Moissaye Olgin was a chronicler of Russian revolutionary literature, introducing U.S. audiences to many novelists and poets. Olgin knew the work of Maxim Gorky as well as anyone, writing a number of works on the great Russian writer. Here he pens an introduction to Gorky on the 40th anniversary of his literary career for the New Masses.
‘The Work of Maxim Gorky’ by Moissaye J. Olgin from New Masses. Vol. 8 No. 4. November, 1932.
He started his literary work when the proletariat of Russia was just beginning to stir; he is celebrating the 40th anniversary of his literary work after fifteen years of proletarian dictatorship in Russia. He stood at the cradle of the socialist movement among the workers of Russia; he stands at the threshold of the second Rive- Year Plan which is to complete in the rough the structure of a socialist society. Throughout all these years he has remained faithful to the working Glass, to the revolution, and to socialism. His unusual artistic power has been devoted to fighting bourgeois society in the name of the oppressed human being, in the name of securing conditions for the growth of a free human personality, in the name of the social revolution.
He came into literature as a challenge. Sympathies for the exploited and downtrodden were not lacking in Russian literature. They were a tradition. Didn’t Chekhov sigh over the fate of the inmates of Ward Number Six? Weren’t his Three Sisters dreaming about a beautiful sun-colored life? Wasn’t Tolstoy the advocate of the night-lodging inmates in the cities, of the Katjushas innocently sentenced to prison, of the peasants groaning under the burden of landlord rule? Did not Uspensky land in an insane asylum as a result of his steeping himself in the life of the Russian village? Didn’t even Turgenev, the apollonic esthete, create immortal pictures saturated with sympathy for the serfs? And how about Korolenko with his Siberian characters, with his “Makar’s Dreams”?
Sympathy for the poor brother, for the victim of social injustice was one of the major notes in the work of the Russian writers. And if Gorky startled the writing brotherhood from the very moment of his appearance it was not due to his subjects; it was due to his manner and spirit.
He was not only telling about the dwellers “down below,” he was the dweller himself. He was the downtrodden personified. He was not looking down at anybody; he was just what he was. And he said to the writing community: “Spare us your sympathy. We can well take care of ourselves.”
He was a challenge because he presented the coming of the new class. He jarred on everybody’s ears because he didn’t fit into the traditional conception of the “poor brother.” He didn’t look poor. He wasn’t even melancholy. He was rudely aggressive. He flaunted his healthy appetite in the faces of the beauty-loving intellectuals. He was not an intellectual in the accepted sense. He was a citizen of the “lower depths.” Those depths were shaking a hairy fist at the whole structure of bourgeois civilization.
Looking backward from the height of forty years it does not seem as if he had said it all correctly at the very outset. He was romantic. He was sometimes unduly sentimental. He wove gypsy legends. He idealized the Russian equivalent of the American hobo. But it wasn’t exactly what he said as how he said it in the face of a sedate intellectual world.
Those Chelkashes and Malvas, Chudras and “creatures that were men” refused to recognize the moral code of bourgeois society. They obeyed powerful instincts. They had sharp teeth and an insatiable greed for things that did not belong to them. They took hold of everything within sight with a magnificent disregard for state and church. They were rebels in a sense. Some Russian critics, in their efforts at profundity, thought they discerned a tendency towards the superman in Gorky’s early writings, and accused him of Nietzscheanism, whereas with him it was only the experience of proletarian youth come to articulation. Even in his earliest works you see the growing proletarian fighter. He is never himself by himself — he is part of a collective humanity which does not include the rich. He does not suffer in individual terms. His figures are highly impressive; they live; they move in an atmosphere of their own; they breathe the essence of life, but at the same time they are representatives of social groups.
What was perhaps most startling in those early challenges was the fact that Gorky showed how you can be poor, hungry and happy, how you can be stealing bread from a baker’s stand and be a splendid specimen of humanity, how you can ignore the very existence of taboos set up by property-owning society and be an intensely attractive creature. In a sense, the first works of Gorky were a mockery at the writing profession. Those hobos were defying anybody to envelope them with the vapor of commiseration.
