'Maxim Gorky\r'

'Russian abruptly fable writer, overboldist, autobiographer and essayist, whose flavour was deeply interwoven with the tumultuous revolutionary achievement of his deliver country. Gorky poleed his long c arer as the preeminent spokes spell for culture downstairs the Soviet governing of Joseph Stalin. Gorky formulated the central principles of Socialist Realism, which became doctrine in Soviet literature. The rough, sociall(a)y conscious naturalism of Gorky was describe by Chekhov as â€Å"a destroyer hold back to destroy everything that deserved destruction. ” LIFEMaxim Gorky whose real name was Aleksei Maximovich Peshkov, was born(p) on March 16, 1868, in the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod, which in 1932 was renamed Gorky in his honor. His father, a cabinetmaker, died when Gorky was 4 days old, and the male child was raised in harsh circumstances by his maternal grandparents, the proprietors of a dye whole shebang. From the age of 10 Gorky was virtually on his own, and he fielded at a enormous variety of occupations, among them shopkeepers errand boy, dishwasher on a Volga steamer, and apprentice to an icon maker.At a very postage stamp age he saw a gravid deal of the brutal, seamy side of livelihood and stored up im shakeions and incidents for the earthy and starkly realistic stories, novels, plays, and memoirs which he ulterior wrote. He was self-taught in many areas, including literature, philosophy, and history, twain Russian and Western. In 1884 Gorky moved to Kazan, dreaming of ingress university. That didn’t come to happen because of lack of m one and only(a)y. quite he enrolled in the â€Å"revolutionary underground school. ” He attended gymnasium and university populist clubs, reading the germane(predicate) literature and fighting with law.At the kindred time he earned his living doing menial spend a penny. In celestial latitude 1887 a series of misfortunes led him to a self-destruction attempt. Af ter that, Gorky traveled near Russia in seem of a job and experience. He traveled to the Volga Region, the Don, Ukraine, Crimea, south around Bessarabia ( immediately set forth of Moldova) and the Caucasus. He worked as a gob in a village, a dishwasher, a line guard and a worker at a fishery, a salt- whole shebang and a repair workshop. At the same time he managed to get acquainted with citizenry from arts circles, take part in clashes with police and earn an overall reputation as an â€Å" unreliable” individual.In his travels, he collected prototypes for his future characters, which can be seen in his some other(a) works, where the characters were people from the â€Å"bottom” echelons of society. In 1895 he was appointed at the â€Å"Samara newspaper publisher” (â€Å"Samarskaya gazeta”), where he wrote daily articles for the gossip column â€Å"By the Way” (â€Å"Mezhdu prochim”), signing them as Iegudiil Khlamida. While at the paper he met Ekaterina Volzhina, an editor, whom he married a year later. In 1897 he suffered from aggravated tebibyte and moved to the Crimea together with his wife. by and by they moved to the village of Maksatikha in Ukraine’s Poltava Region.That same year, his son Maksim was born. At the beginning of 1898 Gorky re writheed to Nizhniy Novgorod and in April 1901 Gorky was detained in Nizhniy Novgorod for having taken part in student unrest in St. Petersburg. Later he was expelled to Arazmus. Gorky was elected an honorary academic of well-bred literature. However, under Emperor Nikolay II’s order, the bequeath of the election was annulled. In 1903 he broke up with his wife and in 1904, the Moscow Theatre Actress maria Andreeva became his common law wife. In 1905 Gorky was an active musician in the revolution.He was a close associate of the social-democrats to a greater extentover at the same time, on the eve of â€Å" spread over Sunday” (a key moment in Russia’s history, which served as a trigger for the 1905 transition) he visited Sergey Witte, the root of the October Manifesto of 1905, and together with a group of intellectuals he tried to prevent the tragedy. After the revolution Gorky was arrested on charges of preparing a coup détat, precisely both Russian and European cultural figures blush up to struggle the writer. He was released and at the beginning of the following year, emigrated from Russia.He went to the States to collect funds to support the Russian Revolution. In 1913 Gorky returned to Russia. After the 1917 Revolution his position became ambiguous: on the one hand, he was supportive of the new authorities, but on the other hand, he kept to his own beliefs, thinking that mass culture is more primary(prenominal) than class struggle. At the same time, he started workss at the â€Å" manhood Literature” (â€Å"Vsemirnaya literatura”) publishing household, open the newspaper â€Å"Ne w Life” (â€Å"Novaya Zhizn”). Gorky’s relations with the authorities bit by bit aggravated.In 1921 he left Russia, officially going to Germany for medical treatment, but in feature escaping Bolshevik retribution. He lived in Germany and Czechoslovakia until 1924. During this time he actively wrote articles for German magazines (â€Å"The Ac familiarityment of a Poet and the Russian Literature of Our Time,” â€Å"The Russian Cruelty,” â€Å"The Intellectuals and the Revolution”). All the articles aim his rejection of what had happened in Russia. Gorky actively strived to unify Russian artists working abroad. In the mid-1920s Gorky moved to Sorrento, Italy, where he started