In a library when I was young I came across a book published by the Hogarth Press. It was so delicate I hardly wanted to touch it. It had a mottled green cover, it was maybe seventy pages long, and I read it in one amazed hour. The book was Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, from 1920, which the Woolfs would later republish in a fuller volume, with two more of Gorky’s reminiscences: of Chekhov and the less world-famous Leonid Andreyev. I loved the book entirely, and surely any book is lovable that has Tolstoy on the phone to Chekhov? For a while I considered stealing it, this rare object, which seemed to contain answers to the mystery of something called literature. The translation a century ago was by S.S. Koteliansky with Leonard Woolf (Woolf’s contribution presumably being to correct the occasional syntactical blemish), and was only rarely reprinted. Now at last there is a new translation, by Bryan Karetnyk, and everyone can contemplate this strange and moving work.
By the time he published his memoir of Tolstoy in 1919, Gorky was a major celebrity but also a scandal. He had made his name in the 1890s, with the novel Foma Gordeyev and a collection of his essays and stories which imported urban proletarian characters into Russian literature. He was born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1868 as Alexei Peshkov. His pen name meant bitter, signalling the way his life story was the guarantee of his work’s authenticity – this autodidact orphan who had apprenticed as a shoemaker, run away as a teenager to work in the kitchens of a Volga steamer, then found a job in a bakery in Kazan, hoping to study at the university. In 1902 Stanislavsky put on his play The Lower Depths at the Moscow Art Theatre, and it made Gorky famous not just in Russia but in Europe too, as a writer who had muscled into the elegant home of Chekhov with his deadbeats and wisecracking prostitutes. Chekhov introduced Gorky to Tolstoy, and they became a strange duo, with an age gap of forty years. Their mismatched friendship was maintained at Tolstoy’s home of Yasnaya Polyana and in the Crimea, where Tolstoy would stay with friends and Gorky spent time for his health, despite having been exiled by the tsarist regime.
The other unlikely friendship Gorky formed at this time was with Lenin. His writings had made him a hero to socialist intellectuals, and he remained close to the Bolsheviks while living in exile on Capri after 1906. In 1913 he returned to Russia, and a few years later observed with admiration the Bolshevik destruction of tsarist autocracy, but by then his friendship with Lenin had become a catastrophe of mutual mistrust and condemnation. Gorky accused Lenin of not knowing the masses, of not having lived with them; Lenin accused Gorky of being ‘weak-willed’ and ‘clearly reactionary’.
Two years after publishing his memoir of Tolstoy, Gorky sent himself back into the safety of exile in Italy, this time from the Bolsheviks. Now, in his fifties, he reminisced about the writers he had known before the revolution, talking about them with love but also a kind of condescending amazement. Tolstoy had been dead for eleven years, Chekhov for seventeen. Gorky was the designated mourner for a vanished moment in Russian culture. He wanted socialism or democracy but he no longer wanted Bolshevism, which seemed to him psychopathically preoccupied with power. Something was at stake, it was partly Russia, it was partly politics, and it was partly the kind of writing Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev practised – always in pursuit of something they liked to call ‘truth’. These reminiscences are therefore little records from a heroic age, but they are also records of a time when no one knew which moves were truly heroic. Maybe it’s this uncertainty that makes them so charming, for all their grim context and our knowledge of how the story would end, a decade later, when Gorky would be wooed back to Moscow by Stalin to champion that oxymoron, socialist realism.
In the 19th century a new tone emerged in Russian writing and it created much confusion – both in Russia and elsewhere. Everyone was agreed that whatever it was, it wasn’t European. The only Russian who was European was Turgenev, and it made him highly suspicious. But maybe to give it this nationalist tinge isn’t accurate at all. There were basically three or four writers – Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov, with Turgenev a possible addition and Gogol an ancestor – who had crafted a form of fiction writing that seemed to offer such a radically fluid and cavernous account of human relations, so much less brittle than Thackeray or Zola, that it no longer seemed to be art at all. Anna Karenina was a ‘piece of life’, Matthew Arnold said, not a novel. Virginia Woolf wondered at Dostoevsky’s naked characters, vessels of ‘this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul’. Everyone else in European literature suddenly seemed ordinary. It was a freak of time and space.
