Engineers of Human Souls: Four Writers Who Changed Twentieth-Century Minds by Simon Ings

Author:Simon Ings [Ings, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780349128580
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2024-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

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In 1913, Tsar Nicholas II proclaimed a general amnesty to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, and on 31 December, an agent of the Okhrana in St Petersburg noted ‘. . . the famous immigrant, Nizhny Novgorod guildsman Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, arrived by train from the station of Verzhbolovo and was put under police surveillance.’

Gorky’s return to Russia was a muted affair. He was certainly a celebrity, but he was not at that time much liked, having got into a tremendous and heated controversy over the relative merits of the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, that ‘evil genius’ (according to Gorky) who took a perverse delight in portraying the deformities of the Russian soul. ‘Gorky against Dostoevsky,’ screamed the headlines, ‘Gorky accuses Dostoevsky.’

Nevertheless, Gorky had always kept an open house and soon his apartment on St Petersburg’s Kronverksky Prospekt reverberated to performances by Rachmaninov and Scriabin, Chaliapin and, of course, Andreyeva. Guests became house guests, and house guests became lodgers. The artist Ivan Rakitsky came to dinner in 1916 and was still there when H. G. Wells visited in 1920. In a letter to a friend, Gorky conceded, ‘Never before have I felt so necessary to Russian life.’

Playing the good host did Gorky good. He eventually ceased to bark on about ‘usefulness’ and ‘decadence’ like some sort of literary policeman, and discovered – and published – the real talent that had been hiding under his nose: Mayakovsky, Esenin, Babel.

No longer the darling of the Party, Gorky was concerned to re-establish himself as a cultural figure, not a political one.

The main task of the revolution, to hear him tell it, was to arm the people with reason, knowledge and culture: in other words, to create a revolutionary culture ahead of the revolution itself, lest the overthrow of the tsar ‘merely drove the old disease inside the body’.

The forces of reaction were no more impressed by this formulation than Lenin was. The chief of police in Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg; its name was changed in 1914) reckoned that ‘Gorky has become “bourgeois”, as they say in Party circles, his glamour as a Social Democrat has grown dim, and he has altogether discontinued his active work.’

But he was busy enough. He set up the publishing house Parus (Sail) and its flagship publication Letopis, a monthly journal published in Petrograd from December 1915 until December 1917. The idea was that Russian writers who lived abroad would contribute stories about other countries, and alongside foreign writers would ‘fight for the interests of international, planetary culture against nationalism, chauvinism, imperialism, and against the current trend of becoming feral’. It generated immense hostility – one socialist, Vladimir Burtsev, accused Gorky of being a German spy – and among established writers, only Ivan Bunin signed up to the project.

Another somewhat unexpected contributor was Lenin, for though Gorky was politically ‘always weak-willed and subject to emotions and moods’, Lenin had to concede, in a letter to fellow-Bolshevik Alexander Shliapnikov in October 1916:

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