work on the novel â€Å"The Life of Klim Samgin” (â€Å"Zhizn Klima Samgina”).The novel was never finished. In 1928 he journ eyed to the USSR and spent the summer traveling around the country. His impressions on the trip were published in the watchword â €Å"Around the conjunction of Soviets” (â€Å"Po Soyuzu Sovetov”). Three years later Gorky moved to Moscow. Having seen the results of Bolshevik rule plot of land traveling, he set as his goal the advance of the new â€Å"cultural construction” of the country. He initiated the beingness of literary magazines and publishing houses. Later he organized and chaired the graduation all-Soviet meeting of Soviet writers. In whitethorn 1934 Gorky’s son was killed.Some suspected the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) was responsible for the killing. Two years later Gorky died himself. Speculations continued to surround his final stage for years; one popular theory suggested he was purposely poisoned. Gorky is buried in Moscow. LITERARY CAREER Gorky rose to prominence early in life and make his mark as a writer, playwright, publicist, and publisher in Russia and abroad. His literary career began in 1892 with the publication of the s tory â€Å"Makar Chudra. ” His articles and stories were briefly appearing in provincial newspapers and journals.His ideas of the writers intimacy in the social, semipolitical, and economic problems facing Russia were close to those of king of beasts Tolstoy and Vladimir G. Korolenko, who became his mentor and friend. Some of his literary works had all-important(prenominal) political significance, such(prenominal) as the poem Burevestnik (The choppy Petrel), which in 1901 prophesied the oncoming storm of revolution. While tour the unite States in 1906 on a thrill to win friends for the revolution and raise funds for the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP), he wrote the novel Mat (Mother).Gorkys revolutionary ideology lay in his insistence on the inevitability of radical budge in Russian society. He started to write for newspapers, and his first book, the 3-volume Sketches and Stories (1898-1899), established his reputation as a writer. Gorky wrote with g enerosity and optimism about the gypsies, hobos, and down-and-outs. He similarly started to analyze more deeply the plight of these people in a broad, social context. In these early stories Gorky skillfully manifold romantic exoticism and realism. Occasionally he proclaim the rebels among his outcasts of Russian society.In his early writing career Gorky became friends with Anton Chekhov , king of beasts Tolstoy , and Vladimir Lenin. Encouraged by Chekhov, he composed his most famous play, The Lower Depths (1902), which took much of the material from his short stories. It was performed at the Moscow Art Theater under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky. The Lower Depths enjoyed a huge conquest, and was soon played in Western Europe and the United States. Gorky was literary editor of Zhizn from 1899 and editor of Znanie publishing house in St. Petersburg from 1900.Foma Gordeyev (1899), his first novel, dealt with the new merchat class in Russia. The short story Dvadsat shest i odna (1899, Twenty-Six work force and a Girl) was about lost ideals. â€Å"There were cardinal of us †twenty-six living machines locked in a damp basement where, from dawn to dusk, we kneaded dough for reservation into biscuits and pretzels. The window of our basement looked out onto a upchuck dug in front of them and lined with brick that was greenness from damp; the windows were covered outside in hunky-dory telegram netting and sunlight could not hit us through the flour-covered panes.Our boss had put the wire netting there so we could not demo hand-outs of his bread to beggars or those comrades of ours who were without work and starving. ” (from ‘Twenty-Six men and a Girl, 1899) The joy in the lives of the bakers is the 16-year old Tania, who works in the same building. A handsome ex-soldier, one of the master bakers, boasts of his success with women. He is challenged to seduce Tania. When Tania succumbs, she is mocked by the men, who have lost the onl y bright key out in the darkness. Tania curses them and walks a sort, and is never again seen in the basement.Gorky became conglomerate in a secret printing press and was temporarily exiled to Arzamas, central Russia in 1902. On deviation Russia in 1906, Gorky spent seven years as a political exile, living mainly in his villa on Capri in Italy. Politically, Gorky was a nuisance to his expletive Marxists because of his insistence on remaining independent, but his great influence was a powerful asset, which from their point of estimate outweighed such minor defects. He returned to Russia in 1913, and during World War I he agreed with the Bolsheviks in opposing Russia’s participation in the war.He unconnected the Bolshevik seizure of power during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and went on to attack the victorious Lenin’s bossy methods in his newspaper Novaya zhizn (â€Å"New Life”) until July 1918, when his protests were quieten by censorship on Leninâ€⠄¢s orders. aliveness in Petrograd, Gorky tried to help those who were not at once enemies of the Soviet government. Gorky often assisted imprisoned scholars and writers, parcel them survive hunger and cold. His efforts, however, were thwarted by figures such as Lenin and Grigory Zinovyev, a close ally of Lenin’s who was the head of the Petrograd Bolsheviks.In 