Even in his early days Gorky was a revolutionist. He belonged to underground revolutionary circles. He shared with the Bolsheviks their convictions regarding the class-struggle and the coming revolution. Lenin himself had just loomed up on the horizon, – a young lion, the great theoretician and strategist of the ; class struggle, destined to lead a victorious social revolution twenty five years later. Lenin wrote, in 1894:
“When the foremost representatives of the working class will have assimilated the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea about the historical role of the Russian worker, when these ideas will have become widespread and there will have been organized among the workers firm organizations which shall transform the present sporadic economic war of the workers into a conscious class struggle, — then the Russian worker, having risen at the head of all the democratic elements, will throw absolutism down and lead the Russian proletariat (alongside with the proletariat of all countries) on the free road of open political struggle to a victorious Communist revolution.”
Gorky soon recognized that his idealized slum dwellers were not his real heroes. Having shocked the intellectuals by his revolutionary onslaught, having placed on the stage the allegorical figure of Danko who, in order to light for his brothers the road “from the dark thickets into sun-lit wide space,” Gorky tore out his own burning heart and lifted it as a torch over the crowd. He hurled himself on the very substance of Russian society, to dissect it limb by limb, to hew, with a firm hand and sure eye, out of the raw material of Russia’s mass life an endless gallery of characters, to record an unceasing variety of incidents tragic and comic, to follow up the appearance of new social configurations and social types, to dig ever deeper into the darkest substratum of mass psychology, to pass from the present to the past, near and remote, and from the past to the present, to people his works with a teeming multiplicity of the most varigated humans who after decades remain as fresh as on the day of their creation.
Gorky’s range is the whole of Russia. Gorky’s interest goes all the way down from Mayakin, the pillar of capitalist society, to the new world citizen just born in the field, to a working mother that was overcome in the middle of the road, — born, be it noted, with the aid of the author doing midwife’s duty. To know Gorky is to know the very fabric of the Russian people of yesterday and today. It is a vast amount of work bearing witness to a gigantic artistic memory, to a powerful pictorial talent, to an ability for creating a living image by a few bold strokes, to an interest in life’s phenomena and to a creative vitality equal to none.
Throughout all this riot of artistic work Gorky remained faithful to a number of fundamental tenets.
He remained the friend of the masses. His chief concern is the baker’s helper, the truckman, the factory hand, the farm hand, the painter’s apprentice, the lumberjack, the night watchman, the clerk. In dealing with these characters he draws from a vast store of experience accumulated in his adolescence and youth. He is not a Kuprin who goes a-slumming to fish out types. He is not an Andreyev who has to invent his personages and make them act by virtue of sheer artistic suggestion. He is not even a Serafimovich who always, in spite of democratic tendencies, speaks of “them.” Gorky, when creating proletarian figures, is always among his own people. He is at his best in these creations. He is not primarily interested in showing the “better” types; neither is he sitting judgment over his people. He just thrusts his artistic pitchfork into the thick mass of humanity whether in the town of Okurov or in the remotest priest-ridden village, whether on a Volga log raft or among the intellectuals in a Petersburg salon, — and brings out whatever happens. What he brings out palpitates with life and remains alive forever. Gorky is not making propaganda in the sense of trying to prove that the workers are good and the exploiters are bad. That is below the dignity of his talent. He gives those people as they are, as they have emerged from the crucible of his experience on the lense of his creative imagination and because the capitalist social system is intrinsically wrong, and because every social type is unavoidably a representative of his class, Gorky’s works give you material of incalculable value for the understanding of the class composition and the class struggle of Russia. If Gorky were to argue on behalf of his own method, he would say together with Foma Gordejev! “You have not built a life, you have made a garbage heap of it. You have created with your own hands mountains of dirt; it is suffocating. Have you a conscience? Do you think of God? Pennies, these are your gods. As to conscience, you have driven it away…Where is it? Blood-suckers! You live on somebody else’s toil! No end of people must shed bloody tears on account of your miserable deeds! You scoundrels do not deserve even to be in hell…You will be boiled not in fire but in hot mud. Not for centuries will you get rid of your tortures.” It was not Gorky’s fault, indeed, that capitalism was so little attractive.