One feature of such apparently exposed writing was to collapse any distinction between life and literature. It seemed natural in this era to covet biographical intimacy, to devour lives and letters, and Gorky’s Reminiscences are especially intense. He believed that no anecdote was too domestic to be meaningful, like this story of Tolstoy praising Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’ in front of Chekhov. ‘On that day, Chekhov had a temperature: he was sitting with red blotches on his cheeks and his head tilted forward, cleaning his pince-nez meticulously. He said nothing for some while, then finally, with a sigh, he said quietly and with embarrassment: “There are misprints in it …”’ Gorky writes as if everything private in the lives of these writers were a mystery to be decoded, as if this story of Chekhov might be some clue to his modesty, and therefore his talent. I don’t think he was mistaken. Maybe at a certain point all literature is personal. It’s difficult to admit this because the ideal is of something abstract and therefore perfect. It was the ideal for sure in Paris, where Flaubert proposed that the realist novel was also the impersonal novel, that the personality of the author was of no interest to anyone serious.
But the theory was always fragile. This is why criticism since the 19th century has always veered between genres, the august impersonal critical essay and the memoir, the diary and the letter (one problem with Flaubert’s theory was his own correspondence, published a few years after he died, which was as exciting, as novelistic, as his novels), and why perhaps the greatest novelist in history is recorded by Gorky in this way: ‘It always struck me that Tolstoy did not much care to discuss literature – and in this I do not believe I am mistaken – although he was vitally interested in the personality of the author. I was frequently asked the question: “Did you know him?” “What was he like?” “Where was he born?”’
One way of reading the Reminiscences is as a novel about timeframes masquerading as an essay. Gorky and Tolstoy first met in 1900, when Gorky was 31 and Tolstoy 71. Tolstoy had a decade left to live. A photo of this unlikely couple survives from Yasnaya Polyana. Gorky has his feet arranged neatly in balletic first position, with a stick and a hat and a buttoned-up coat. Next to him Tolstoy is dressed as a luxury muzhik, with an unkempt white beard. Chekhov, the third character in this story, was forty. He was Gorky’s more brilliant elder contemporary, the preferred sibling, the one whom Tolstoy truly loved, partly for his soul but really for his talent. (‘He loved Chekhov and always, whenever looking at him, seemed to caress his face with a tender gaze.’ Or: ‘Ah, what a dear, wonderful man he is: modest and mild-mannered, just like a young lady! Why, he even walks like a young lady. What a marvel he is!’) At this moment, in 1900, almost all the realists were dead: Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Flaubert, George Eliot, the Goncourt brothers, Maupassant. Zola was about to die. An entire era had passed. In the absence of the dead, the three men were arguing over something, which was literature.
Older revered writers are a problem for the younger writer, however famous the younger writer may already be. The older writers are more respected, more famous, and often they now write in a way the younger writer dislikes, but still the younger writer needs or wants their love and respect, and this complicates the relationship. (The protégé also wants to distinguish himself from mere disciples like the spiritual intellectuals crowding Yasnaya Polyana who, Gorky wrote, ‘love to sigh and greet each other with a kiss; they all have sweaty palms, limp wrists and cheating eyes.’)
No wonder that in this memoir Gorky is all ambivalence. He complains about Tolstoy’s ‘stubborn, despotic wish … to turn the life of Count Tolstoy into some kind of hagiographic Life of St Leo’, but fervently records Tolstoy’s actions and conversations. ‘He leaped over the ditches and puddles like a young boy, shook the raindrops from the branches overhead, and told a marvellous tale of how Fet’ – the lyric poet Afanasy Fet – ‘had explained Schopenhauer to him in that very grove.’ And then: ‘With a loving, gentle hand, he stroked the damp satin trunks of the birch trees.’ What’s interesting is what emerges from this proximity, a relationship so complicated that its symbol or summary might be this wonderful game of truth or dare:
He used to ask: ‘Aren’t you fond of me?’
