Maxim Gorky, Alexey Maksimovich Gorky. Real name Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov. Born March 16 (28), 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod, died June 18, 1936 in Gorki, Moscow Region. Russian Soviet writer, literary critic and publicist, founder of Soviet literature, active participant in revolutionary movement, public figure. One of the most popular authors of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nickname Aleksey Maksimovich invented himself. Subsequently, he said: "Do not write to me in literature - Peshkov ...".

This pseudonym- phrenonym *. The pseudonym of Alexei Maksimovich characterizes not only his fate, but also the direction of his work. So, the life of young Alyosha Peshkov "in people" was bitter, and he wrote about the bitter fate of the destitute.

With his literary name, Alexei made the name of his father, whom he loved very much and lost early. By the same name he named his son, whom he also lost very early. There is a version that the name Maxim was borrowed from the criminal who killed Gorky's great-grandfather, Maxim Bashlyk, about whom Alyosha liked to talk about in childhood. It is also worth noting that the stepfather of A. Peshkov had the surname Maksimov. Therefore, be that as it may, with the name Maxim, Gorky had a lot in his life and the choice of such a pseudonym is not accidental.

This deeply symbolic signature first appeared under the story "Makar Chudra" in the Tiflis newspaper "Kavkaz" on September 12, 1892. The 24-year-old author then served as a clerk in railway workshops. It was the literary debut of Alexei Peshkov. Subsequently, he used a number of pseudonyms, but the very first of them brought worldwide fame.

M. Gorky under the notes in Samarskaya Gazeta and Nizhny Novgorod Leaflet (1896) he put Pacatus (peaceful), and in the collection Red Panorama (1928) he signed Unicus (the only one). In Samarskaya Gazeta, the feuilletons Samara in All Relationships, with the subtitle Letters from a Knight-Errant, were signed by Don Quixote (1896). Bitter in captions to feuilletons, he often used the incogniton name N. Kh., which should have read: “Someone X”.

A number of notes by Alexei Maksimovich in the Samarskaya Gazeta (1895-1896), as well as the story "The Nightingale" were signed by Dvaga, i.e. two "G" - Gorky and Gusev (a journalist who gave materials for notes).

It happened that Bitter acted under the name of his character own work. Once he used as an alias the name of a self-created literary hero. One of his feuilletons in "The Eccentric" (1928) was signed by Samokritik Slovotekov. This surname was borne by the character of Gorky's satirical play "Hard worker Slovotekov", written by him in 1920 for the Theater of People's Comedy. About this alias Bitter told the editors of Eccentric the following: “I can hardly find the time to personally contribute to your journal, but allow me to recommend to you my friend, Self-criticist Kirillovich Slovotekov. Self-critic is his true name, given by his parents at birth. He is quite an old man, but a “beginner”. Non-partisan. Attitude towards alcohol is moderate.

To make readers laugh Bitter came up with comic pseudonyms, choosing old names that had long been out of use, combined with an intricate surname. In his youth, in the Samara and Saratov newspapers of the late 90s, Yehudiel Khlamida was signed. Under one of the letters to his 15-year-old son is: Your father Polikarp Unesibozhenozhkin. On the pages of his home hand-written journal Sorrento Pravda (1924), he signed Metranpage Goryachkin, Disabled Muses, Osip Tikhovoyev, Aristid Balyk.

IN literary biography Gorky there were also cases of plagiarism, or rather plagiarism "for the good", i.e. the desire of an already popular writer to help his novice colleague, without any selfish motives. In 1918, a signed name was published in Novaya Zhizn. M. Gorky story "Lanpochka". But it would be in vain to look for this story in Gorky's collected works. In 1933, he told the editors of Siberian Lights: “The story “Lanpochka”, about which you ask, was not written by me, but by my son Maxim, who was in Siberia in 1918 and saw this light bulb in action.”

However, A. Peshkov was not the first Russian writer who invented for himself pseudonym Gorky: according to the testimony of the Russian writer and poet N.D. Teleshov, the same was one of the early pseudonyms of the poet I.A. Belousov.

Later derivatives of the pseudonym began to appear. Maxim Leonov, father of the Soviet writer Leonid Leonov, poet and journalist, a man of difficult fate, signed Maxim Goremyka. In honor of Gorky The outstanding Belarusian poet Maxim Tank (autonym Yevgeny Skurko) also named himself.

It's interesting that when pseudonym Maxim Gorky was supposed to be used with a patronymic, then they used the real name and patronymic - Alexei Maksimovich.

Short biography:

Orphaned early, Bitter spent his childhood in the house of his grandfather Kashirin. From the age of 11, he was forced to go “to the people”: he worked as a “boy” at a store, as a buffet utensil on a steamboat, as a baker, studied at an icon-painting workshop, etc.

At the age of 16, he tried to enter Kazan University. He got acquainted with Marxist literature and propaganda work. For connection with the circle of N. E. Fedoseev in 1888 he was arrested. M. Gorky was under constant police surveillance. Worked for railway. In the spring of 1891 he set off to wander around the country and reached the Caucasus. For five and a half years of travel, he described social problems in society. At this time, the stories “Chelkash”, “Old Woman Izergil”, “Former People”, “Spouses Orlovs”, etc. appeared.

In 1898, the book "Essays and Stories" was published in St. Petersburg, which had a sensational success. In 1899 a poem appeared in prose "Twenty-six and one" and the first big story"Foma Gordeev". Glory A.M. Gorky grew with incredible speed and soon caught up with the popularity of A.P. Chekhov and L.N. Tolstoy.

public position Gorky was radical. He worked closely with revolutionary organizations. In 1905 he joined the ranks of the RSDLP and met V. I. Lenin. Gorky provided serious financial support for the revolution of 1905-1907. After the revolution due to tuberculosis Bitter settled in Italy on the island of Capri, where he lived for 7 years. There Bitter writes "Confession" (1908), where his philosophical differences with Lenin were clearly identified.

After returning to Russia in 1913 Bitter writes autobiographical novels "Childhood", "In People", a cycle of stories "In Rus'" (1912-17). He edits the Bolshevik newspapers Zvezda and Pravda, the art department of the Bolshevik magazine Enlightenment, publishes the first collection of proletarian writers.

Bitter was enthusiastic about February Revolution 1917, but he had an ambiguous attitude towards Oktyabrskaya. In 1917-1919 M. Gorky conducts a great social and political work, criticizes the "methods" of the Bolsheviks, condemns their attitude towards the old intelligentsia, saves many of its representatives from the repressions of the Bolsheviks and hunger.

Autumn 1921 Bitter again went abroad, in 1922 he wrote the story "My Universities", which became the last part of his autobiographical trilogy. In 1925, he published the novel "The Artamonov Case", which essentially became the history of the development of capitalism in Russia.

In 1928, at the invitation of the Soviet government and personally I. Stalin, makes a trip around the country, during which Gorky show the achievements of the USSR, which are reflected in the series of essays "On the Soviet Union".

In 1932 Bitter returns to the USSR, where he immediately becomes the "head" of Soviet literature. M. Gorky creates new magazines, a series of books - "The Life of Remarkable People", "The History of the Civil War", "The History of Factories and Plants", "The Poet's Library". is the initiator of the creation and the first chairman of the board of the Union of Writers of the USSR. Member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR.

M. Gorky died June 18, 1936. There is an unconfirmed version that he was poisoned on the orders of Trotsky when Stalin was preparing the Moscow show trials, in which many of Gorky's old friends were to be accused. After his death, he was cremated, the ashes were placed in an urn in the Kremlin wall on Red Square in Moscow. Before cremation brain M. Gorky was removed and taken to the Moscow Brain Institute for further study.

Name Maxim Gorky settlements, streets, lanes and embankments, squares and parks, railway and metro stations, many theaters and libraries, film studios, universities and institutes are named. Planes and ships, plants and factories bore his name. Almost every city Gorky a monument was erected (there are four of them in Nizhny Novgorod alone). City Bitter- the name of Nizhny Novgorod from 1932 to 1990. Name Gorky given to the reservoir on the Volga River.

Unknown facts from the life of Gorky. April 19th, 2009

There were many mysteries in Gorky. For example, he did not feel physical pain, but at the same time he experienced someone else's pain so painfully that when he described the scene of a woman being stabbed, a huge scar swelled on his body. From a young age he suffered from tuberculosis and smoked 75 cigarettes a day. He tried several times to commit suicide, and each time he was saved by an unknown force, for example, in 1887, he deflected a bullet aimed at the heart by a millimeter from the target. He could drink as much alcohol as he wanted and never got drunk. In 1936 he died twice, on June 9 and 18. On June 9, the already practically dead writer was wonderfully revived by the arrival of Stalin, who came to Gorky's dacha in Gorki near Moscow in order to say goodbye to the deceased.

On the same day, Gorky arranged a strange vote of relatives and friends, asking them: should he die or not? In fact, he controlled the process of his dying ...
Gorky's life is an amazing carnival that ended tragically. The question still remains unresolved: whether Gorky died a natural death or was killed on Stalin's orders. The last days and hours of Gorky are filled with some kind of horror. Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov drank champagne near the bedside of the dying Russian writer. Nizhny Novgorod friend of Gorky, and then a political emigrant Ekaterina Kuskova wrote: "But they also stood over the silent writer with a candle day and night ..."
Leo Tolstoy at first mistook Gorky for a peasant and spoke obscenities to him, but then he realized that he had made a big mistake. “I can’t treat Gorky sincerely, I don’t know why, but I can’t,” he complained to Chekhov. evil person. He has a soul of a spy, he came from somewhere to a strange land of Canaan, looks at everything, notices everything and reports everything to some god of his.
Gorky paid the intelligentsia in the same coin. In letters to I. Repin and Tolstoy, he sang hymns in praise of Man: "I don't know anything better, harder, more interesting than a person..."; "I deeply believe that there is nothing better on earth than a man ..." And at the same time he wrote to his wife: "It would be better if I didn’t see all this bastard, all these miserable, little people ..." ( this is about those who in St. Petersburg raised their glasses in his honor.(And who is his wife, an NKVD agent?)
He passed Luka, a crafty wanderer,” wrote the poet Vladislav Khodasevich. This is just as true as the fact that he was a wanderer always and everywhere, being connected and in correspondence with Lenin, Chekhov, Bryusov, Rozanov, Morozov, Gapon, Bunin, Artsybashev, Gippius, Mayakovsky, Panferov, realists, symbolists, priests, Bolsheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, monarchists, Zionists, anti-Semites, terrorists, academicians, collective farmers, GEP workers and all people on this sinful earth. "Gorky did not live, but examined ... ." - said Viktor Shklovsky.
Everyone saw in him "Gorky", not a person, but a character that he himself invented while in Tiflis in 1892, when he signed his first story "Makar Chudra" with this pseudonym
A contemporary of the writer, emigrant I.D. Surguchev seriously believed that Gorky once made a pact with the devil - the same one that Christ refused in the wilderness. "And he, an average writer in general, was given success that neither Pushkin, nor Gogol, nor Leo Tolstoy, nor Dostoevsky knew during their lifetime. He had everything: fame, money, and female sly love." Maybe right. It's just not our business.
Pundits on his planet, after reading the report on the trip, nevertheless asked:
- Did you see the man?
- Saw!
- What is he?
- Oh-oh... That sounds proud!
- What does it look like?
And he drew a strange figure in the air with his wing.