In one respect Gorky was a propagandist all his life: he did not try to beautify ugly reality. He gave it as it existed. He hated exploitation, the degradation of the human personality, the humiliation of the human mind. In his intense sympathy for the sufferers he resembled Dostoijevsky, but while the latter sought escape in mystic moods, Gorky sought escape in fighting the hateful system.
It was natural for him to portray the revolutionary movement in its varying aspects. From “Mother” to the “Life of Klim Samgin” there is an immense distance artistically. The former novel has something of the romantic: the latter is all sound and sober realism; the main hero of the former, the old working woman who turns Bolshevik after her son is arrested, is somewhat idealized; the figures in the “Life of Klim Samgin” are ruthlessly exposed both as to positive and negative qualities. The spirit that pervades these and many other works dealing with the revolutionary movement, however, remains unchanged. Toiling humanity breaking its chains. Workers rising against exploitation. The human personality in the oppressed battling to assert itself. The vision of a great tomorrow illuminating the difficult road.
“Man, — that sounds proud,” said Gorky in one of his early writings. He has remained faithful to this slogan throughout his life. Gorky is perhaps the most humane writer living in spite — or even because — of the fact that he is not sentimental, that he sees people in their proper proportions. Gorky loves life. He loves the processes of life. He loves the crowded avenues of life.
He seems always to be moving in a crowd. And this is why he so adamantly despises the typical bourgeois intellectual who lives for himself by himself. With what sarcasm Gorky scolded the esthetic intellectuals who tried to run away from the revolution under various ideological pretenses. “Here we see them,” he writes in 1905, “disturbed and pitiful, hiding from the revolution wherever they can — in the dark corners of mysticism, in the pretty bowers of estheticism, in the artificial structures hastily built by them out of stolen material. Sad-eyed and hopeless, they wander through the labyrinths of metaphysics over and over again returning to the narrow paths of religion all heaped with the rubbish of centuries, everywhere bringing with them their vulgarity, the hysterical moanings of a soul smitten with petty fear, their sterility, their brazenness, and everything they touch they shower with a hail of pretty but empty words that have a false and pitiful ring.”
Gorky was actively and intensely interested in political events. He lived those events with all the passion of his being. The writer of these lines has a personal interest in the following passage of a letter written by Gorky to Brjusov right after the sentencing of 218 students of the Kiev University to serve one year in the army — “for correction.” The writer was among the sentenced; the punishment was the czar’s reaction to a students’ demonstration. Gorky wrote:
“My mood is that of a mad dog who was beaten up and leashed to a chain. If you, sir, love man, I hope you will understand me. You see, I feel that to send a student to the army is hideous; it is a brazen crime against his personal freedom. It is an idiotic measure of scoundrels oversated with power. My heart is boiling over and I would be glad to spit into the shameless mugs of those man-haters who when reading your ‘Northern Flowers’ will give them a gracious praise. But then they praise me too. This is revolting and intolerable to such a degree that an inexpressible hatred is surging in me against everything, even against Bunin whom I love but whom I do not understand; I do not understand why his talent, beautiful like opaque old silver, is not being sharpened by him like a knife to be thrust where it belongs.”
Gorky has never been one of the literati. He is never an outsider, an observer. He is always part of the revolutionary struggle even when he lives abroad, even when he is confined to the Capri island in consequence of his illness. He is conscious of being an active part of the stream of social life.