‘No, I’m not,’ you had to answer.
‘Don’t you love me?’
‘Not today.’
In his questions he was merciless: in his answers reserved – as behoves a wise man.
Gorky’s account is so open and so prickly in its misunderstandings that sometimes it reads like stand-up. One day Tolstoy lets him read his diary. Gorky gives it back, puzzled by one entry: ‘God is my desire.’
‘An unfinished thought,’ he said, his eyes narrowing as he glanced at the little page. ‘I suppose I meant to say: “God is my desire to know Him …” No, that can’t be it …’
He roared with laughter and, having rolled the diary up into a tube, thrust it into the broad pocket of his jacket.
God and Tolstoy were a particular problem for Gorky. By now, Tolstoy had fully entered his sage phase. He was no longer only a novelist. He was also a vast thinker, the founder of a cult whose apolitical politics Gorky disliked. ‘The thought that plagues him, markedly, more than others is that of God.’ This is how Gorky chose to begin his collage of impressions. And it ends with Tolstoy still plagued, telling Gorky, the unbeliever, that belief in God is necessary:
He had scarcely ever spoken to me about this subject, and its weightiness, its unexpectedness, caught me off guard, as it were, overwhelmed me. I said nothing. As he sat on the divan with his legs tucked under him, he smiled victoriously into his beard and, threatening me with a finger, said: ‘You won’t get out of this by saying nothing, oh no!’
Then, unbeliever that I am, I looked at him warily, a little fearfully – I looked, and I thought: ‘How like unto God this man is!’
Instead of God, Gorky had Tolstoy. Gorky had been orphaned when he was eleven, and he is frank in his depiction of Tolstoy as his ideal patriarch. Once, he writes, he happened to see Tolstoy alone on a beach.
In the meditative stillness of the old man, I sensed something magical and prophetic, something that plunged down into the dark depths below him and soared up into the blue abyss above the earth, as if it were he, his concentrated will, that were summoning the waves and pushing them away again, directing the movements of the clouds and shadows that seemed to be disturbing the rocks, trying to awaken them.
And then, a few lines later: ‘To put into words what I felt back then is impossible: it was both ecstatic and terrifying, and later everything merged into a single happy idea: “I am not an orphan so long as this man lives upon the earth!”’
This is the problem with writers: they are real people, and therefore subject to major occlusions and inventions. They turn other people into objects of fantasy, and it’s part of Gorky’s talent for truth that he smooths out none of the contradictions or gaps in this encounter. Mostly he was unsure if Tolstoy even liked him, or if he liked Tolstoy.
That first meeting left me with a dual impression: I was both glad and proud of having met Tolstoy, but his conversation with me had reminded me somewhat of an examination, as though it was not the author of The Cossacks, ‘Pace-setter’ and War and Peace whom I had met but a nobleman who, in condescending to my level, had deemed it necessary to address me ‘in peasantese’, the language of the streets and marketplaces, and this upset my impression of him – one that I had cherished for so long.
There was always, it seemed to Gorky, the possibility that Tolstoy saw him merely as a curiosity, an emissary from the working class. ‘His interest in me is ethnographic. In his eyes, I am but a representative of some unknown race – nothing more.’ But this gap also allowed Gorky to see through the muzhik costume Tolstoy liked to wear. ‘Then suddenly, from under the peasant beard, from under the democratically rumpled blouse, would emerge the old Russian nobleman, the grand aristocrat.’ One day, he writes, they went out riding and came across some of Tolstoy’s Romanov neighbours, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke Georgy Mikhailovich and Grand Duke Pyotr Nikolaevich.