Gorky was married to Ekaterina Pavlovna Volzhina, in marriage - Peshkova (1876-1965; public figure, employee of the International Red Cross).
Son - Maxim Maksimovich Peshkov (1896-1934). His sudden death was explained, like Gorky's death, by poisoning.
The adopted son of Gorky, whose godfather he was - Zinovy ​​\u200b\u200bMikhailovich Peshkov - General French army, brother of Ya. Sverdlov).
Among the women who enjoyed Gorky's special favor was Maria Ignatievna Budberg (1892-1974), a baroness, nee Countess Zakrevskaya, by her first marriage, Benkendorf. Lev Nikulin writes about her in his memoirs; “When we are asked who Klim Samgin is dedicated to, who Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya is, we think that her portrait was before his last days stood on Gorky's table" (Moscow, 1966, No. 2). She was with him and last hours his life. A photograph has been preserved where Budberg, next to Stalin, follows Gorky's coffin. It was she who, fulfilling the task of the GPU, brought Gorky's Italian archive to Stalin, which contained what Stalin was especially interested in - Gorky's correspondence with Bukharin, Rykov and other Soviet figures who, having escaped from the USSR on a business trip, bombarded Gorky with letters about the atrocities of "the very wise and great” (about Budberg, see: Berberova N. Iron Woman. New York, 1982).
http://belsoch.exe.by/bio2/04_16.shtml
The common-law wife of M. Grky was also Maria Andreeva.
YURKOVSKAYA MARIA FYODOROVNA (ANDREEVA, ZHELYABUZHSKAYA, PHENOMENON) 1868-1953 Born in St. Petersburg. Actress. On stage since 1886, in 1898-1905 at the Moscow Art Theater. Roles: Rautendelein ("The Drowned Bell" by G. Hauptmann, 1898), Natasha ("At the Bottom" by M. Gorky, 1902), etc. In 1904 she joined the Bolsheviks. Publisher of the Bolshevik newspaper New life"(1905). In 1906 she married an official Zhelyabuzhsky, but later became the common-law wife of Maxim Gorky and emigrated with him. In 1913 she returned to Moscow after breaking off relations with Gorky. She resumed acting work in Ukraine. Together with M. Gorky and A. A. Blok, she participated in the creation of the Bolshoi Drama Theater (Petrograd, 1919), until 1926 she was an actress of this theater. Commissioner of theaters and spectacles of Petrograd (in 1919-1921), director of the Moscow House of Scientists (in 1931-1948).
With what did Gorky come to our world?

In 1895, he almost simultaneously published in the Samara newspaper romantic fairy tale"About a Little Fairy and a Young Shepherd", the famous "Old Woman Izergil" and the realistic story "On the Salt", dedicated to describing the hard work of tramps in the salt mines. Patterned, colorful bright colors the fabric of the artistic narrative in the first two works is in no way in harmony with the mundane everyday depiction of tramps, in one of which the author himself is guessed. The text of the story "On the salt" is replete with rude cruel images, common speech, abuse, conveying feelings of pain and resentment, "senseless rage" of people brought to complete stupefaction in salt hard labor. Romantically colored landscape in "Old Woman Izergil" ("dark blue patches of the sky, decorated with golden specks of stars"), the harmony of colors and sounds, amazing beautiful heroes legends about a little fairy (the shepherd does not resemble a Wallachian shepherd, but biblical prophet) create sunny fairy tale about love and freedom. The story "On the Salt" also describes the sea, the sky, the shore of the estuary, but the color of the story is completely different: unbearably scorching heat, cracked gray earth, red-brown grass like blood, women and men swarming like worms in greasy mud. Instead of a solemn symphony of sounds - the squeal of wheelbarrows, rude and angry abuse, groans and "dreary protest".
Larra is the son of a woman and an eagle. His mother brought him to people in the hope that he would live happily among his kind. Larra was the same as everyone else, "only his eyes were cold and proud, like those of the king of birds." The young man did not respect anyone, did not listen to anyone, behaved arrogantly and proudly. There was both strength and beauty in him, but he repelled him with pride and coldness. Larra behaved among people, as animals behave in a herd, where everything is allowed to the strongest. He kills the "obstinate" girl right in front of the whole tribe, not knowing that by doing so he signs a sentence for himself to be rejected for the rest of his life. Angry people decided that: “The punishment for him is in himself!” They let him go, gave him freedom.
the theme of an ungrateful, capricious crowd, because people, having fallen into the thickest darkness of the forest and swamp swamps, attacked Danko with reproaches and threats. They called him "an insignificant and harmful person", they decided to kill him. However, the young man forgave the people for their anger and unfair reproaches. He tore out his heart from his chest, which burned with a bright fire of love for these same people, and lit the way for them: “It (the heart) burned as brightly as the sun, and brighter than the sun, and the whole forest fell silent, lit by this great torch love for people...
Danko and Larra are antipodes, they are both young, strong and beautiful. But Larra is a slave to his egoism, and this makes him lonely and rejected by everyone. Danko lives for people, therefore he is truly immortal.
The falcon is a symbol of a fearless fighter: "We sing glory to the madness of the brave." And Already is a symbol of a cautious and sensible man in the street. The images of cowardly loons, a penguin and seagulls are allegorical, which frantically rush about, trying to hide from reality and its changes.
Chudra says: “You have chosen a glorious fate for yourself, falcon. That’s the way it should be: go and look, you’ve seen enough, lie down and die - that’s all!”
Izergil lives among people, looking for human love ready for her heroic deeds. Why is the ugliness of her old age so cruelly emphasized by the writer? She is “almost a shadow” - this is associated with the shadow of Larra. Apparently, because her path is the life of a strong person, but who lived for himself.
“... O brave Falcon! In a battle with enemies you bled to death... But there will be time - and drops of your hot blood, like sparks, will flare up in the darkness of life and will light many brave hearts with an insane thirst for freedom, light! .. We sing a song to the madness of the brave! .. "
For him, a fact, a case from reality, was always important. He was hostile to the human imagination, he did not understand fairy tales.
Russian writers of the 19th century were mostly his personal enemies: He hated Dostoevsky, despised Gogol as a sick person, he laughed at Turgenev.
His personal enemies were the Kamenev family.
- Trotsky's sister, Olga Kameneva (Bronstein) - the wife of Lev Kamenev (Rozenfeld Lev Borisovich), who headed the Moscow Soviet from 1918 to 1924, a former member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. But the most interesting thing is that until December 1934 (before his arrest), Lev Kamenev was the director of the Institute of World Literature. M. Gorky (?!).
Olga Kameneva was in charge of the theatrical department of the People's Commissariat of Education. In February 1920, she told Khodasevich: “I am surprised how you can get to know Gorky. All he does is cover up scammers - and he himself is a scammer. If not for Vladimir Ilyich, he would have been in prison long ago! Gorky had a long acquaintance with Lenin. Nevertheless, it was Lenin who advised Gorky to leave the new Russia.

Having gone abroad in 1921, Gorky, in a letter to V. Khodasevich, sharply criticized N. Krupskaya's circular about the removal from Soviet libraries for the mass reader of the works of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, V. Solovyov, L. Tolstoy and others.
One of the many testimonies that Gorky was poisoned by Stalin, and perhaps the most convincing, although indirect, belongs to B. Gerland and was published in No. 6 of the Socialist Bulletin in 1954. B. Gerland was a Gulag prisoner in Vorkuta and worked in the barracks of the camp together with Professor Pletnev, also exiled. He was sentenced to death for the murder of Gorky, later replaced by 25 years in prison. She recorded his story: “We treated Gorky for heart disease, but he suffered not so much physically as morally: he did not stop tormenting himself with self-reproach. He no longer had anything to breathe in the USSR, he passionately longed back to Italy. The Kremlin was most afraid of open speech famous writer against his regime. And, as always, he came up with an effective remedy at the right time. It turned out to be a bonbonniere, yes, a light pink bonbonniere adorned with a bright silk ribbon. She stood on the night table by the bed of Gorky, who loved to treat his visitors. This time he generously gave sweets to two orderlies who worked with him, and he himself ate some sweets. An hour later, all three began excruciating stomach pains, and an hour later they died. An autopsy was performed immediately. Result? It lived up to our worst fears. All three died from the poison."

Long before Gorky's death, Stalin tried to make him his political ally. Those who knew Gorky's incorruptibility could imagine how hopeless the task was. But Stalin never believed in human incorruptibility. On the contrary, he often pointed out to the NKVD officers that in their activities they should proceed from the fact that incorruptible people do not exist at all. Everyone has their own price.
Under the influence of these appeals, Gorky returned to Moscow. From that moment on, a program of appeasing him, sustained in the Stalinist style, began to operate. At his disposal were given a mansion in Moscow and two comfortable villas - one in the Moscow region, the other in the Crimea. The supply of the writer and his family with everything necessary was entrusted to the same department of the NKVD, which was responsible for providing for Stalin and the members of the Politburo. For trips to the Crimea and abroad, Gorky was allocated a specially equipped railway car. On Stalin's instructions, Yagoda (Enoch Gershonovich Yehuda) sought to catch Gorky's slightest desires on the fly and fulfill them. Around his villas, his favorite flowers were planted, specially delivered from abroad. He smoked special cigarettes ordered for him in Egypt. On demand, any book from any country was delivered to him. Gorky, by nature a modest and moderate person, tried to protest against the defiant luxury that surrounded him, but he was told that Maxim Gorky was alone in the country.
Along with concern for material well-being Gorky, Stalin instructed Yagoda to "re-educate" him. It was necessary to convince the old writer that Stalin was building real socialism and was doing everything in his power to raise the standard of living of the working people.
He participated in the work of the so-called association of proletarian writers, headed by Averbakh, who was married to Yagoda's niece.

The famous book "The Stalin Canal", written by a group of writers led by Maxim Gorky, who visited the White Sea Canal, tells, in particular, about the gathering of the builders of the canal - security officers and prisoners - in August 1933. M. Gorky also spoke there. He said excitedly, “I am happy, overwhelmed. Since 1928, I have been looking closely at how the OGPU re-educates people. You have done a great job, a great job!”
Completely isolated from the people, he moved along the conveyor organized for him by Yagoda, in the constant company of Chekists and several young writers who collaborated with the NKVD. Everyone who surrounded Gorky was made to tell him about the miracles of socialist construction and sing praises to Stalin. Even the gardener and cook assigned to the writer knew that from time to time they had to tell him that they "just" received a letter from their village relatives who report that life there is getting more and more beautiful.
Stalin was impatient for a popular Russian writer to immortalize his name. He decided to shower Gorky with royal gifts and honors and thus influence the content and, so to speak, the tone of the future book.
Sun. Vishnevsky was at Gorky's banquet and says that it even mattered who was further and who was closer to Gorky. He says that this spectacle was so disgusting that Pasternak could not stand it and ran away from the middle of the banquet.

They boast that there has never been slavery in Russia, that she immediately stepped into feudalism. Pardon me, Russia has not stepped anywhere. All attempts to reform the social order burned down in slave psychology, so convenient for the bureaucratic-feudal state ...
Behind a short time Gorky received such honors that the greatest writers of the world could not even dream of. Stalin ordered to name a large industrial center after Gorky - Nizhny Novgorod. Accordingly, all Nizhny Novgorod Region renamed Gorkovskaya. Gorky's name was given to the Moscow Art Theatre, which, by the way, was founded and gained worldwide fame thanks to Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and not Gorky.
The Council of People's Commissars by a special resolution noted his great services to Russian literature. Several businesses have been named after him. The Moscow City Council decided to rename the main street of Moscow - Tverskaya - into Gorky Street.
The famous French writer, Russian by origin, Victor Serge, who stayed in Russia until 1936, in his diary, published in 1949 in the Parisian magazine Le Tan Modern, spoke about his last meetings with Gorky:
“I once met him on the street,” writes Serge, “and was shocked by his appearance. He was unrecognizable - it was a skeleton. He wrote official articles, really disgusting, justifying the trials of the Bolsheviks. But in an intimate setting he grumbled. He spoke with bitterness and contempt about the present, entered into or almost entered into conflicts with Stalin. Serge also said that Gorky cried at night.