1921 Lenin sent Gorky into exile under the assumption of Gorky’s needing specialized medical treatment abroad. In the decade ending in 1923 Gorky’s superior masterpiece appeared. This is the autobiographical trilogy Detstvo (1913â€14; My Childhood), V lyudyakh (1915â€16; In the World), and Moi universitety (1923; My Universities). The title of the last volume is sardonic because Gorky’s only university had been that of life, and his wish to study at Kazan University had been frustrated.This trilogy is one of the finest autobiographies in Russian. It describes Gorky’s childhood and early manhood and reveals him as an acute observer of detail, with a flair for describing his own family, his numerous employers, and a persuasion of minor but memorable figures. The trilogy contains many messages, which Gorky now tended to imply rather than preach openly: protests against motiveless cruelty, continued emphasis on the importance of humor and self-reliance, and musings on the value of hard work.Gorky finished his trilogy abroad, where he also wrote the stories published in Rasskazy 1922â€1924 (1925; â€Å"Stories 1922â€24”), which are among his best work. From 1924 he lived at a villa in Sorrento, Italy, to which he invited many Russian artists and writers who stayed for lengthy periods. Gorky’s health was poor, and he was disillusioned by postrevolutionary life in Russia, but in 1928 he yielded to pressures to return, and the overgenerous official celebration there of his 60th birthday was beyond anything he could have expected.In the followi ng year he returned to the U. S. S. R. permanently and lived there until his death. His return coincided with the presidential term of Stalin’s ascendancy, and Gorky became a prop of Stalinist political orthodoxy. Correspondence published in the 1990s in the midst of Gorky and Stalin and between Gorky and Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the Soviet secret police, shows that Gorky gradually lost all illusions that freedom would prevail in the U. S. S. R. , and he consequently adjusted to the rules of the new way of life.He was now more than ever the undisputed attracter of Soviet writers, and, when the Soviet Writers’ Union was lay downed in 1934, he became its first president. At the same time, he helped to found the literary method of Socialist Realism, which was imposed on all Soviet writers and which obliged themâ€in stampâ€to become outright political propagandists. Gorky remained active as a writer, but almost all his later fiction is concerned with the peri od before 1917. In Delo Artamonovykh (1925; The Artamonov Business), one of his best novels, he showed his continued pursual in the rise and fall of prerevolutionary Russian capitalism.From 1925 until the end of his life, Gorky worked on the novel Zhizn Klima Samgina (â€Å"The Life of Klim Samgin”). Though he completed four volumes that appeared between 1927 and 1937 (translated into English as Bystander, The Magnet, Other Fires, and The Specter), the novel was to remain unfinished. It depicts in detail 40 years of Russian life as seen through the eyes of a man inside destroyed by the events of the decades preceding and following the turn of the 20th century.There were also more playsâ€Yegor Bulychov i drugiye (1932; â€Å"Yegor Bulychov and Others”) and Dostigayev i drugiye (1933; â€Å"Dostigayev and Others”)â€but the most generally admired work is a set of reminiscences of Russian writersâ€Vospominaniya o Tolstom (1919; Reminiscences of social lio n Nikolaevich Tolstoy) and O pisatelyakh (1928; â€Å"About Writers”). The memoir of Tolstoy is so springy and free from the hagiographic approach traditional in Russian studies of their leading authors that it has sometimes been acclaimed as Gorky’s masterpiece.Almost as impressive is Gorky’s study of Chekhov. He also wrote pamphlets on topical events and problems in which he proclaim some of the most brutal aspects of Stalinism. Assessment. After his death Gorky was canonized as the patron saint of Soviet letters. His reputation abroad has also remained high, but it is uncertain whether posterity will deal with him so kindly. His success was partly due, both in the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent abroad, to political accident.Though technically of lower-middle-class origin, he lived in such beggary as a child and young man that he is often considered the greatest â€Å"proletarian” in Russian literature. This circumstance, coinciding with the r ise of working-class movements all over the world, helped to give Gorky an immense literary reputation, which his works do not wholly merit. Gorky’s literary style, though gradually improving through the years, kept up(p) its original defects of excessive striving for effect, of working on the reader’s nerves by the heap up of emotive adjectives, and of tending to overstate.Among Gorky’s other defects, in addition to his weakness for philosophical digressions, is a certain coarseness of emotional grain. But his eye for physical detail, his talent for making his characters live, and his unrivaled knowledge of the Russian â€Å"lower depths” are weighty items on the credit side. Gorky was the only Soviet writer whose work embraced the prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary period so exhaustively, and, though he by no means stands with Chekhov, Tolstoy, and others in the front outrank of Russian writers, he remains one of the more important literary figur es of his age.\r\n'