A droshky and a single saddle horse stood blocking the road. He fixed the Romanov men with a hard, expectant gaze, but they had already turned their backs on him. The saddle horse pawed the earth and moved a little to the side, letting Tolstoy’s horse pass.
We rode on for several minutes in silence.
‘They recognised me, the fools,’ he said eventually.
And, after another minute: ‘At least the horse knew to make way for Tolstoy.’
There’s a fraught moment in the later memoir of Chekhov where Gorky recalls something Chekhov said that Tolstoy had said about Gorky (this text often reads like a teenage diary). Tolstoy was only so mercurial with Gorky, Chekhov says, because he was jealous of the way other writers loved him. Gorky ‘has the soul of a spy’, Chekhov has Tolstoy say. ‘It is as if he has arrived here from abroad, and now, finding himself in a foreign land – in Canaan – he watches everything, noting it down and reporting it back to some god of his.’ As he tells the story, Chekhov reduces himself to tears. He composes himself and continues:
So, I tell him: ‘Gorky is a good man.’ But he’s having none of it.
‘You’re wrong,’ he says. ‘I know: he has a duck’s bill for a nose, and only the wretched and the wicked have noses like that.’
Chekhov sighed and finally said: ‘Yes, the old man is jealous. How he does astonish me.’
It takes courage for a writer to include this kind of exchange about themselves. The anecdote preserves Chekhov’s particular sense of humour, but also defines the way Tolstoy saw Gorky: as a politician with the wrong values, not an artist. Whenever Gorky’s writing comes up, Tolstoy is dismayingly critical.
I read him my story ‘The Bull’. He laughed greatly and remarked that I know ‘the tricks of language’.
‘But you handle words poorly,’ he said. ‘All your peasants speak very sensibly, whereas in reality what they say is foolish and incoherent. You can never tell what a peasant means to say right away.’
Later on, Gorky reads to him from The Lower Depths. ‘He listened carefully, then asked: “Why did you write this?” I explained as best I could.’ And Tolstoy once again takes apart his language (‘You must write more simply’) then adds a larger disapproval: ‘You speak a great deal from your own perspective, and this is why you have no characters, and all your people wear the same face. You do not understand women, I expect: none of them – not one – comes off well in your writing. They are unmemorable.’
Honestly, sometimes you don’t get what they saw in each other. Another issue was sex. Tolstoy could be madly puritanical, telling Gorky that ‘man alone is given to endure all this shame and the terror of such torment – in the flesh given him. We bear it within ourselves like an inescapable punishment – but for which sin?’ But also he loved talking about sex, and Gorky didn’t.
Like a French novelist, he talks of women willingly and at great length, and yet always with the coarseness of a Russian peasant, which I used to find unseemly. Today in the Almond Grove he asked Chekhov:
‘Did you go whoring much in your youth?’
Chekhov smiled in consternation. Tugging at his little beard, he muttered something unintelligible in response.
Looking out to sea, however, Tolstoy confessed:
‘I was a tireless …’
He pronounced the words with contrition, but at the end of the sentence he used a salty peasant turn of phrase.
Like a French novelist. The amusing thing is that in the end it was Gorky who loved the French realists, and Tolstoy who looked down on them. ‘The French have three writers: Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert. There is also Maupassant, of course, but Chekhov is better. As for the Goncourts – what clowns they are! They merely feign seriousness. They learned life from books written by such fabulists as themselves, believing it all to be serious stuff. Nobody needs that.’ ‘I could not agree with his estimation,’ Gorky reports, ‘and this irked him somewhat.’
In the end these memoirs record a competition over truth in literature, over what knowledge of the truth the old might have or have had, or what the young might know or not know, or what anyone can know. Just as he dislikes the Goncourts, Tolstoy no longer admires Dostoevsky: ‘It is a curious thing that he is read so much. I cannot fathom why. After all, reading him is hard and leads to nothing, for all these Idiots, Adolescents, Raskolnikovs and the rest of them – none of it has ever been true; everything is simpler, more rational.’