In Russia, Gorky lost his son, perhaps skillfully groomed by Yagoda, who liked Maxim's wife. There is a suspicion that Kryuchkov killed Maxim on behalf of Yagoda. From Kryuchkov’s confession: “I asked what I need to do. To this he answered me:“ Eliminate Maxim. ”Yagoda said that he should be given as much alcohol as possible and then he should have caught a cold. Kryuchkov, according to him, did this When it turned out that Maxim had pneumonia, they did not listen to Professor Speransky, but listened to Dr. Levin and Vinogradov (not brought to trial), who gave Maxim champagne, then a laxative, which hastened his death.
In the last years of his life, Gorky became a dangerous burden for the Soviet government. He was forbidden to leave Moscow, Gorki and the Crimea when he traveled south.
As an example of "socialist realism", government critics usually point to Gorky's story "Mother", written by him in 1906. But Gorky himself in 1933 told his old friend and biographer V. A. Desnitsky that "Mother" was "long, boring and carelessly written." And in a letter to Fyodor Gladkov, he wrote: "Mother" is a book, really only a bad one, written in a state of vehemence and irritation.
“After Gorky’s death, the NKVD officers found carefully hidden notes in his papers. When Yagoda finished reading these notes, he cursed and said: "No matter how you feed the wolf, he keeps looking into the forest."
“Untimely Thoughts” is a series of articles by M. Gorky, published in 1917-1918 in the newspaper Novaya Zhizn, where he, in particular, wrote: “Rumors are spreading more and more insistently that on October 20 there will be a“ performance of the Bolsheviks ”- in other words: the disgusting scenes of July 3-5 can be repeated ... An unorganized crowd will crawl out into the street, poorly understanding what it wants, and, hiding behind it, adventurers, thieves, professional killers will begin to “create the history of the Russian revolution” ”(emphasis added by me - V.B.).

After the October Revolution, Gorky wrote: “Lenin, Trotsky and those accompanying them have already been poisoned by the rotten poison of power ... The working class must know that it will face famine, a complete breakdown of industry, the destruction of transport, a long bloody anarchy ...”.

“Imagining themselves as Napoleons from socialism, the Leninists tear and rush, completing the destruction of Russia - the Russian people will pay for this with lakes of blood.”

“To frighten with terror and pogrom people who do not want to participate in the frantic dance of Mr. Trotsky over the ruins of Russia is shameful and criminal.”

“People's commissars treat Russia as a material for experiment, the Russian people for them are the horse into which bacteriologists inoculate typhus so that the horse develops anti-typhoid serum in its blood. It is precisely such a cruel and doomed to failure experiment that the commissars perform on the Russian people, not thinking that the exhausted, half-starved horse can die.
At Lubyanka, the investigator was summoned to the office one at a time. Each signed a non-disclosure agreement. Everyone was warned that if he let out even one word, at least to his own wife, he would be immediately liquidated along with his entire family.
The notebook found in the mansion on Povarskaya Street was M. Gorky's diary. The full text of this diary was read only by the most responsible employee of the NKVD, by some of the Politburo and, of course, by Stalin.
Stalin, puffing on his pipe, was sorting through photographs of pages from Gorky's diary lying in front of him. He fixed his heavy gaze on one.

“An idle mechanic calculated that if an ordinary vile flea is increased hundreds of times, then the most scary beast on a land that no one else would be able to control. With modern great technology, a giant flea can be seen in the cinema. But the monstrous grimaces of history sometimes create similar exaggerations in the real world ... Stalin is such a flea that Bolshevik propaganda and the hypnosis of fear have increased to incredible proportions.
On the same day, June 18, 1936, Genrikh Yagoda went to Gorki, where Maxim Gorky was being treated for influenza, accompanied by several of his henchmen, including a mysterious woman in black. The People's Commissar of the NKVD looked at Alexei Maksimovich for a short time, but the woman, according to eyewitnesses, spent more than forty minutes at the writer's bedside ...
It was the day of the solar eclipse.
On the morning of June 19, a mournful message was placed in Soviet newspapers: the great proletarian writer Alexei Maksimovich Gorky died of pneumonia.
But here is other evidence. During Gorky's last illness, M.I. Budberg was on duty at Gorky's deathbed and, together with other people close to him (P.P. Kryuchkov, nurse O.D. Chertkova, his last affection), was an eyewitness to the last moments of his life. Particularly difficult for her were the night hours of duty, when Gorky often woke up and was tormented by attacks of suffocation. All these observations of M.I. Budberg are confirmed by the memoirs of E.P. Peshkova, P.P. Kryuchkov and M.I. Budberg herself, which were recorded by A.N. Tikhonov, a friend and colleague of Gorky, immediately after the death of the writer.
Whether it really was so or not (there are many versions of what Gorky died from, and the above is just one of them), we will probably never know.
MARIA Ignatievna Budberg, nee Zakrevskaya, by her first marriage, Countess Benckendorff, a truly legendary woman, an adventurer and a double (and maybe triple, even German intelligence) agent of the GPU and British intelligence, the mistress of Lockhart and Herbert Wells.
Being the mistress of the English envoy, Lockhart, she came to him for the family's departure documents. But while she was in the capital, bandits attacked her estate in Estonia and killed her husband. But the Chekists found Moura herself in bed with Lockhart and escorted her to the Lubyanka. The accusations were clearly not groundless, since the head of the English mission Lockhart himself rushed to rescue the countess. He failed to rescue the agent-mistress, and he himself fell under arrest.
Most likely, it was not beauty (Maria Ignatievna was not a beauty in the full sense of the word), but Zakrevskaya's wayward character and independence that captivated Gorky. But in general, her energy potential was huge and immediately attracted men to her. At first he took her to his literary secretary. But very soon, despite the big age difference (she was 24 years younger than the writer), he offered her a hand and a heart. Maria did not want to officially marry the petrel of the revolution, or maybe she did not receive a blessing for marriage from her "godparents" from the NKVD, however, be that as it may, for 16 years she remained Gorky's common-law wife.
Agents of the NKVD, and specifically, the well-known Yagoda, allegedly bring her to the dying writer. Moura removes the nurse from the room, declaring that she will prepare the medicine herself (by the way, she never studied medicine). The nurse sees how Mura dilutes some liquid in a glass and gives the writer a drink, and then hurriedly leaves, accompanied by Yagoda. The nurse, peeping behind her through the crack of the half-open door, rushes to the patient and notices that the glass from which Gorky drank the medicine has disappeared from the writer's table. So Moura took it with her. 20 minutes after her departure, Gorky dies. But this is most likely another legend.
Although the NKVD did indeed have a huge secret laboratory engaged in the manufacture of poisons, this project was supervised by Yagoda, a former pharmacist. In addition, it is necessary to recall one more episode: a few days before Gorky's death, he was sent a box of chocolates, which the writer loved very much. Not eating them, Gorky treats two orderlies caring for him. A few minutes later, the orderlies show signs of poisoning and die. Subsequently, the death of these orderlies will become one of the main points of indictment in the "doctors' case", when Stalin accuses the doctors who treated the writer of killing him.
In Russia, people are buried according to seven categories, Kipnis joked. - The seventh is when the deceased himself controls the horse that carries him to the cemetery.
Leon Trotsky, who was well versed in the Stalinist climate prevailing in Moscow, wrote:
“Gorky was neither a conspirator nor a politician. He was a kind and sensitive old man, protective of the weak, sensitive Protestant. During the famine and the first two five-year plans, when general indignation threatened the authorities, repressions exceeded all limits ... Gorky, who enjoyed influence at home and abroad, could not endure the liquidation of the old Bolsheviks, prepared by Stalin. Gorky would have immediately protested, his voice would have been heard, and the Stalinist trials of the so-called "conspirators" would have turned out to be unfulfilled. It would also be absurd to attempt to prescribe silence to Gorky. His arrest, deportation or open liquidation was even more unthinkable. There was only one possibility: to hasten his death with poison, without shedding blood. The Kremlin dictator saw no other way out.”
But Trotsky himself could have desired the removal of a writer who knew too much and was unpleasant to him for family reasons.
In his book Vladimir Lenin, published in Leningrad in 1924, on page 23, Gorky wrote about Lenin:
“I often heard him praise his comrades. And even about those who, according to rumors, did not seem to enjoy his personal sympathies. Surprised by his assessment of one of these comrades, I noticed that for many this assessment would have seemed unexpected. “Yes, yes, I know,” said Lenin. - There's something lying about my relationship with him. They lie a lot and even especially a lot about me and Trotsky. Hitting the table with his hand, Lenin said: “But they would point out another person who is capable of organizing an almost exemplary army in a year and even gaining the respect of military specialists. We have such a person!”
All this was thrown out by the editors of the posthumous edition of Gorky's collected works, and instead they inserted the following gag: “But still, not ours! With us, not ours! Ambitious. And there is something bad in him, from Lassalle. This was not in the book written by Gorky in 1924, shortly after Lenin's death, and published in the same year in Leningrad.
Gorky's book on Lenin ended (in 1924) with these words:
“In the end, the honest and truthful, created by man, wins, that without which there is no man wins.”
In the collected works of Gorky, these words of his were thrown out, and instead of them, the party editors entered the following gag: “Vladimir Lenin is dead. The heirs of his mind and will are alive. They are alive and working as successfully as no one has ever worked anywhere in the world.”

Nadya Vvedenskaya is married to her father's intern Dr. Sinichkin. Around - nine brothers of the young bride... The wedding night. As soon as the groom approached the bride, at the moment when they were alone in the room, she ... jumped out the window and ran away to Maxim Peshkov, her first love ...

Nadia met the son of Maxim Gorky in the last grade of the gymnasium, when one day she came to the skating rink with her friends. Maxim immediately struck her with boundless kindness and equally boundless irresponsibility. They didn't get married right away.
After October and the Civil War, Maxim Peshkov was going to the Italian shores, to his father. And then Lenin gave Maxim Peshkov an important party assignment: to explain to his father the meaning of the "great proletarian revolution" - which the great proletarian writer took for an immoral massacre.

Together with her son Gorky, in 1922 Nadezhda Vvedenskaya also went abroad. They got married in Berlin. The Peshkovs' daughters were born already in Italy: Marfa - in Sorrento, Daria two years later - in Naples. But family life young spouses did not work out. The writer Vladislav Khodasevich recalled: “Maxim was then about thirty years old, but by nature it was difficult to give him more than thirteen.”

In Italy, Nadezhda Alekseevna discovered her husband's strong addiction to strong drinks and women. However, here he followed in the footsteps of his father ...
The great writer was not shy in the same place, in Italy, to show all kinds of signs of attention to Varvara Sheikevich, the wife of Andrey Diderikhs. She was an amazing woman. After the break with Gorky, Varvara alternately became the wife of the publisher A. Tikhonov and the artist Z. Grzhebin. Gorky courted V. Sheikevich in the presence of his second wife, actress Maria Andreeva. Of course, my wife was crying. However, Alexei Maksimovich was also crying. In fact, he loved to cry. But in fact, Gorky's wife at that time was a well-known adventurer associated with the Chekists, Maria Benkendorf, who, after the writer left for her homeland, married another writer, Herbert Wells.

