Maxim Gorki | Page 4

cannot live like this. Life under these conditions is impossible." But they never rouse themselves to any act of emancipation. They founder on existence and its crushing tyranny.
Chekhov is none the less the gifted artist of many parts, and imbued with deep earnestness, who gave mature and valuable work to the men of his time, which, from its significance, will have an enduring after-effect, and will be prized for its genuine ability long after weaker, but more noisy and aggressive, talents have evaporated. He was, however, so finely organised that his brain responded to all the notes of his epoch, and he only emancipated himself by giving them out again in his works of art. And so his "Sea-Gull," "Uncle Vanja," and other dramas, novels, and stories portray the blighted, hopeless, degenerate men of his day, his country, and its woes . . . like the productions of many others who worked alongside of him, but did not attain the same heights of imagination.
Such was the state of Russian Literature and Russian Society at the time of Maxim Gorki's appearance. He stands for the new and virile element, for which the reforms of the Sixties had been the preparation. These reforms, one-sided and imperfect as they may have been, had none the less sufficed to create new economic conditions. On the one hand, a well-to-do middle-class, recruited almost entirely from non-aristocratic strata, sprang up; on the other, an industrial proletariat. Maxim Gorki emerged from this environment: and as a phenomenon he is explained by this essentially modern antithesis. He flung himself into the literary movement in full consciousness of his social standing. And it was just this self-consciousness, which stamped him as a personality, that accounted for his extraordinary success. It was obvious that, as one of a new and aspiring class, a class that once more cherished ideal aims and was not content with actual forms of existence, Gorki, the proletaire and railway-hand, would not disavow Life, but would affirm it, affirm it with all the force of his heart and lungs.
[Illustration: Tartar day-labourer (After a sketch by Gorki)]
And it is to this new note that he is indebted for his influence.
Gorki, or to give him his real name, Alexei Maximovich Pjeschkov, was born on March 14, 1868, in Nijni Novgorod. His mother Varvara was the daughter of a rich dyer. His father, however, was only a poor upholsterer, and on this account Varvara was disinherited by her father; but she held steadfast to her love. Little Maxim was bereft of his parents at an early age. When he was three he was attacked by the cholera, which at the same time carried off his father. His mother died in his ninth year, after a second marriage, a victim to phthisis. Thus Gorki was left an orphan. His stern grandfather now took charge of him. According to the Russian custom he was early apprenticed to a cobbler. But here misfortune befell him. He scalded himself with boiling water, and the foreman sent him home to his grandfather. Before this he had been to school for a short time; but as he contracted small-pox he had to give up his schooling. And that, to his own satisfaction, was the end of his education. He was no hand at learning. Nor did he find much pleasure in the Psalms in which his grandfather instructed him.
As soon as he had recovered from the accident at the shoemaker's, he was placed with a designer and painter of ikons. But "here he could not get on"; his master treated him too harshly, and his pluck failed him. This time he found himself a place, and succeeded in getting on board one of the Volga steamboats as a scullion.
And now for the first time he met kindly, good-natured people. The cook Smuriy was delighted with the intelligent lad and tried to impart to him all that he knew himself. He was a great lover of books. And the boy was charmed to find that any one who was good-tempered could have relations with letters. He began to consider a book in a new light, and took pleasure in reading, which he had formerly loathed. The two friends read Gogol and the Legends of the Saints in their leisure hours in a corner of the deck, with the boundless steppes of the Volga before them, lapped by the music of the waves that plashed against the sides of the vessel. In addition, the boy read all that fell into his hands. Along with the true classics he fed his mind upon the works of unknown authors and the play-books hawked about by travelling pedlars.
All this aroused a passionate, overpowering thirst for art and knowledge in Gorki when he was about fifteen. Without a notion of how