and cold. Here, in fact, is the solution.
But Alyosha liked the Sorcerer with the chest. He wanted to imitate Smuriy in everything, who was far from Orthodoxy. And in the future, Gorky himself became Smury.
Sheer devilry
There is a lot of evidence that one of Gorky's favorite words was the word "devil". Moreover, he put something endearing into this concept. “The devil is bald,” “the devil you are,” “God knows how great,” these were his most popular expressions.
Gorky's three early stories "About the devil", "More about the devil" and "About the writer who is arrogant" tell how the devil is a writer. In the play At the Bottom, the name of the main character Satin is derived from Satan.
In the book Notes from the Diary, the writer tells about a hunchback sorcerer who proves that the world is made of devils. How can we not recall the sorcerer from the ship "Dobry" Smuriy? But Gorky expounds his views: “Yes, yes, the devils are not a joke … The same reality as people, cockroaches, microbes. Devils come in different shapes and sizes … There are, for example, purple devils; they are shapeless, like slugs, move slowly like snails, and are translucent. When there are many of them, their gelatinous mass is like a cloud. There are a lot of them. They are spreading boredom. A sour smell emanates from them and the soul becomes gloomy, lazy … The Dutch devils are small ocher-colored creatures, round like balls, and shiny.
Their heads are wrinkled like a grain of pepper, their legs are long, thin, like threads, their fingers are connected by a membrane and at the end of each is a red hook. They suggest a strange thing: thanks to them, a person can tell the governor - "fool!", Rape his daughter, light a cigarette in the church, yes, yes! These are the devils of an unintelligible riot … Checkered devils are a chaos of variously crooked lines; they convulsively and continuously move in the air, forming strange, immediately destroyed patterns, relationships, connections. They tire the eyes terribly. It looks like a glow. Their purpose is to cut off a person's paths wherever he goes … The drape devils resemble nails with a forked edge in their shape. They wear black hats, their faces are greenish and they radiate a smoky phosphoric light. They move in leaps, resembling the move of a chess knight. In the human brain, they light up the blue fires of madness. These are the friends of drunkards."
And then Gorky takes out his anger at the clergy: “The devils of the bell ringing are terrible. They are winged, the only winged among the legions of devils. They attract lasciviousness … They flicker like swallows, and, penetrating a person, burn him with lust. They must live on the bell towers, because they persecute a person especially violently under the ringing of bells. " However, hatred for people in robes can be traced in other works of Alexei Maksimovich. Everything Orthodox looked disgusting to him: alcoholics, slovens, fools. Gorky also intended to write about the Monk Seraphim of Sarov. He imagined him … "an evil old man."
Gorky also dreamed of devils where they had never been. Vyacheslav Ivanov recalled how he once presented the writer with his drawing, which depicted a dog on a chain. “It's curious,” said Alexey Maksimovich. - Yes, this is the devil with a bunch of bagels."
The Russian émigré writer Ilya Surguchev was friends with Gorky when he lived in Capri. But soon the friendship was upset. Surguchev directly connected this with the fact that the writer sold his soul. In his essay "Bitter and the Devil", published in 1955 in the Parisian newspaper "Renaissance", Surguchev gave several examples of the relationship between the writer and evil spirits …
Many years later, Surguchev saw a portrait of Heinrich Yagoda, who, as the prosecutors argued at the trial of the “Pravotrotsky bloc” in 1938, was involved in the death of Gorky's son Maxim and himself. Yagoda, wrote Surguchev, "was like two drops of water like the devil, prophetically drawn by a talented godmother."
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Perhaps Ivan Surguchev is exaggerating somewhat. But Gorky's devilry is not his invention. Hence the terrible end of a confused person. A writer who denied spirituality and faith. And there was a certain symbol in it.
“I went to Levin (Gorky’s doctor, later accused of murdering the founder of socialist realism. - Author),” the nurse’s recollections, permitted from above, said, “and said:“Let me inject twenty cubes of camphor, since the situation is hopeless anyway?” Without their permission, I was afraid. Levin consulted with the doctors, said: "Do what you want." I injected him with camphor.
And it turned out that the last woman Gorky said goodbye to were neither his wives, nor Budberg, but this completely ordinary-looking and middle-aged nurse. “I put my ear to his chest - listen - is it true? she recalled. - Suddenly, as he hugged me tightly, like a healthy one, and kissed me. So we said goodbye to him. I never regained consciousness”.
Everything is in place. The nurse's name was Olympiada Chertkova.