Maria Andreeva was not going to lag behind her husband - a "traitor". She made her lover Pyotr Kryuchkov, Gorky's assistant, who was 21 years her junior. In 1938, P. Kryuchkov, who was undoubtedly an agent of the OGPU, was accused of "villainous killing" of Gorky and shot.
Before Kryuchkov, Andreeva's lovers were a certain Yakov Lvovich Izrailevich. Upon learning of his unexpected resignation, he did not find anything better than to beat his opponent, driving him under the table. The situation that prevailed in the family is also evidenced by the following fact: the mother of M. Andreeva committed suicide, having previously gouged out the eyes of her granddaughter Katya in the portrait.
Gerling-Grudzinsky in the article “Seven Deaths of Maxim Gorky” draws attention to the fact that “there is no reason to believe the indictment of the 1938 trial, which said that Yagoda decided - partly for political, partly for personal reasons (it was known that he was in love to Nadezhda) - to send Maxim Peshkov to the next world.
The daughter of Nadezhda Alekseevna - Marfa Maksimovna Peshkova - was a friend of the daughter of I.V. Stalin Svetlana and became the wife of Sergo Lavrentievich Beria (son of Lavrenty Pavlovich).
Well, Gorky and Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov knew each other from Nizhny Novgorod. In 1902, the son of Yakov Sverdlov, Zinovy, converted to Orthodoxy, Gorky was his godfather, and Zinovy ​​Mikhailovich Sverdlov became Zinovy ​​Alekseevich Peshkov, the adopted son of Maxim Gorky.
Subsequently, Gorky wrote in a letter to Peshkova: “This handsome boy has recently behaved surprisingly boorishly towards me, and my friendship with him is over. It's very sad and hard."
Fathers Sverdlov and Yagoda were cousins
Berries are gone. But the Chekists continued to influence the life of Nadezhda Peshkova. She had just gathered on the eve of the war to marry her longtime friend I. K. Lupol - one of the most educated people of his time, philosopher, historian, writer, director of the Institute of World Literature. Gorky, - how her chosen one ended up in the dungeons of the NKVD and died in the camp in 1943. After the war, Nadezhda Alekseevna married the architect Miron Merzhanov. Six months later, in 1946, her husband was arrested. Already after the death of Stalin, in 1953, N.A. Peshkova agreed to become the wife of engineer V.F. Popov ... The groom was arrested ...
Nadezhda Alekseevna carried the cross of the "untouchable" until the end of her days. As soon as a man appeared near her, who could have serious intentions, he disappeared. Most often - forever. All the years in the USSR, she lived under a magnifying glass, which was constantly held in her hands by the "organs" ... The daughter-in-law of Maxim Gorky was supposed to go to the grave as his daughter-in-law.
Gorky's son Maxim Alekseevich Peshkov. The monument of the sculptor Mukhina is so good, so similar to the original, that when Maxim's mother saw it, she had an attack. "You extended my meeting with my son," she said to Mukhina. For hours I sat near the monument. Now resting nearby.
Maxim Alekseevich's wife, Gorky's daughter-in-law - Nadezhda. She was a stunningly beautiful woman. She painted beautifully. Surrounded by Gorky, it was customary to give playful nicknames: his second common-law wife, actress of the Bolshoi Drama Theater in Petrograd, Maria Fedorovna Andreeva, had the nickname "Phenomenon", Maxim's son was called "The Singing Worm", Gorky's secretary Kryuchkov's wife - "Tse-tse" ... Wife Maxim's son Nadezhda Gorky gave the nickname "Timosha". Why? For recalcitrant curls sticking out in all directions. First there was a scythe, with which it was possible to kill the spine of a teenage calf. Nadezhda secretly cut it off and at the hairdresser's (it was in Italy) they laid down what was left after the haircut. For the first half hour, it seemed to look good, but in the morning ... Gorky, seeing his son's wife, named her Timosha - in honor of the coachman Timofey, whose unkempt tufts always aroused general delight. However, Nadezhda-Timosha was so good that Genrikh Yagoda fell in love with her. (For the country's chief Chekist, by occupation, it seems that falling in love meant betraying the Motherland. Assess the risk of Yagoda - he openly gave Gorky's daughter-in-law orchids).
Maxim died early - at the age of 37. Died weird. His daughter Martha, sharing her memories with the poetess Larisa Vasilyeva, suspects poisoning. Maxim liked to drink (they even quarreled on this basis with the patient but proud Timosha). But on that ill-fated day (early May 1934) he did not take a sip. We were returning from the dacha Yagoda. Felt bad. Gorky's secretary, Kryuchkov, left Maxim on the bench - in one shirt, there was still snow in Gorki.

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- (Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov) (1868 1936) writer, literary critic and publicist Everything in Man is everything for Man! There are no pure white people or completely black people; people are all colorful. One, if it is great, is still small. Everything is relative to… Consolidated encyclopedia of aphorisms

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Books

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• Maksim Gorky. Book about Russian people, Maxim Gorky. Perhaps only Gorky managed to reflect in his work the history, life and culture of Russia in the first third of the 20th century on a truly epic scale. This applies not only to his prose and ...

WRITER MAXIM GORKY IS A LEAVING NATURE?

In less than 15 months there will be the 150th anniversary of the birth of A. M. Gorky. It seems that the government of Russia, all-Russian writers' associations, theater and others cultural organizations it is expedient to begin preparations for holding public events dedicated to this anniversary date. One of the most famous and significant Russian writers and thinkers in the world, Alexei Maksimovich Gorky, is worthy of the memory of modern Russian society. OH is a brilliant artist of the word and a sincere person, a keen socialist and romantic realist, his outstanding and large-scale literary heritage is a link between old and new Russia.

In connection with this topic, below is a detailed and interesting article "Eminent and outcast", published on November 21, 2016. on the Internet portal SUBNET, the author of the material Resepter.

AND THE FAMOUS AND THE REJECTED

"He came to literature at the right time,
With high wave revolution, and knew why he had come.
Samuil Marshak, Russian and Soviet poet, playwright,
(1887-1964)

Russian writer, prose writer, playwright Alexei Maksimovich Gorky (Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov, March 16 (28), 1868 - June 18, 1936) is also known as Maxim Gorky. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, he was one of the most widely read authors in the world. He was a recognized creator of works with a revolutionary attitude, personally close to the Social Democrats, who were in opposition to the tsarist regime. Starting his literary activity with the image of romanticized declassed characters (“tramps” - protesting heroes who find no place in life), having gone through the worldview path of an ideologist of god-building and literary evangelism, Gorky then became a literary spokesman for the interests of all working people, a conductor of the idea of ​​a fundamental social, political and cultural transformation of Russia. Gorky saw in literature not so much a way of artistic and aesthetic self-expression as moral and political activity with the aim of changing the world. He acted as a literary harbinger of the coming global social transformations.

The writer quickly gained worldwide fame. According to A.V. Lunacharsky: “Already the first appearance, the first successes of Gorky drew close attention of Europe to him. It was striking that this came from the "bottom". His diverse long-suffering biography was striking. He was especially struck by his inherent tone - both in his angry revelations of the hell that society arranged for its "lower classes", and in the flights of his dream to grandiose and radiant human happiness.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the fame of Maxim Gorky equaled the popularity of the remarkable Russian word artists - A.P. Chekhov and L.N. Tolstoy. February 21, 1902. A.M. Peshkov (Maxim Gorky) was elected to the honorary academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the category of fine literature. But before Gorky could exercise his new rights, his election was annulled by the tsarist government, under the pretext that the newly elected academician "was under police surveillance." In this regard, world authorities - writers V.G. Korolenko and A.P. Chekhov refused membership in the Academy. After the overthrow of the monarchy, March 20, 1917. Gorky was re-elected an honorary member.

One of the most famous and significant Russian writers and thinkers in the world, Alexei Maksimovich Gorky, was nominated 5 times for Nobel Prize in literature: in 1918, 1923, 1928, 1930 and 1933
In 1923-1924, a 22-volume collected works of A.M. Gorky. In 1949-1955, a collection of the writer's works of 30 volumes was published in Moscow (including fiction, letters and critical articles). Maxim Gorky was the most published Soviet writer in the USSR in 1918-1986. The total circulation of 3556 editions of his literary works amounted to 242.6 million copies. However, if we take into account not only Soviet writers, then in that period A. M. Gorky yielded only to the luminaries of literature L.N. Tolstoy and A. S. Pushkin.

However, in the last 20 years, domestic literary critics and politicians pretend that Maxim Gorky, as a writer and a person, was not in the cultural life of Russia.

Gorky is a phenomenon of world literature

Maxim Gorky as a writer appeared on the historical verge of two worlds - the world of capitalism and the world of socialism. According to the figurative expression of a prominent literary critic, Gorky sang the waste to the dying, dying world, to the emerging world, coming to replace him, he sang "Many Years". Maxim Gorky acted as the Petrel of an imminent social revolution and the artist of a new progressive social system even before the working class that entered the historical arena buried Russian capitalism. In 1898, two volumes of essays and stories by Gorky were published, and he becomes perhaps the most popular writer modernity, the ruler of the thoughts of advanced Russian society. The talent of the young artist of the word was noticed and welcomed by the classics domestic literature and literature Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Their personal acquaintance with Maxim Gorky took place in the period 1900-1901. Chekhov saw the most important merit of Gorky in the fact that he was “the first in Russia and in general in the world to speak with contempt and disgust about petty bourgeoisie and spoke precisely at the time when society was prepared for this protest.” Gorky's famous Notes on Philistinism first appeared in the legal Bolshevik newspaper Novaya Zhizn (1905, October 27 and 30, November 13 and 20). This sharply accented essay by V.I. Lenin highly appreciated it as an example of militant revolutionary journalism.

A.M. Gorky is a world-famous Russian writer, interlocutor and permanent correspondent of outstanding classics foreign literature Romain Rolland, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw. Maxim Gorky was united by strong spiritual and creative connections with progressive prose writers of Europe and America: T. Dreiser, J. London, A. Barbusse, M. Andersen-Neske, A. Frans. An artist of words, a socialist and a romantic realist, an intermediary between the two systems of the universal human order, Gorky was the link between old and new Russia. “You were like a high arch thrown between two worlds - the past and the future, as well as between Russia and the West” (from a letter from Romain Rolland to A.M. Gorky

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian and world culture was replenished with new independent direction creativity of Maxim Gorky - a literary portrait. This genre made it possible for the writer to convey to future generations the bright images of representatives of the advanced Russian intelligentsia - the bearer of progressive culture. Possessing a phenomenal artistic memory that kept inexhaustible reserves of observations, Gorky created vivid literary portraits of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Stasov, Vladimir Korolenko, Alexander Blok, Leonid. Andreev, Nikolai Karonin, Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky, Innokenty Annensky and many others. The literary portrait of V.I. Lenin (1930) is considered the masterpiece of this series of Gorky essays.