One of the greatest extended cross-talks Gorky records is a strange conversation in which Tolstoy remembers seeing a drunk woman lying in the gutter accompanied by her son, ‘a fair-haired, grey-eyed youth with tears streaming down his cheeks’, who was begging her to get up. Tolstoy says that Gorky shouldn’t write that kind of story, he shouldn’t write something that features a drunk woman.
‘It’s shameful to write of beastliness. But then – why not write about it? Yes, one has to write everything, about all things.’
… And then, nudging me gently with his elbow: ‘You, too, shall live your life, and everything shall remain exactly as it was – then you, too, will cry, and worse than I now – “streaming”, as the peasant women say … And you must write everything, about all things, for otherwise that fair-haired youth will be hurt, and he will blame us – “That’s not true, that isn’t the whole truth,” he will say. And he is a stickler for the truth!’
I find this moving, just as it is moving when, in his memoir of Andreyev, another exile from the Bolsheviks, Gorky demonstrates that he has not quite learned the master’s lesson, however much he tries. Andreyev tells him about an episode involving a friend, which Andreyev had used in his novella ‘Darkness’. A revolutionary on the run from the police had hidden himself in a brothel. The prostitute he was with looked after him tenderly and, embarrassed, he responded with a ‘moralistic sermon’. So she slapped him. ‘Then, having realised the rudeness of his mistake, he apologised to her and kissed her hand – something, I believe, that she could have done without. And that is all there was to it.’ But when Andreyev came to write this as a story he had added ‘dreadful details’: he had made it about ‘the agonising and foul mockery of a person’ – in other words, he had borrowed from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground – and Gorky was unhappy. ‘Sometimes – very rarely, alas,’ Gorky explains, ‘reality is truer and more beautiful than even the most talented tale of it … Yet Andreyev distorted both the sense and the form of the affair beyond all recognition.’ It sounds close to the master’s earlier lesson, but the difference is in that word ‘beautiful’. In Tolstoy’s story of the drunk woman and her son there is no vocabulary of the majestic and the noble, no sense that a writer should put the beautiful first.
But then Gorky knew enough to acknowledge that Tolstoy was incomparable, and Tolstoy knew it too. ‘One evening at twilight, narrowing his eyes and shuffling his brows’, Gorky recalls, Tolstoy ‘read a variant of the scene in “Father Sergius” where the woman goes to seduce the hermit. He read it through to the very end, looked up, and, with his eyes shut, said distinctly: “Well written, old man. Well written!”’ It seemed to these writers that they were operating in an environment without serious criticism. ‘For a quarter of a century,’ Gorky records Chekhov as saying, ‘I have read reviews of my works, and I cannot remember a single valuable remark made by any critic, nor even a solitary good piece of advice.’ Almost none of them wrote much criticism either, and if they did it existed in prefaces and minor works. So maybe this was why their conversations felt so intense: they were the testing lab for the writers’ new inventions.
One of the things that defined this Russian version of realism for European readers was its volatility, its characters’ mood changes and incomprehensible weeping, rather than the usual cult of the detail. It was closer to the version of realism in Knut Hamsun’s novels, such as Mysteries, whose hero keeps deliberately contradicting his own statements. This is the kind of realism Gorky also comes up with in his scenes from the lives of his writers, always attuned to the impossible or perverse, as in this anecdote about Andreyev’s idea of parenting:
One evening I called and found him in an armchair in front of the fireplace. Dressed in black, all in the crimson glow of the smouldering embers, he was holding his son, Vadim, on his knees and whispering something to him as the boy sobbed. I tiptoed in. I thought the child was asleep, so I sat down in an armchair by the door. That was when I heard Andreyev telling the boy how death stalks the Earth, strangling little children.
‘I’m scared,’ said Vadim.
‘Don’t you want to hear any more?’
‘I’m scared,’ the child repeated.
‘Then go to bed …’
But the boy clung to his father’s legs and began to cry. It took us a long while to settle him.