Gorky hates with all his might the darkness of the Russian past, the domination of man over man, the ignorance, the brutality, the crudity of “holy Russia.” No less does he hate those poison flowers of art that throve on the accursed soil. He was and is an enemy of religion, an enemy of the church and an enemy of those writers who tried to find “profundities” in religious mysticism luxuriating amidst poverty and filth. When he was accused of opposing Dostoievsky’s “Devils” he wrote: “Kipling is very talented, but the Hindoos cannot fail to recognize the damage he causes by his preachment of imperialism, and many Englishmen agree with them in that …. Dostoievsky is great, and Tolstoy is a genius, and you gentlemen, if you please, are all talented and clever, but Russia and its people are more significant and more important than Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, and even Pushkin, not to speak about us all.”
In one form or another Gorky always remained a member of a revolutionary organization. Since 1905 he has been affiliated with the Bolshevik party. There were times when he deviated from the Communist line as in the case of that ultra-left movement known as “recallism” (demanding the recall of the Bolshevik Duma deputies) or in the case of other disagreements with one of the other measures undertaken by the Bolshevik Party. There were times when he had his quarrels even with the new Soviet state. But all his life he remained loyal to the revolution and loyal to socialism. Gorky as a writer and Gorky as a fighter was always hated by the bourgeoisie and by the very many intellectuals defending the bourgeoisie. For about thirty years his enemies were shouting about the “death” of Gorky. In this their wish was father to their thought. Gorky kept on growing, broadening, reaching out into new fields, creating monumental works to the dismay of the enemies.
Gorky is considered the father of proletarian literature in Russia. His very language was a challenge to the language prevailing in pre-war Russian literature. He is colorful but he is an enemy of that artful polish and exaggerated refinement that the language received at the hands of the Russian symbolists. He is natural in the true sense of the word, but he never tries to imitate folklore in the manner in which it was done by the Russian classics: he has no need of that. He is idiomatic but without the “holy Russian” darkness that creeps into the language of a Dostoievsky or a Chekhov or a Sergejev Tsensky or an Andrey Belyj. He is strong with the strength of one who does not have to tighten his muscles to show power. He is musical like the Russian steppe, like the ripples of the Volga, but he is seldom sentimental and never shallow.
Gorky is the father of Russian proletarian literature not only because he gave samples of great art of molding social material under the rays of the class-conception of society with the purpose of bringing the class-struggle into bolder relief, but also in the sense of having been the first organizer of the young proletarian writers who began their activities at the turn of the century. In 1914, three years before the revolution, a volume of stories of young proletarian writers, factory workers, the first of its kind, was published with the aid of, and with an introduction by, Gorky. Here Gorky, addressing himself to the readers and to the writer workers, says:
“This book written by your comrades is a new and very significant phenomenon in your life. It speaks eloquently of the growth of the intellectual powers of the proletariat. You understand very well that for a self-taught writer to write a little story is infinitely more difficult than for a professional writer to write a novel of several hundred pages. Without equivocation we may say that this collection of yours is interesting. You have ground to be proud. And who can tell the future? Maybe this little book will be mentioned in the future as one of the first steps of the Russian proletariat towards the creation of its own artistic literature. One may object that this is a fantasy, that such a literature has never existed. Well, there are many things that have never existed; the working class itself has never existed in those forms and with that spiritual content which it has acquired in later days. I am convinced that the proletariat can create artistic literature as it has created, with great difficulty and toil, its daily press.”
Gorky foresaw the development of the proletariat’s creative forces as Lenin foresaw the development of the proletariat towards the social revolution. Lenin valued Gorky, thinking of him as “an authority in proletarian art,” as “the greater representative of proletarian art,” defending him against attacks while criticizing his mistakes and declaring that “Gorky is a tremendous artistic talent who has done and will do much service to the world proletarian movement.”