In world literature about Maxim Gorky, there is hardly a description of his creative genius more penetrating in depth and more vivid in form than that given to Gorky by the writer and poet Stefan Zweig, famous in the West. In a speech delivered on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the birth of A.M. Gorky, in 1928, the Austro-British prose writer and literary critic said:

“I rank Gorky’s vigilant memory among the few genuine miracles of our era, and I don’t know anything about contemporary art that could even remotely match the clarity and precision of his eye. Not a hint of mystical fog obscures the eyes of this artist, not a bubble of lies is stuck in a crystal clear lens that does not increase or decrease, never gives a distorted or skewed image, an incorrect picture, never enhances light and deepens darkness; Gorky's eye sees only clearly, only the truth, and this is unsurpassed truth and unattainable clarity ... ".
“When Maxim Gorky draws an image, I am ready to swear that this person was exactly the same as Gorky saw and described him, exactly the same - no better and no worse; here nothing is imagined and nothing is diminished, nothing is embellished and not belittled, here in a pure, unclouded form the unique essence of one person is captured, comprehended to the end and translated into an image. There is no picture among the thousands of photographs of Leo Tolstoy, no description in the stories of thousands of his friends and visitors, where he would appear before us more vividly, more clearly in his modern truth than in the incomplete sixty pages that Gorky dedicated to him in his Memoirs. And in exactly the same way, with the same truthfulness and the same impartiality as this greatest of the Russians with whom he happened to meet, Gorky described the most insignificant vagabond, the most contemptible gypsy, with whom fate had brought him to high road. The genius of Gorky's vision bears one name - truthfulness ... ".
"This honest fair man, this great artist he never imagined himself a leader, did not claim to be a judge, did not try to be known as a prophet - he only defended the rights of his people, testified to their spiritual depth and moral strength. As befits a sincere witness, he did not embellish the truth and did not deny it, did not make speeches, but gave an account, did not declare, but narrated. Without pessimism in the dark years and without jubilation in the years of success, steadfast in the hour of danger and modest in the hour of good fortune, he lined up people, one beside the other, in his books, until they themselves became a multitude, became a people and the image of an eternal people - the basis foundations of all art and all creative power. Therefore, Gorky's epic (the trilogy "Childhood", "In People", "My Universities", "Memoirs" - ed.) is not a vague myth about the Russian soul, but Russian reality itself, genuine and irrefutable. Thanks to Gorky's books, we can fraternally understand Russia as a close, kindred world to us, without alienation, without internal resistance, and this is the highest duty of the writer - to destroy the barriers between people, make the distant close and unite peoples with peoples, estates with estates in ultimate universal unity...

The advantage of Maxim Gorky's work is that speaking at the time of the beginning death of capitalism, he was able to express the ideas, aspirations and emotions of the Russian people, the public mission. The writer sought to understand the problems of reality, to know the essence of social misfortune, to find a way to achieve truth and justice. He took an active part in the organization of the First World socialist revolution, and then joined the process of building a communist community and a renewed culture.
The work of Maxim Gorky is a rich palette of colors, paintings, people, images, deep and wise thoughts. This is a heroic ode about a man and his work. For the great humanist Gorky, man was the center and pride of the universe, the measure of all things. The writer proclaimed: “Man! It sounds proud! He argued: "Man is an organ of nature, created by it, as it were, for its self-knowledge and transformation."
Gorky's hymn to man is inseparable from his affirmation of the great transformative role of labor. In all of world literature, no one treated labor with such reverence as Maxim Gorky. He was a singer of human labor. The unity of human efforts in labor sounded like music to him. Collective work was perceived by him as a kind of orchestra. Gorky perceived universal human labor as an all-planet symphony of human creation.

Gorky and Soviet literature

In the era of the Silver Age of Russian literature (beginning of the 20th century), Maxim Gorky was a very significant figure in Russian literature. The writer's artistic skill in depicting the character of a person who is being formed in the process of the revolutionary transformation of society had a noticeable influence on the work of many current and new masters of the word that appeared in the world's first socialist country. With particular acuteness, Gorky felt great role and the importance of fiction in the era of a revolutionary turning point in the life of the people. He argued that the writer, the ruler of the thoughts and aspirations of the people, “is never an accident, he is always a historical necessity; he is a phenomenon brought to life by the spiritual work of the nation, saturated with its creative power, justified by its need to see its life reflected in art ... ".

In the difficult and hungry year of 1918, in Soviet Russia, Maxim Gorky organized a new publishing house " world literature» at the People's Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR. His great plan was that "the Russian citizen should have at his disposal all the treasures of poetry and fiction created over a century and a half. In the preface to a large catalog of future publications, compiled in several European languages, Gorky solemnly proclaimed to the whole world prophetic, enduring thoughts about literature. He argued: “Literature is the heart of the world, inspired by all the joys and all its sorrows, the dreams and hopes of people, their despair and anger, the tenderness of a person in front of the beauty of nature, fear of its secrets; this heart is restlessly and immortally beating with a thirst for self-knowledge: as if in it all the substances and forces of nature, which have created in the person of man the highest expression of their complexity and rationality, are striving to understand the essence and purpose of their being.
Literature can also be called the all-seeing eye of the world, an eye that penetrates into the deepest recesses of the life of the human spirit; a book - a simple thing, so familiar to us - is, in its essence, one of the greatest and mysterious wonders of the earth: someone unknown to us, sometimes speaking in an incomprehensible language, separated from us by thousands of miles, drew various combinations of three dozen signs on paper , called letters, letters; and, looking at them, we, alien and distant to the creator of the book, mysteriously comprehend the meaning of all words, ideas, feelings, images, admire the description of the pictures of nature, admire the beautiful dimensionality of speech, the music of the word ... The book, perhaps the most complex and great miracle of all the miracles created by mankind on its way to the happiness and power of the future.

The brilliant artist of the new era, Alexei Maksimovich Gorky, was a true realist and at the same time the most sublime romantic. In this creative fusion of realism and romanticism, the writer became the founder of a new direction, an innovative style of world literature, which later became known as socialist realism.

M. Gorky considered the main task of this method of literary creation to be "the excitation of a socialist, revolutionary worldview, worldview." "Proud, joyful pathos ... will give our literature a new tone, help it create new forms, create the new direction we need - socialist realism." He pointed out that for a correct image and understanding of today, it is necessary to clearly see and imagine tomorrow, the future, based on the development prospects, show today's life, because only knowing and correctly imagining the future, you can remake the present. According to the writer, “looking at the present from the future” does not mean at all a craving for embellishing reality, its idealization: “Socialist realism is the art of the strong! Strong enough to face life fearlessly...

Socialist realism was interpreted by Gorky as a realistically correct depiction of life in its development from the standpoint of a Marxist worldview. He wrote: "Scientific socialism has created for us the highest intellectual plateau, from which the past is clearly visible and the direct and only path to the future is indicated ...". The writer demanded the truth, but the truth is not a separate fact, but the truth illuminated by the great ideas of a great tomorrow.

Gorky did not identify his personal writing style with the method of socialist realism, believing that the broad scope of this artistic method contributes to the identification and development of various artistic personalities and styles. He considered neither his own nor anyone else's formulas and "settings" for the literary process as directive and final. On the manuscript of one critic, who, wanting to convince the reader of the correctness of his judgments, often quoted Gorky, Alexei Maksimovich wrote: “I consider it necessary to note that M. Gorky is not an indisputable authority for us, but - like everything from the past - is subject to careful study, the most serious criticism.
Alexei Maksimovich Gorky was a great literary worker. His feat in life is as incomprehensible as the breadth of the writer's artistic talent. At the same time, he was engaged in a huge community service in the literary field. Created the publishing house "Academia" (1921/1922), the journal "Literary Study" (1930), the book series "The History of Factories and Plants" (1931), "The History of the Civil War in the USSR", "The Poet's Library", "History young man of the nineteenth century. Resumed the publication of the book series "The Life of Remarkable People" (since 1933). On the initiative of Gorky, the first literary institute was organized in Moscow (1933).

A.M. Gorky brought up a whole generation of prose writers and poets, many of whom have won world fame. There is not a single Soviet writer, poet or prose writer contemporary of Gorky, to whose creative growth he would remain indifferent, did not tell him something very important for his creative future.
The prominent Russian Soviet writer Konstantin Fedin (1872-1977) recalled: “In letters to me, Alexei Maksimovich touched on many topics, answering my questions, objecting to me, sometimes entering into a detailed dispute, passing from one letter to another ... But the main Literature has always been the subject of correspondence. Alexey Maksimovich wrote about the writer, his work, his work with love and great passion. His letters burn like fire: touching them takes your breath away. He considered the cause of literature to be sacred and managed to inspire such an attitude towards it. junior writers who had the good fortune to communicate with him, his students and friends.

Any more or less significant event in Russian literature, in the literature of Soviet national republics and in world literature met the close attention of the Russian writer Alexei Maksimovich Gorky. national literatures in the republics and regions of the vast socialist country. On the literary traditions of Maxim Gorky, a whole galaxy has grown now widely famous writers older generation. It is rightly considered that Maxim Gorky was the father of the great friendship of the cultures of all Soviet peoples.

In the field of literature, culture in general, Gorky enjoyed great authority, but he always listened to the opinions of others, never considered his judgment "ultimate truth", in his articles and speeches he expressed the concepts developed by Soviet literature of those years as a whole. He considered the matter of literature to be a collective matter; a shout, an order, a command in literature seemed to Gorky unacceptable. In 1927 he wrote to the prose writer and playwright Boris Lavrenev (1881-1959): “I am not a quarterly warden and not a “boss” at all, but a Russian writer just like you.” On the manuscript of one critic, who, wanting to convince the reader of the correctness of his judgments, often quoted Gorky, Alexei Maksimovich wrote: “I consider it necessary to note that M. Gorky is not an undeniable authority for us, but - like everything from the past - is subject to careful study, the most serious criticism.

In all his speeches, Gorky emphasized the importance of cultural tradition. This was all the more important since nihilistic attacks on the classical heritage of the past were not uncommon in the first years of the formation of a new, Soviet culture.

Maxim Gorky, being ill, was treated in Italy in 1922-1930. But, even here, thousands of kilometers from Russia, the writer lived the life of his people, followed everything that happened on his native land, participated in the literary process of the Soviet country with his journalistic articles and speeches. Upon returning to his homeland, Gorky devoted a lot of strength, energy and will to the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers. He was the inspirer and "first among equals" participant in the First Congress of Writers of the USSR in 1934, at which the multinational Soviet literature appeared as a single, all-Union, all-people.

Alexey Maksimovich Gorky saw the greatest significance of the congress in creative work writers were henceforth inspired by the "basic, organizing idea", the idea of ​​Bolshevism - "the radical changer of the world". Popularity and partisanship, the writer's deep awareness of his duty to the people, to history - this is what should determine the direction and meaning of the work of every Soviet writer. “From now on,” Gorky said, “the concept of a “non-party writer” will remain only a formal concept, but inwardly each of us will feel like a real member of the Leninist party ...”.

Gorky was surprised that domestic writers were not sufficiently attracted by the theme of labor, the theme of the Soviet working class: “For three thousand writers registered in the Union (Union of Soviet Writers - ed.), the intellectual, the son of an intellectual and his dramatic fuss with himself, is still a favorite hero ".
Unbearably hard, forced labor was in tsarist Russia, mercilessly and vividly described by Gorky. But then October came, and the writer, turning to a free Soviet worker inspired by creation, exclaims: “You are an inexhaustible [mat], creating everything, an inexhaustible source of creativity!”. "In our country, every work should be turned into an art to transform the world." In one of his articles, Aleksey Maksimovich wrote: “All my life I have seen as heroes only people who love and know how to work, people who set themselves the goal of freeing all the forces of man for creativity, for decorating the earth, for organizing on it forms of life worthy of person."

The greatest writer of his time, Maxim Gorky, believed that any prose writer (poet) has no right to consider literature as a personal, individual matter. He considered his work, as well as the work of other writers - old and young, famous and little-known - part of the huge work of all Soviet literature, all Soviet people. Gorky was equally kind and equally strict to the writer, who deserved honor and recognition, and to the author of the first book in his life. - Famous poet, prose writer, literary critic Korney Chukovsky (1882-1969) recalled: “... one should not think that we, writers, received only laudatory letters from him (Gorky-ed.). For evaluating our literary work, he had the only firm criterion: the interests of Soviet readers, and if it seemed to him that we were harming these interests, he felt compelled to tell us the most cruel truth».