Or take the way Gorky continued to express his amazement at the mismatch between Tolstoy’s genius and his pastimes: ‘How curious that he should be so fond of playing cards. He plays seriously, and with great fervour. And how nervous his hands grow when he takes the cards in them, as though he were holding not dead pieces of card but live birds.’ All this was what made the writing so special, its refusal of consistency.
In his own life Gorky was the least consistent of any of them, which is why it’s difficult and melancholy to read this book, shadowed by his later history. What was he up to in these pages, in the early 1920s? I guess he was trying to salvage something from the punitive place he had ended up in, to console himself with his memories. ‘It is good to remember a man like that,’ he writes of Chekhov. ‘Vigour will return to your life in an instant, and once again you will see its meaning with clarity.’ But some clarity eluded him. The kind of truth-telling Chekhov achieved in his writing, his method of miniature ironies, is redescribed by Gorky as an attack on ‘the dingy chaos of bourgeois mundanity’, the ‘tragedy’ of bourgeois existence, whereas that kind of judgmental tone is precisely what Chekhov’s writing refuses. If you need a lesson in this, Gorky offers it himself in his description of Chekhov’s funeral. On the one hand, this duo of mistaken identity:
The coffin of this writer so ‘dearly beloved’ by Moscow arrived on some green freight wagon with an inscription stencilled on the doors in enormous letters: OYSTERS. A part of the small crowd that had gathered at the station to meet the writer followed the coffin of General Keller, which had been brought from Manchuria, and was greatly surprised to find Chekhov being buried to the strains of a military band.
On the other hand, this unnecessary moralising sentence: ‘The dirty-green smudge of that freight wagon strikes me as nothing but the great, triumphant smile of banality over a weary enemy.’
Gorky’s problem was that he couldn’t suppress his idealism. Ten years after these reminiscences he was back in Moscow, and was himself the sage. At the 1934 Writers’ Congress he dismissed the ‘critical realism’ of Tolstoy and Chekhov and instead proposed ‘socialist realism’, an expression of pure kitsch:
Life, as asserted by socialist realism, is deeds, creativeness, the aim of which is the uninterrupted development of the priceless individual faculties of man, with a view to his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his health and longevity, for the supreme joy of living on an earth which, in conformity with the steady growth of his requirements, he wishes to mould throughout into a beautiful dwelling place for mankind, united into a single family.
The generation below him, the generation of Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam and Olesha and Platonov, he never really understood. He acquired a reputation in Stalinist Russia as some kind of great interceder for other writers, but in her own reminiscences Nadezhda Mandelstam gives an acidic portrait of his capacity for indifference, as in this story about her husband, Osip: ‘In those days clothing could not be bought, but was supplied only against vouchers. The issue of such vouchers for writers had to be authorised by Gorky. When he was asked to let M. have a pair of trousers and a sweater, he crossed out the word “trousers” on the voucher and said: “He’ll manage without.”’ ‘The trousers were a small matter in themselves,’ she added, ‘but they spoke eloquently of Gorky’s hostility to a literary trend that was foreign to him.’
The writers involved in the trend were at least twenty years younger than Gorky, and the hostility was mutual. In 1922, shortly after the Reminiscences were published, Osip Mandelstam wrote an article on ‘Literary Moscow’ in which he dismissed the ‘psychological belles-lettres’ of Andreyev and Gorky. A year later, he wrote a brilliant essay on the early years of the Moscow Art Theatre: ‘For the intelligentsia to go to the Moscow Art Theatre was almost equal to taking communion or going to church.’ This older generation, he argued, did not know that they were corrupted: they had lost touch with literature and used theatre to compensate for their lack of understanding. Nothing in this literature, Mandelstam wrote, was true. ‘In real life people revolted, wept, sang and shot themselves. But I remember their production of The Lower Depths. It was no more than a masquerade of cheap calico and slums. A tidy little lair. A sleek slum. Among other things, they did not succeed in touching the stench and the filth. In reality they touched only themselves.’