Gorky never knew the line of demarcation between “literature” and journalism, the art of the creative writer and the art of the pamphleteer. Such works as the “Island of the Yellow Devil” or “Beautiful France” are a happy blending of satirical denunciation and striking artistic presentation. Many chapters of his works are of similar nature. When necessity requires, Gorky puts aside his artistic pen to grip the publicist’s club with which he belabors the enemies of the working class and the enemies of the revolution all the while using his artistic talent to make his ideas stand out in clear relief. It is difficult to say in which field he is a greater master.
As a publicist he is particularly effective in his attacks upon bourgeois culture. His letter to the American intellectuals published in pamphlet form in this country may serve as an example. He defends the Soviet Union, describing the achievement of the proletarian dictatorship, countering the attacks of the capitalists. Never for a moment does he lose sight of the great future of a classless society now under construction. In this publicist’s work he is as realistic, as close to the earth as in his artistic writings.
Russia of today does not appear to him in a haze of ideal beauty. He sees the ugly remnants of “old mother Russia”; he is aware of the scars of the dark past that Russia still bears, he feels the obstacles which arise not only in the objective world but also within the minds of those who build the new life. But never for a moment does he forget that these are the sufferings of growth, that old “Mother Russia” is vanishing, that new Russia is rapidly casting off the remnants of the old hideous habiliments, that the future is assured. In this ability to see the future amidst the difficulties of to-day Gorky finds Lenin’s greatest genius. “He knew how to foresee what must happen like nobody else before him knew. He knew this and he knew how to do it, it seems to me, because with one half of his great soul he lived in the future, because his iron-clad but flexible logic showed him the remote future in perfectly concrete real forms. This seems to explain his astonishing stability in relation to the reality which never dismayed him, no matter how difficult and complicated it was, which never shook his firm belief that the moment will come when the working class and the peasantry must and shall be the masters of the whole world.” This holds true not only of Lenin but of his friend and collaborator Gorky.
Gorky is one of the outstanding champions of the Soviet Union and of socialist construction. The fortieth anniversary of his literary activity was celebrated in a fashion worthy of the Socialist country and the great artist fighter. This was the first time in history that a great writer was celebrated not by dozens or hundreds of thousands, but by scores of millions of toilers in cities and villages.
Gorky is inseparable from the Soviet Union. Gorky is bringing the Soviet Union to millions of workers still exploited under capitalism throughout the world. The workers must know Gorky. It is the duty of such magazines as the New Masses and such organizations as the John Reed Club to bring Gorky most intimately to the consciousness of the American workers.
Moissaye J Olgin was born in Ukraine in 1878 where he joined the revolutionary movement, organized Jewish self-defense groups and participated in 1905 as a member of the Central Committee of the local Bund in Vilnius. He emigrated to the US in 1915 where he wrote for Forverts and became a Left Wing leader of the Socialist Party’s Jewish Socialist Federation as he was when this was written. He, like many in the JSF, sided with the Workers Council group and stayed in the SP to fight for its adherence to the Third International until 1921. He played a leading role in popularizing Marxism and Marxist texts among Yiddish speaking workers. He joined the CP in 1922 and became editor of the Workers (Communist) Party’s Yiddish language daily Freiheit, which he would continue until his death in 1939. He also wrote for Pravda, the Daily Worker, and the party’s large and varied Jewish press. He was a member of the National Committee of the CPUSA for most of his time in the Party. A rival of Bittleman, Cannon, Foster and Browder’s for much of the1920s, he would become ardent supporter of Browder and Foster’s throughout the many turns of the following fifteen years who immense authority among Jewish revolutionaries was used to attack Trotsky and Trotskyism, whom he formerly championed, throughout the 30s. Fluent in nearly a dozen languages, he was a translator and responsible for producing several volumes of Lenin’s Collected Works in English, as well as many classic texts of Marx and Engels in Yiddish. Tens of thousands attended his funeral in New York City when he died.
The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.
PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1932/v08n04-nov-1932-New-Masses.pdf