Gorky is sent to oblivion

In post-Soviet Russia, the bourgeois intelligentsia saddled the cultural life of the country and subjugated the literary process. Its liberal ideologists and practices intend to withdraw (throw) from public consciousness and the memory of the people of the writer Maxim Gorky, whose worldview and creative talent were turned to expressing the vital interests of the working classes. The avant-gardists of belles-lettres - "literary cleaners" - seek to prevent the young and rising generation of Russians from reading Gorky's works, which sharply denounce the ugly vices of capitalism and enthusiastically sing of the greatness of human relations in a socialist society. A variety of techniques and methods of denigrating the personality, belittling writing skills and defamation of the social activities of A.M. Gorky.

Russian neoliberals consider A.M. Gorky is an average, in general, prose writer and playwright. Political dissidents and literary opponents of all directions deliberately play on Gorky's ideological and creative throwing, focus on his ambiguous relationship with the leaders of Bolshevism at different periods of his life. The best in his work condescendingly consider the early autobiographical stories, which give a realistic and picturesque picture of Russian life. late XIX century.
First of all, right-liberal literary figures reproach the proletarian writer for placing his work at the service of the communist movement. An obvious example is the tendentious, in their opinion, novel "Mother", written by Maxim Gorky in 1906. right in the wake of the December (1905) protest actions of workers in the major cities of tsarist Russia. According to neo-critics, the theme of this artistically mediocre work was chosen by the author as opportunistic - the joining of a simple working woman to the revolution after the arrest of her son, who participated in a labor strike.
Especially zealously and angrily creative modern "Lithuanians" condemn the article-pamphlet published by Gorky (March 1932) in the two central Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia under the title, which has become winged, "Who are you with, masters of culture?" They say : sustained in the style of Leninist-Stalinist propaganda, she called on writers, artists and artists to engage in creativity, guided by a Marxist worldview. Opponents maliciously believe that it was precisely because of the socialist orientation of Maxim Gorky's work that the Soviet leadership presented him as the greatest Russian writer of his time, a native of the people, a true friend of the Communist Party. After returning to the USSR in 1930, in the last years of his life, Maxim Gorky was surrounded by official recognition as a "petrel of the revolution", "a great proletarian writer", the father of "socialist realism". During festive demonstrations on Red Square in Moscow, Gorky went up to the podium of the mausoleum along with Stalin and other members of the Politburo of the Communist Party. Since 1929 A.M. Gorky was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. His sculptures and portraits were distributed throughout the country. One of the main Moscow streets, Tverskaya, was renamed in honor of the writer, just like his hometown, Nizhny Novgorod (1932) The largest aircraft in the world, ANT-20, built in the mid-1930s by the Tupolev aviation bureau, was named "Maxim Gorky". The name of M. Gorky was given to many regional drama theaters, one of the central film studios in Moscow. In almost every major locality Union republics of the USSR there was Gorky Street. In 1933 on the occasion of his 65th birthday, Maxim Gorky was awarded the highest state award Order of Lenin.

Russian neo-liberals see Gorky's work as the epitome of slippery compromise. They constantly emphasize the vacillation of his views on the Soviet system, recall Gorky's repeated criticism of the Bolshevik regime. At the same time, critics insist that Gorky's work was built into the arsenal of Stalinist propaganda. So, June 20-23, 1929. Maxim Gorky made a trip to the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp, where he received detailed information from the campers about the terrible atrocities that were happening there. Nevertheless, following the results of his trip to Solovki, he wrote a laudatory article about the Soviet punitive system. In the West, this article about the Solovetsky camp aroused stormy criticism. Then Gorky began bashfully to explain that he was under pressure from the Soviet censors in Solovki. Later, in 1934. A.M. Gorky co-edited a literary collection that glorified the White Sea-Baltic Canal built by the slave labor of prisoners. The book convinced that in the Soviet "correctional" camps a successful "reforging" of the former "enemies of the proletariat" was being carried out.

Maxim Gorky argued that the center of his work is a deep belief in the value of the human person, the glorification of human dignity and inflexibility in the midst of life's hardships. In himself, the writer saw a "restless soul", which seeks to find a way out of the contradictions of hope and skepticism, love of life and disgust at the petty vulgarity of others. However, "literary cleaners" assure that these statements were mostly affected. They are allegedly convinced of this by the style of Gorky's books and the details of his public biography. The tragedy and confusion in the life and literary works of the writer reflected the extreme ambiguity of his rosy promises of a complete revolutionary transformation of the world, masking the selfish thirst for power and bestial cruelty of human strata opposite in their social aspirations.

Zoils from literary criticism write that when Maxim Gorky depicted the life of beggars from the very bottom of society (“tramps”), depicting their difficulties and humiliations with strong exaggerations, he seemed to be strenuously introducing into his stories the feigned pathos of “humanity”. And so, thanks to this reception, the writer gained a reputation as the only literary spokesman for the interests of the working class, a supporter of the idea of ​​​​a radical social and political reorganization of Russia. Meanwhile, the work of A.M. Gorky was praised by intellectuals and "conscious" workers. The antagonists, on the other hand, believe that those artistic merits of his works, which are usually spoken of, do not atone for the harmful meaning of the sermons contained in them and the idealization of "boaboyism". "Tramp" - this new, tavern Faust, who did not find anything in the world that satisfies him, this new crib Demon, who does not want to bless anything in all of nature - goes on a campaign against God, because He created the world in a wrong way, against people, because they are reptiles, crooks and hypocrites, against his wife, because she interferes with him, against cities and villages, because they are disgusting to him. "Literary cleaners" argue: had it not been for this tramp catechism preached by Gorky, his writings would never have had the success that they received in their time. Liberal aesthetes from literature believe that the "Tramp", who dreams of strangling everyone, is a creature that is not at all safe for public peace.

Attacking A.M. Gorky, "masters" of behind-the-scenes provocations do not shun dirty slander and speculation. So, according to some literary critics, Gorky's return to his homeland, in Soviet country in 1930 It was by no means due to the writer’s political convictions, but to his long-standing sympathies for the Bolsheviks. Allegedly, the main circumstance here was Gorky’s sincere desire to get rid of large debts made during his life abroad (including cash advances from the publishers of his literary works.). that the importance of M. Gorky in organizing and holding the First Congress of Writers of the USSR was exaggerated. It is claimed that in fact his role was purely decorative. Allegedly, the main report read by Gorky at that congress on Soviet literature compiled in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks with the participation of Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Mekhlis and edited by Stalin. In addition, the preparation of the congress was carried out by the Organizing Committee, whose activities were directed by the secretary of the Central Committee of the party A.A. Zhdanov and the deputy head of the organizational department of the Central Committee A.S. Shcherbakov. The latter at the congress of writers was elected secretary of the board of the USSR Writers' Union. Once again, the long-running tale is being circulated that supposedly Stalin harbored a grudge against Maxim Gorky for refusing to write it. artistic biography, similar to the essay about V.I. Lenin created by the writer. Such a literary work was supposed to further glorify Stalin as the only legitimate heir to Lenin. When Gorky, under various pretexts, evaded fulfilling the "order" of the Secretary General of the CPSU (b), the world-famous writer, who was also considered the leader's ideological rival, was imprisoned on Stalin's orders. Then, he used the death of Burevestnik to organize a bloody purge of old party cadres in the country. Therefore, according to home-grown "political experts", although unwittingly, Gorky's "stubbornness" was the forerunner of the brutal political repressions of the late 1930s.

In less than 15 months there will be the 150th anniversary of the birth of A. M. Gorky. I think it would be expedient for the Russian government, all-Russian writers' associations, theater and other cultural organizations to begin preparations for holding public events dedicated to this anniversary date. One of the most famous and significant Russian writers and thinkers in the world, Alexei Maksimovich Gorky, is worthy of the memory of modern Russian society. HE is a brilliant artist of the word and a sincere person, a keen socialist and romantic realist, his outstanding and large-scale literary heritage is a link between old and new Russia.

In connection with this topic, below is a detailed and interesting article "Eminent and outcast", published on November 21, 2016. on the Internet portal SUBNET, the author of the material Resepter.

AND THE FAMOUS AND THE REJECTED

"He came to literature at the right time, with a high wave of revolution, and he knew why he came." Samuil Marshak, Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, (1887-1964)

Russian writer, prose writer, playwright Alexei Maksimovich Gorky (Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov, March 16 (28), 1868 - June 18, 1936) is also known as Maxim Gorky. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, he was one of the most widely read authors in the world. He was a recognized creator of works with a revolutionary attitude, personally close to the Social Democrats, who were in opposition to the tsarist regime. Starting his literary activity with the image of romanticized declassed characters (“tramps” - protesting heroes who find no place in life), having gone through the worldview path of an ideologist of god-building and literary evangelism, Gorky then became a literary spokesman for the interests of all working people, a conductor of the idea of ​​a fundamental social, political and cultural transformation of Russia. Gorky saw in literature not so much a way of artistic and aesthetic self-expression as moral and political activity with the aim of changing the world. He acted as a literary harbinger of the coming global social transformations.

The writer quickly gained worldwide fame. According to A.V. Lunacharsky: “Already the first appearance, the first successes of Gorky drew close attention of Europe to him. It was striking that this came from the "bottom". His diverse long-suffering biography was striking. He was especially struck by his inherent tone - both in his angry revelations of the hell that society arranged for its "lower classes", and in the flights of his dream to grandiose and radiant human happiness.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the fame of Maxim Gorky equaled the popularity of the remarkable Russian word artists - A.P. Chekhov and L.N. Tolstoy. February 21, 1902. A.M. Peshkov (Maxim Gorky) was elected to the honorary academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the category of fine literature. But before Gorky could exercise his new rights, his election was annulled by the tsarist government, under the pretext that the newly elected academician "was under police surveillance." In this regard, world authorities - writers V.G. Korolenko and A.P. Chekhov refused membership in the Academy. After the overthrow of the monarchy, March 20, 1917. Gorky was re-elected an honorary member. One of the most famous and significant Russian writers and thinkers in the world, Alexei Maksimovich Gorky, was nominated 5 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature: in 1918, 1923, 1928, 1930. and 1933 In 1923-1924, a 22-volume collected works of A.M. Gorky. In 1949-1955, a collection of the writer's works of 30 volumes (including fiction, letters and critical articles) was published in Moscow. Maxim Gorky was the most published Soviet writer in the USSR in 1918-1986. The total circulation of 3556 editions of his literary works amounted to 242.6 million copies. If we take into account not only Soviet writers, then at that time A. M. Gorky yielded only to the luminaries of literature L.N. Tolstoy and A. S. Pushkin.

However, in the last 20 years, domestic literary critics and politicians pretend that Maxim Gorky, as a writer and a person, was not in the cultural life of Russia.

Gorky is a phenomenon of world literature

Maxim Gorky as a writer appeared on the historical verge of two worlds - the world of capitalism and the world of socialism. According to the figurative expression of a prominent literary critic, Gorky sang the waste to the dying, dying world, to the emerging world, coming to replace him, he sang "Many Years". Maxim Gorky acted as the Petrel of an imminent social revolution and the artist of a new progressive social system even before the working class that entered the historical arena buried Russian capitalism. In 1898, two volumes of essays and stories by Gorky were published, and he became perhaps the most popular writer of our time, the ruler of the thoughts of progressive Russian society. The talent of the young artist of the word was noticed and welcomed by the classics of Russian literature and literature, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Their personal acquaintance with Maxim Gorky took place in the period 1900-1901. Chekhov saw the most important merit of Gorky in the fact that he was “the first in Russia and in general in the world to speak with contempt and disgust about petty bourgeoisie and spoke precisely at the time when society was prepared for this protest.” Gorky's famous Notes on Philistinism first appeared in the legal Bolshevik newspaper Novaya Zhizn (1905, October 27 and 30, November 13 and 20). This sharply accented essay by V.I. Lenin highly appreciated it as an example of militant revolutionary journalism.

