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During the excitement connected with the visit of Gorki to this country, three different committees of Russians came to Hull-House begging that I would secure a statement in at least one of the Chicago dailies of their own view, that the agents of the Czar had cleverly centered public attention upon Gorki's private life and had fomented a scandal so successfully that the object of Gorki's visit to America had been foiled; he who had known intimately the most wretched of the Czar's subjects, who was best able to sympathetically portray their wretchedness, not only failed to get a hearing before an American audience, but could scarcely find the shelter of a roof.
The crowds at Coney Island are as different from Gorki's description of them as anything could well be. Now then, we who know the dregs of Russian life only through Gorki's pictures, can we be certain that his representations are accurate? Are they reliable history of fact, or are they the revelations of a heart that knoweth its own bitterness?
This sketch is valuable not merely because of the impression of a distinguished foreign writer of one of the sights of America, but because it raises in our minds an obstinate doubt of his capacity to tell the truth about life in general. Suppose a person who had never seen Coney Island should read Gorki's vivid description of it, would he really know anything about Coney Island? Of course not.
Gorki's full-length novels are far from successful works of art. They have all the incoherence and slipshod workmanship of Dostoevski, without the latter's glow of brotherly love. His first real novel, "Foma Gordeev," an epic of the Volga, has many beautiful descriptive passages, really lyric and idyllic in tone, mingled with an incredible amount of drivel.
The long novel "Mother" is a good picture of life among the working-people in a Russian factory, that is, life as seen through Gorki's eyes; all cheerfulness and laughter are, of course, absent, and we have presented a dull monotone of misery.
In the life of the peasants there is of course fun and laughter, as there is in every human life; but at the root there is suffering, not the loud protest of the Anglo-Saxon labourer, whose very loudness is a witness to his vitality but passive, fatalistic, apathetic misery. Life has been often defined, but never in a more depressing fashion than by the peasant in Gorki's novel, who asks quietly:
It foreshadows a complete change in the psychosis of the Russian reader, the decay of the literature of passivity, and the rise of a new literature of action and physical revolt. The best representative of the transition from Chekhov to the new literature of self-assertion is Maxim Gorki's friend, Leonid Andreev. . . .
Much of Gorki's work is like Swift's poetry, powerful not because of its cerebration or spiritual force, but powerful only from the physical point of view, from its capacity to disgust. It appeals to the nose and the stomach rather than to the mind and the heart. From the medicinal standpoint, it may have a certain value.
Gorki's notes are always the most thrilling when played below the range of the conventional instrument of style. This is not low life, it is sub-life. He is, after all, a student of sensational effect; and the short story is peculiarly adapted to his natural talent. He cannot develop characters, he cannot manage a large group, or handle a progressive series of events.
Similarly direct and powerful is the indictment contained in Gorki's NIGHT LODGING. The social pariahs, forced into poverty and crime, yet desperately clutch at the last vestiges of hope and aspiration. Lost existences these, blighted and crushed by cruel, unsocial environment.
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