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Updated: May 24, 2025
I did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the cause of freedom in Russia which he had come to get; as I told a valued friend of his and mine, I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the figure too high.
Gorky has done all that one man could to preserve the intellectual and artistic life of Russia. I feared that he was dying, and that, perhaps, it was dying too. But he recovered, and I hope it will recover also. It has often been said that, whatever the inadequacy of Bolshevik organization in other fields, in art and in education at least they have made great progress.
It came so suddenly that it troubled him and was almost a blow to his modesty, which is one of the sympathetic traits of his personality. In fact, there came a time when the attention of the literary world, especially among the younger generation, became so wrapped up in his works that Gorky and Tchekoff sank to a second level.
Maxim Gorky declared in his Novya Zhizn that there had been "ten thousand lynchings." Upon what authority Gorky who was inclined to sympathize with the Bolsheviki, and who even accepted office under them based that statement is not known. Probably it is an exaggeration.
For, if I have exaggerated what happened, my method of exposition has shown the true state of my soul. Perhaps, I have served you with an imaginary roast, but the sauce is made of the purest truth." The end that he is after, Gorky has shown us in his story, "The Lecturer," which contains his theories on literature.
Recently, however, publicists have gone to the other extreme and asserted that Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and a host of other Russian writers were apostles of the tenets which have since received the name of Bolshevism, and that it was they who prepared the Russian upheaval just as it was the authors of the "Encyclopedia" who prepared the French Revolution.
Altogether that autumn was an eventful one for him: Kuprin, Bunin and Gorky visited the Crimea; the writer Elpatyevsky settled there also, and Chekhov felt fairly well. Tolstoy's illness was the centre of general attention, and Chekhov was very uneasy about him.
Speaking of new writers, you throw Melshin in with a whole lot. That's not right. Melshin stands apart. He is a great and unappreciated writer, an intelligent, powerful writer, though perhaps he will not write more than he has written already. Kuprin I have not read at all. Gorky I like, but of late he has taken to writing rubbish, revolting rubbish, so that I shall soon give up reading him.
For the barefooted dreamer's life is Gorky's life, his ideals are Gorky's ideals, his pleasures and pains, Gorky's pleasures and pains. And Gorky, though broken in health now, buffeted by the storms of fate, bruised and wounded in the battle-field of life, still like Byron and like Lermontov, " seeks the storm As though the storm contained repose."
It may be that a man like Ibsen in Norway or a man like Gorky in Russia are the only people left who have so much faith that they can really believe in scepticism. It may be that they are the only people left who have so much animal spirits that they can really feast high and drink deep at the ancient banquet of pessimism.
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