A.M. Gorky is a world-famous Russian writer, interlocutor and permanent correspondent of the outstanding classics of foreign literature Romain Rolland, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw. Maxim Gorky was united by strong spiritual and creative ties with progressive prose writers of Europe and America: T. Dreiser, J. London, A. Barbusse, M. Andersen-Neske, A. Frans. An artist of words, a socialist and a romantic realist, an intermediary between the two systems of the universal human order, Gorky was the link between old and new Russia. “You were like a high arch thrown between two worlds - the past and the future, as well as between Russia and the West” (from a letter from Romain Rolland to A.M. Gorky dated March 18, 1918).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian and world culture was replenished with a new independent direction in Maxim Gorky's work - a literary portrait. This genre made it possible for the writer to convey to future generations the bright images of representatives of the progressive Russian intelligentsia - the bearers of progressive culture. Possessing a phenomenal artistic memory that kept inexhaustible reserves of observations, Gorky created vivid literary portraits of Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Stasov, Vladimir Korolenko, Alexander Blok, Leonid. Andreev, Nikolai Karonin, Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky, Innokenty Annensky and many others. The literary portrait of V.I. Lenin (1930) is considered the masterpiece of this series of Gorky essays.

In world literature about Maxim Gorky, there is hardly a description of his creative genius more penetrating in depth and more vivid in form than that given to Gorky by the writer and poet Stefan Zweig, famous in the West. In a speech delivered on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the birth of A.M. Gorky, in 1928, the Austro-British prose writer and literary critic said:

“I rank Gorky's vigilant memory among the few genuine miracles of our era, and I know nothing in modern art that could even remotely compare with the clarity and accuracy of his eye. Not a hint of mystical fog obscures the eyes of this artist, not a bubble of lies is stuck in a crystal clear lens that does not increase or decrease, never gives a distorted or skewed image, an incorrect picture, never enhances light and deepens darkness; Gorky's eye sees only clearly, only the truth, and this is unsurpassed truth and unattainable clarity ... ". “When Maxim Gorky draws an image, I am ready to swear that this person was exactly the same as Gorky saw and described him, exactly the same - no better and no worse; here nothing is imagined and nothing is diminished, nothing is embellished and not belittled, here in a pure, unclouded form the unique essence of one person is captured, comprehended to the end and translated into an image. There is no picture among the thousands of photographs of Leo Tolstoy, no description in the stories of thousands of his friends and visitors, where he would appear before us more vividly, more clearly in his modern truth than in the incomplete sixty pages that Gorky dedicated to him in his Memoirs. And in exactly the same way, with the same truthfulness and the same impartiality as this greatest of the Russians with whom he happened to meet, Gorky described the most insignificant vagabond, the most contemptible gypsy, with whom fate had pushed him on the high road. The genius of Gorky's vision bears one name - truthfulness ... ". “This honest, just man, this great artist never fancied himself a leader, did not claim to be a judge, did not try to be known as a prophet, he only defended the rights of his people, testified to their spiritual depth and moral strength. As befits a sincere witness, he did not embellish the truth and did not deny it, did not make speeches, but gave an account, did not declare, but narrated. Without pessimism in the dark years and without jubilation in the years of success, steadfast in the hour of danger and modest in the hour of good fortune, he lined up people, one beside the other, in his books, until they themselves became a multitude, became a people and the image of an eternal people - the basis foundations of all art and all creative power. Therefore, Gorky's epic (the trilogy "Childhood", "In People", "My Universities", "Memoirs" - ed.) is not a vague myth about the Russian soul, but Russian reality itself, genuine and irrefutable. Thanks to Gorky's books, we can fraternally understand Russia as a close, kindred world to us, without alienation, without internal resistance, and this is the highest duty of the writer - to destroy the barriers between people, make the distant close and unite peoples with peoples, estates with estates in ultimate human unity. ..".

The advantage of Maxim Gorky's work is that speaking at the time of the beginning death of capitalism, he was able to express the ideas, aspirations and emotions of the Russian people, the public mission. The writer sought to understand the problems of reality, to know the essence of social misfortune, to find a way to achieve truth and justice. He took all possible part in the organization of the first world socialist revolution, and then joined the process of building a communist community and a renewed culture.

The work of Maxim Gorky is a rich palette of colors, paintings, people, images, deep and wise thoughts. This is a heroic ode about a man and his work. For the great humanist Gorky, man was the center and pride of the universe, the measure of all things. The writer proclaimed: “Man! It sounds proud! He argued: "Man is an organ of nature, created by it, as it were, for its self-knowledge and transformation."

Gorky's hymn to man is inseparable from his affirmation of the great transformative role of labor. In all world literature, no one treated work with such reverence as Maxim Gorky. He was a singer of human labor. The unity of human efforts in labor sounded like music to him. Collective work was perceived by him as a kind of orchestra. Gorky perceived universal human labor as an all-planet symphony of human creation.

Gorky and Soviet literature

In the era of the Silver Age of Russian literature (beginning of the 20th century), Maxim Gorky was a very significant figure in Russian literature. The writer's artistic skill in depicting the character of a person who is being formed in the process of the revolutionary transformation of society had a noticeable influence on the work of many current and new masters of the word that appeared in the world's first socialist country. With particular acuteness, Gorky felt the great role and significance of fiction in the era of a revolutionary turning point in the life of the people. He argued that the writer, the ruler of the thoughts and aspirations of the people, “is never an accident, he is always a historical necessity; he is a phenomenon brought to life by the spiritual work of the nation, saturated with its creative power, justified by its need to see its life reflected in art ... ".

In the difficult and hungry year of 1918, in Soviet Russia, Maxim Gorky organized a new publishing house, World Literature, under the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR. His great plan was that "the Russian citizen would have at his disposal all the treasures of poetry and fiction created over a century and a half." In the preface to a large catalog of future publications, compiled in several European languages, Gorky solemnly proclaimed to the whole world prophetic, enduring thoughts about literature. He argued: “Literature is the heart of the world, inspired by all the joys and all its sorrows, the dreams and hopes of people, their despair and anger, the tenderness of a person in front of the beauty of nature, fear of its secrets; this heart is restlessly and immortally beating with a thirst for self-knowledge: as if in it all the substances and forces of nature, which have created in the person of man the highest expression of their complexity and rationality, are striving to understand the essence and purpose of their being.

Literature can also be called the all-seeing eye of the world, an eye that penetrates into the deepest recesses of the life of the human spirit; a book - a simple thing, so familiar to us - is, in its essence, one of the greatest and mysterious wonders of the earth: someone unknown to us, sometimes speaking in an incomprehensible language, separated from us by thousands of miles, drew various combinations of three dozen signs on paper , called letters, letters; and, looking at them, we, alien and distant to the creator of the book, mysteriously comprehend the meaning of all words, ideas, feelings, images, admire the description of the pictures of nature, admire the beautiful dimensionality of speech, the music of the word ... The book, perhaps the most complex and great miracle of all the miracles created by mankind on its way to the happiness and power of the future.

The brilliant artist of the new era, Alexei Maksimovich Gorky, was a true realist and at the same time the most sublime romantic. In this creative fusion of realism and romanticism, the writer became the founder of a new direction, an innovative style of world literature, which later became known as socialist realism.

M. Gorky considered the main task of this method of literary creation to be "the excitation of a socialist, revolutionary worldview, worldview." "Proud, joyful pathos ... will give our literature a new tone, help it create new forms, create the new direction we need - socialist realism."

He pointed out that for a correct image and understanding of today, it is necessary to clearly see and imagine tomorrow, the future, based on the development prospects, show today's life, because only knowing and correctly imagining the future, you can remake the present. According to the writer, “looking at the present from the future” does not mean at all a craving for embellishing reality, its idealization: “Socialist realism is the art of the strong! Strong enough to face life fearlessly...

Socialist realism was interpreted by Gorky as a realistically correct depiction of life in its development from the standpoint of a Marxist worldview. He wrote: "Scientific socialism has created for us the highest intellectual plateau, from which the past is clearly visible and the direct and only path to the future is indicated ...". The writer demanded the truth, but the truth is not a separate fact, but the truth illuminated by the great ideas of a great tomorrow.

Gorky did not identify his personal writing style with the method of socialist realism, believing that the broad scope of this artistic method contributes to the identification and development of various artistic personalities and styles. He considered neither his own nor anyone else's formulas and "settings" for the literary process as directive and final. On the manuscript of one critic, who, wanting to convince the reader of the correctness of his judgments, often quoted Gorky, Alexei Maksimovich wrote: “I consider it necessary to note that M. Gorky is not an indisputable authority for us, but - like everything from the past - is subject to careful study, the most serious criticism.

Alexei Maksimovich Gorky was a great literary worker. His feat in life is as incomprehensible as the breadth of the writer's artistic talent. At the same time, he was engaged in a huge public work in the literary field. Created the publishing house "Academia" (1921/1922), the journal "Literary Study" (1930), the book series "The History of Factories and Plants" (1931), "The History of the Civil War in the USSR", "The Poet's Library", "History young man of the nineteenth century. Resumed the publication of the book series "The Life of Remarkable People" (since 1933). On the initiative of Gorky, the first literary institute was organized in Moscow (1933).

A.M. Gorky brought up a whole generation of prose writers and poets, many of whom have won world fame. There is not a single Soviet writer, poet or prose writer contemporary of Gorky, to whose creative growth he would remain indifferent, did not tell him something very important for his creative future.

The prominent Russian Soviet writer Konstantin Fedin (1872-1977) recalled: “In letters to me, Alexei Maksimovich touched on many topics, answering my questions, objecting to me, sometimes entering into a detailed dispute, passing from one letter to another ... But the main Literature has always been the subject of correspondence. Alexey Maksimovich wrote about the writer, his work, his work with love and great passion. His letters burn like fire: touching them takes your breath away. He considered the cause of literature to be sacred and managed to instill such an attitude towards it in younger writers who had the good fortune to communicate with him, his students and friends.

Any more or less significant event in Russian literature, in the literature of the Soviet national republics and in world literature met the close attention of the Russian writer Alexei Maksimovich Gorky. revived or newly emerged Soviet national literatures in the republics and regions of the vast socialist country. A whole galaxy of now widely known writers of the older generation grew up on the literary traditions of Maxim Gorky. It is rightfully considered that Maxim Gorky was the father of the great friendship of the cultures of all Soviet peoples.

In the field of literature, culture in general, Gorky enjoyed great authority, but he always listened to the opinions of others, never considered his judgment "ultimate truth", in his articles and speeches he expressed the concepts developed by Soviet literature of those years as a whole. He considered the matter of literature to be a collective matter; a shout, an order, a command in literature seemed to Gorky unacceptable. In 1927 he wrote to the prose writer and playwright Boris Lavrenev (1881-1959): “I am not a quarterly warden and not a “boss” at all, but a Russian writer just like you.” On the manuscript of one critic, who, wanting to convince the reader of the correctness of his judgments, often quoted Gorky, Alexei Maksimovich wrote: “I consider it necessary to note that M. Gorky is not an undeniable authority for us, but - like everything from the past - is subject to careful study, the most serious criticism.

