Maxim Gorky - Delphi Works of Maxim Gorky (Illustrated)

The Works of

MAXIM GORKY

(1868-1936)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2014

Version 1

The Works of

MAXIM GORKY

By Delphi Classics, 2014

The house where Maxim Gorky was born Nizhny Novgorod

Nizhny Novgorod is the fifth largest city in Russia, located 400 kilometres from Moscow to the east.

Gorky, c. 1900

OR, FOMA GORDEYEV

Translated by Herman Bernstein

The Man Who was Afraid is one of Gorkys first novels, published in 1899 when the author was in his early thirties. The writer had experienced a turbulent and difficult upbringing; he was born into poverty and his father died during the authors infancy and Gorky was mostly raised by his grandparents. He was forced into work and when he was twelve he ran away from home to a village in Kazan, where he encountered radical political groups such as Land and Liberty, where he attended socialist meetings. He was first arrested in October 1889 when he was accused of spreading revolutionary materials and propaganda, although a lack of evidence resulted in the charges being dropped. Gorky would continue to be periodically arrested over the next twenty years, contributing to the further radicalisation of his politics. Gorkys early experiences and beliefs are central to his novels and plays; he was a writer that believed firmly in literature as a political and moral act, which could help transform society.

He contributed political articles to newspapers and journals, while also writing short stories that earned him great commercial and critical success during the late 1890s. The author was devoted to showing the lives and hardships of those most humbled and humiliated under Capitalism and the Tsarist system that seemed to deny many people their dignity and humanity. Gorky was a great admirer of the renowned writer Anton Chekhov and it has been revealed through the discovery of letters sent between the authors that Gorky wished to dedicate his novel Foma Gordeyev to The Three Sisters playwright.

Gorkys novel details a generational conflict between father and son in the Russian merchant class at the turn of the twentieth century. Ignat is a powerful and ruthless businessman that shamelessly exploits his workers to garner great wealth for his family. His son, Foma, opposes his methods and over time comes to scorn and detest moneyed power and the class dynamics rendering so many people miserable and impoverished. The young heirs attempt to navigate his position in society with his belief system results in tragic events and a ruined man.

Gorky moved to Kazan in 1879

CONTENTS

Gorky, close to the time of publication

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

OUT of the darkest depths of life, where vice and crime and misery abound, comes the Byron of the twentieth century, the poet of the vagabond and the proletariat, Maxim Gorky. Not like the beggar, humbly imploring for a crust in the name of the Lord, nor like the jeweller displaying his precious stones to dazzle and tempt the eye, he comes to the world, nay, in accents of Tyrtaeus this commoner of Nizhni Novgorod spurs on his troops of freedom-loving heroes to conquer, as it were, the placid, self-satisfied literatures of to-day, and bring new life to pale, bloodless frames.

Like Byrons impassioned utterances, borne on the tones of a wild and quite artless melody, is Gorkys mad, unbridled, powerful voice, as he sings of the madness of the brave, of the barefooted dreamers, who are proud of their idleness, who possess nothing and fear nothing, who are gay in their misery, though miserable in their joy.

Gorkys voice is not the calm, cultivated, well-balanced voice of Chekhov, the Russian De Maupassant, nor even the apostolic, well-meaning, but comparatively faint voice of Tolstoy, the preacher: it is the roaring of a lion, the crash of thunder. In its elementary power is the heart rending cry of a sincere but suffering soul that saw the brutality of life in all its horrors, and now flings its experiences into the face of the world with unequalled sympathy and the courage of a giant.

For Gorky, above all, has courage; he dares to say that he finds the vagabond, the outcast of society, more sublime and significant than society itself.

His Bosyak, the symbolic incarnation of the Over-man, is as naive and as bold as a child or as a genius. In the vehement passions of the magnanimous, compassionate hero in tatters, in the aristocracy of his soul, and in his constant thirst for Freedom, Gorky sees the rebellious and irreconcilable spirit of man, of future man, in these he sees something beautiful, something powerful, something monumental, and is carried away by their strange psychology. For the barefooted dreamers life is Gorkys life, his ideals are Gorkys ideals, his pleasures and pains, Gorkys 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.

And in a leonine voice he cries defiantly:

Let the storm rage with greater force and fury!

HERMAN BERNSTEIN.

September 20, 1901.

FOMA GORDYEEF

Dedicated to

ANTON P. CHEKHOV

By

Maxim Gorky

CHAPTER I

ABOUT sixty years ago, when fortunes of millions had been made on the Volga with fairy-tale rapidity, Ignat Gordyeeff, a young fellow, was working as water-pumper on one of the barges of the wealthy merchant Zayev.

Built like a giant, handsome and not at all stupid, he was one of those people whom luck always follows everywhere not because they are gifted and industrious, but rather because, having an enormous stock of energy at their command, they cannot stop to think over the choice of means when on their way toward their aims, and, excepting their own will, they know no law. Sometimes they speak of their conscience with fear, sometimes they really torture themselves struggling with it, but conscience is an unconquerable power to the faint-hearted only; the strong master it quickly and make it a slave to their desires, for they unconsciously feel that, given room and freedom, conscience would fracture life. They sacrifice days to it; and if it should happen that conscience conquered their souls, they are never wrecked, even in defeat they are just as healthy and strong under its sway as when they lived without conscience.