In all his speeches, Gorky emphasized the importance of cultural tradition. This was all the more important since nihilistic attacks on the classical heritage of the past were not uncommon in the first years of the formation of a new, Soviet culture.

Maxim Gorky, being ill, was treated in Italy in 1922-1930. But, even here, thousands of kilometers from Russia, the writer lived the life of his people, followed everything that happened in his native land, participated in the literary process of the Soviet country with his journalistic articles and speeches. Upon returning to his homeland, Gorky devoted a lot of strength, energy and will to the creation of the Union of Soviet Writers. He was the inspirer and "first among equals" participant in the First Congress of Writers of the USSR in 1934, at which the multinational Soviet literature appeared as a single, all-Union, all-people.

Alexei Maksimovich Gorky saw the greatest significance of the congress in that the creative work of writers would henceforth be inspired by the "basic, organizing idea," the idea of ​​Bolshevism, "the fundamental reformer of the world." Popularity and partisanship, the writer's deep awareness of his duty to the people, to history - this is what should determine the direction and meaning of the work of every Soviet writer. “From now on,” Gorky said, “the concept of a “non-party writer” will remain only a formal concept, but inwardly each of us will feel like a real member of the Leninist party ...”.

In a letter to I.V. Stalin, on August 2, 1934, Maxim Gorky wrote about the state of Soviet literature of that period: “... we deal mainly with people 30 years old, i.e. who experienced “hard times” in adolescence and youth, and these times affected the psyche of many 30-year-olds in a very harmful way: people are too greedy for the pleasures of life, they are in too much a hurry to enjoy and do not like to work conscientiously. And some “hurry to live” so rapidly that their haste gives rise to such an impression: people are not sure that the reality created by the Party has grown strong enough and will develop exactly as it is developing, they think that the peasant is only pretending to be a collectivist and that we have there are all prerequisites for fascism and that "the war can take us further than to the NEP." If only a tradesman, a layman thought this, then it doesn’t matter, but some “party members” think so, it seems alarming to me, although, as you know, I am an “optimist”. attention to literature - "the conductor of ideas into life", I will add: not so much ideas as moods. ... The Union of Writers must be led by the most solid ideological leadership ... The cultural and revolutionary significance of literature is understood by a few.

Gorky was surprised that domestic writers were not sufficiently attracted by the theme of labor, the theme of the Soviet working class: “For three thousand writers registered in the Union (Union of Soviet Writers - ed.), the intellectual, the son of an intellectual and his dramatic fuss with himself, is still a favorite hero ". Unbearably hard, forced labor was in tsarist Russia, mercilessly and vividly described by Gorky. But then October came, and the writer, turning to a free Soviet worker inspired by creation, exclaims: “You are an inexhaustible [mat], creating everything, an inexhaustible source of creativity!”. "In our country, every work should be turned into an art to transform the world." In one of his articles, Aleksey Maksimovich wrote: “All my life I have seen as heroes only people who love and know how to work, people who set themselves the goal of freeing all the forces of man for creativity, for decorating the earth, for organizing on it forms of life worthy of person."

The greatest writer of his time, Maxim Gorky, believed that any prose writer (poet) has no right to consider literature as a personal, individual matter. He considered his work, as well as the work of other writers - old and young, famous and little known - part of the great cause of all Soviet literature, the entire Soviet people. Gorky was equally kind and equally strict to the writer, who deserved honor and recognition, and to the author of the first book in his life. The famous poet, prose writer, literary critic Korney Chukovsky (1882-1969) recalled: “... one should not think that we, writers, received only laudatory letters from him (Gorky-ed.). For evaluating our literary works, he had the only firm criterion: the interests of Soviet readers, and if it seemed to him that we were harming these interests, he felt compelled to tell us the most cruel truth.

Gorky is sent to oblivion

In post-Soviet Russia, the bourgeois intelligentsia saddled the cultural life of the country and subjugated the literary process. Its liberal ideologists and practitioners intend to remove (throw out) from the public consciousness and memory of the people the writer Maxim Gorky, whose worldview and creative talent were directed towards expressing the vital interests of the working classes. The avant-gardists of belles-lettres - "literary cleaners" - seek to prevent the young and rising generation of Russians from reading Gorky's works, which sharply denounce the ugly vices of capitalism and enthusiastically sing of the greatness of human relations in a socialist society. A variety of techniques and methods of denigrating the personality, belittling the writing skills and scolding the social activities of A.M. Gorky were put into play.

Russian neoliberals consider A.M. Gorky is an average, in general, prose writer and playwright. Political dissidents and literary opponents of all directions deliberately play on Gorky's ideological and creative throwing, focus on his ambiguous relationship with the leaders of Bolshevism at different periods of his life. The best in his work condescendingly consider the early autobiographical stories, which give a realistic and picturesque picture of Russian life at the end of the 19th century.

First of all, right-liberal literary figures reproach the proletarian writer for placing his work at the service of the communist movement. An obvious example is the tendentious, in their opinion, novel "Mother", written by Maxim Gorky in 1906. right in the wake of the December (1905) protest actions of workers in the major cities of tsarist Russia. According to neo-critics, the theme of this artistically mediocre work was chosen by the author as opportunistic - the joining of a simple working woman to the revolution after the arrest of her son, who participated in a labor strike.

Especially zealously and angrily creative modern "Lithuanians" condemn the article-pamphlet published by Gorky (March 1932) in the two central Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia under the title, which has become winged, "Who are you with, masters of culture?" They say : sustained in the style of Leninist-Stalinist propaganda, she called on writers, artists and artists to engage in creativity, guided by a Marxist worldview. Opponents maliciously believe that it was precisely because of the socialist orientation of Maxim Gorky's work that the Soviet leadership presented him as the greatest Russian writer of his time, a native of the people, a true friend of the Communist Party. After returning to the USSR in 1930, in the last years of his life, Maxim Gorky was surrounded by official recognition as a "petrel of the revolution", "a great proletarian writer", the father of "socialist realism". During festive demonstrations on Red Square in Moscow, Gorky went up to the podium of the mausoleum together with Stalin and other members of the Politburo of the Communist Party. Since 1929. A.M. Gorky was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. His sculptures and portraits were distributed throughout the country. One of the main Moscow streets, Tverskaya, was renamed in honor of the writer, just like his hometown, Nizhny Novgorod (1932). " Maksim Gorky ". The name of M. Gorky was given to many regional drama theaters, one of the central film studios in Moscow. Practically in every large settlement of the Union Republics of the USSR there was a Gorky street. In 1933 In connection with the 65th anniversary of his birth, Maxim Gorky was awarded the highest state award, the Order of Lenin.

Russian neo-liberals see Gorky's work as the epitome of slippery compromise. They constantly emphasize the vacillation of his views on the Soviet system, recall Gorky's repeated criticism of the Bolshevik regime. At the same time, critics insist that Gorky's work was built into the arsenal of Stalinist propaganda. So, June 20-23, 1929. Maxim Gorky made a trip to the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp, where he received detailed information from the campers about the terrible atrocities that were happening there. Nevertheless, following the results of his trip to Solovki, he wrote a laudatory article about the Soviet punitive system. In the West, this article about the Solovetsky camp aroused stormy criticism. Then Gorky began bashfully to explain that he was under pressure from the Soviet censors in Solovki. Later, in 1934. A.M. Gorky co-edited a literary collection that glorified the White Sea-Baltic Canal built by the slave labor of prisoners. The book convinced that in the Soviet "correctional" camps a successful "reforging" of the former "enemies of the proletariat" was being carried out.

Maxim Gorky argued that the center of his work is a deep belief in the value of the human person, the glorification of human dignity and inflexibility in the midst of life's hardships. In himself, the writer saw a "restless soul", which seeks to find a way out of the contradictions of hope and skepticism, love of life and disgust at the petty vulgarity of others. However, "literary cleaners" assure that these statements were mostly affected. They are allegedly convinced of this by the style of Gorky's books and the details of his public biography. The tragedy and confusion in the life and literary works of the writer reflected the extreme ambiguity of his rosy promises of a complete revolutionary transformation of the world, masking the selfish thirst for power and bestial cruelty of human strata opposite in their social aspirations.

Zoils from literary criticism write that when Maxim Gorky depicted the life of beggars from the very bottom of society (“tramps”), depicting their difficulties and humiliations with strong exaggerations, he seemed to be strenuously introducing into his stories the feigned pathos of “humanity”. And so, thanks to this reception, the writer gained a reputation as the only literary spokesman for the interests of the working class, a supporter of the idea of ​​​​a radical social and political reorganization of Russia. Meanwhile, the work of A.M. Gorky was praised by intellectuals and "conscious" workers. The antagonists, on the other hand, believe that those artistic merits of his works, which are usually spoken of, do not atone for the harmful meaning of the sermons contained in them and the idealization of "boaboyism". "Tramp" - this new, tavern Faust, who did not find anything in the world that satisfies him, this new crib Demon, who does not want to bless anything in all of nature - goes on a campaign against God, because He created the world in a wrong way, against people, because they are reptiles, crooks and hypocrites, against his wife, because she interferes with him, against cities and villages, because they are disgusting to him. "Literary cleaners" argue: had it not been for this tramp catechism preached by Gorky, his writings would never have had the success that they received in their time. Liberal aesthetes from literature believe that the "Tramp", who dreams of strangling everyone, is a creature that is not at all safe for public peace.

Attacking A.M. Gorky, "masters" of behind-the-scenes provocations do not shun dirty slander and speculation. So, according to some literary critics, Gorky's return to his homeland, to the Soviet country in 1930. It was by no means due to the writer’s political convictions, but to his long-standing sympathies for the Bolsheviks. Allegedly, the main circumstance here was Gorky’s sincere desire to get rid of large debts made during his life abroad (including cash advances from the publishers of his literary works.). that the importance of M. Gorky in organizing and holding the First Congress of Writers of the USSR was exaggerated. It is claimed that in fact his role was purely decorative. Allegedly, the main report on Soviet literature read by Gorky at that congress was compiled by the apparatus of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks with the participation of Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Mekhlis and edited by Stalin. In addition, the preparation of the congress was carried out by the Organizing Committee, whose activities were directed by the secretary of the Central Committee of the party A.A. Zhdanov and the deputy head of the organizational department of the Central Committee A.S. Shcherbakov. The latter at the congress of writers was elected secretary of the board of the USSR Writers' Union. Once again, the long-running tale is being circulated that Stalin harbored a grudge against Maxim Gorky for refusing to write his artistic biography, similar to the essay about V.I. Lenin created by the writer. Such a literary work was supposed to further glorify Stalin as the only legitimate heir to Lenin. When Gorky, under various pretexts, evaded fulfilling the "order" of the Secretary General of the CPSU (b), the world-famous writer, who was also considered the leader's ideological rival, was imprisoned on Stalin's orders. Then, he used the death of Burevestnik to organize a bloody purge of old party cadres in the country. Therefore, according to home-grown "political experts", although unwittingly, Gorky's "stubbornness" was the forerunner of the brutal political repressions of the late 1930s.

What contribution did Alexei Maksimovich Gorky make to world and Russian literature? After all, they could not have been mistaken all together: Korolenko, Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy, who took Gorky's talent very seriously. And it is unlikely that Fyodor Chaliapin was changed by his natural instinct, when before recent years long friendship, he believed that the main thing with the writer Gorky is sincerity. Finally, readers. After all, it was only later, starting in the 1930s, that Maxim Gorky was made an official classic in the Soviet Union, whom everyone must know. But, after all, thirty years before that, Russia knew and read Gorky without any order.