The mysterious life and death of Maxim Gorky. Unknown facts from the life of Gorky

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 myself, but I can’t,” he complained to Chekhov. “Gorky is an evil person. and reports everything to some kind of his god.
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 better than a man there is nothing on earth ... "And at the same time he wrote to his wife:" It would be better if I did not see all this bastard, all these pathetic, little people ..." (this is about those who in St. Petersburg raised their glasses in his honor (Yes, 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 explained, like Gorky's death, by poisoning.
The adopted son of Gorky, whose godfather he was - Zinovy ​​\u200b\u200bMikhailovich Peshkov - general of the French army, brother of Y. 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 stood on Gorky’s table until his last days” (Moscow. 1966. N 2). She was with him and in the last hours of his life. A photograph has been preserved where Budberg, next to Stalin, walks behind the coffin of Gorky. 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 wisest and greatest" (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. Resumed acting work in Ukraine. Participated together with M. Gorky and A. A. Blok in the creation of the Bolshoi drama theater(Petrograd, 1919), until 1926 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. The patterned fabric of artistic narration, colored with bright colors, in the first two works does not harmonize in any way 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 lot 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 heroic deeds for her sake. 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.
Most of the Russian writers of the 19th century were his personal enemies: he hated Dostoevsky, he despised Gogol as a sick man, 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 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, 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 on the fly the slightest desires of Gorky 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 "Stalin's 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 - Chekists 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 structure burned in the 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 that a large industrial center, Nizhny Novgorod, be named after Gorky. Accordingly, the entire Nizhny Novgorod region was renamed Gorky. Gorky's name was given to the Moscow Art Theatre, which, by the way, was founded and received worldwide fame thanks to Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and not to 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 recent 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 last years 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's been a day 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 last illness Gorky, 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 Lately behaved towards me surprisingly boorish, 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 civil wife the actress of the Bolshoi Drama Theater in Petrograd Maria Fedorovna Andreeva had the nickname "Phenomenon", the son of Maxim was called "The Singing Worm", the wife of Gorky's secretary Kryuchkov - "Tse-tse" ... The wife of 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.

Maxim Gorky is one of the most famous Soviet writers. His work is literally permeated with rebelliousness, unwillingness to put up with life's adversities and calls for struggle. His works were ambiguously received by the authorities, but they provided him with worldwide fame.

1. In fact, the writer's name was not Maxim or Gorky - at birth he received the name Alexei Peshkov.
2. Gorky five times could become Nobel Laureate but never received the prestigious award.
3. Although Gorky lived abroad for 18 years, including 15 years in Italy, he never mastered a single foreign language.
4. The writer ardently supported the Bolsheviks, but took the October Revolution with skepticism. He used all his influence to save the enemies of the new regime who were arrested and sentenced to death.
5. Gorky was the most published Soviet writer in his homeland - the total circulation of his books for almost 70 years exceeded 242.5 million copies. If we consider Russian writers as a whole, then in terms of the number of published publications, he is second only to Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Pushkin.
6. For more than half a century, Nizhny Novgorod, native to Gorky, bore his name - the old name was returned to the city only in 1990 after the collapse of the USSR.
7. At three years old future writer fell ill with cholera. His father, carpenter Maxim Peshkov, left his son, but became infected and soon died himself.
8. When Alyosha Peshkov was 11 years old, his mother died of consumption, and the boy's parents were replaced by his grandmother, whom he spoke warmly of until the end of his life.
9. Left an orphan, Peshkov-Gorky was forced to start working - he managed to be a baker, an errand boy in a store and on a steamboat, at one time he even stole firewood and collected rags on the streets.
10. At school, Peshkov was considered a difficult teenager, who, moreover, contacted a bad company. Due to complaints from classmates that he allegedly “smells like garbage”, the offended young man dropped out of school and never received a secondary education. Without a certificate, the path to universities was also closed to him.
11. Although Peshkov, who had already become Gorky by that time, was an extremely erudite, well-read and versatile person, even by the age of 30 he continued to write with many errors. Fortunately, his wife Ekaterina was a proofreader by profession, so she carefully corrected all the works of her husband.
12. The future writer adored fire since childhood and could look at the flame for an infinitely long time.
13. Gorky believed until his very old age that he was born in 1869, until documents were found in the archives dating his birth to 1868.
14. When Peshkov was 19 years old, he succumbed to depression and tried to commit suicide - being at that moment in Kazan, where he unsuccessfully tried to enter the university, the young man shot himself in the chest. The bullet lodged in the lung, and the doctors managed to save him. In the hospital, the young man made another suicide attempt by grabbing a bottle of poison and taking a few sips. They washed his stomach and saved him from death a second time.
15. Since Gorky refused to repent after two suicide attempts, he was excommunicated for 4 years. The luminaries of medicine, who later studied the life and work of the writer, discovered several mental disorders in him at once.
16. Young Peshkov, inspired by the ideas of Leo Tolstoy, intended to organize a Tolstoy-type peasant community and even went to Moscow to ask the writer for advice. He, however, did not accept him, and Peshkov returned to Novgorod in a cattle car.
17. Gorky's first wife was the daughter of a midwife who once helped the writer himself to be born.
18. In 1902, Gorky became an honorary academician, but the emperor was annoyed by this fact, and very soon his election was canceled by the authorities: it was indicated that the luminary of literature had problems with the law. In protest, along with Gorky, Chekhov and Korolenko left the academy.

Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) - Russian writer and prose writer. Was born in Nizhny Novgorod, and is one of the most famous writers and thinkers (Wikipedia). And today we cannot but tell interesting facts about such a wonderful writer.

1. Many people know that in fact Maxim Gorky's name is Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov. According to the most popular version, he took such a pseudonym for himself due to the fact that he could not sign Peshkov in literature, and Gorky was a clear allusion to the hard and bitter life of the author, who was orphaned early and his grandfather sent him “to the people”. Although there are many other versions. Which one is true is still unknown.

2. As a child, at the age of 11, his grandfather sent him “to people” and Maxim had to work as a boy at a store, as a cook on a ship, and as a baker. Then he even studied at the icon-painting workshop.

3. In December 1887, Gorky wanted to shoot himself with a revolver in the region of the heart, but the bullet missed the organ by just a couple of millimeters. In general, throughout his life, Maxim Gorky tried to commit suicide more than once. He had suicidal tendencies. But every time he managed to avoid death.

Though perhaps he didn't want to actually end his life. According to one of the stories of his wife, one day, while doing housework, she heard a roar. Running to the place, she saw a bloodied husband. Asking him what happened, the writer replied that he was deliberately hurting himself in order to feel the pain of the character he was writing about.

4. The writer was very resistant to all kinds of alcoholic beverages, and despite the amount of alcohol he drank, he practically did not get drunk.

5. During his life he was nominated 5 times for Nobel Prize on literature.

6. In 1902, he became the godfather and at the same time the adoptive father of Zinovy ​​​​Sverdlov, who later takes the surname Peshkov. Without this, he would not have been able to live in Moscow.

7. Gorky was a frequent visitor to the police, for his revolutionary spirit. He was even arrested for being friends with the founder of the revolutionary circle.

8. Maxim had tuberculosis since childhood, and despite all this, he smoked a lot.

9. Gorky was still a walker, despite the fact that he had several wives throughout his life, he also had enough mistresses. This cannot be taken away. He was successful with women.

10. Gorky's own granddaughters Daria and Martha are still alive. By the way, Marfa was in close contact with Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, and married the son of Lavrenty Beria. Daria is still playing at the Vakhtangov Theater, despite her advanced age.

11. It is said that Gorky was the favorite writer of the head of state. But nevertheless, according to one version, Stalin was involved in the death of Maxim Alekseevich.

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About Maxim Gorky's suicide addiction. XX The personality of Maxim Gorky in the light of his attempted suicide in December 1887*).

Dr. I.B. Galant.

The attraction to suicide or suicidomania (suicidomania) - a phenomenon that, like many other incomprehensible phenomena, has become a “question” in science, belongs to the so-called “damned questions” of science, because it seems at first glance unsolvable, or it really is unsolvable. Therefore, it seems to us necessary, before talking about Gorky's suicide mania, to understand properly the very question of suicide, because only in this way will we subsequently facilitate the task of analyzing the personality of Maxim Gorky (his actual mental life) in connection with his suicide mania.

The main axis around which the problem of suicide revolves is the question of whether, in suicide, we are dealing with a manifestation of mental illness, and suicide is a psychopathological phenomenon, indicating a severe neurodevelopmental disorder. mental disorder, or suicide is (or may be) a “normal” phenomenon, i.e., not arising from psychopathogenic motives. The resolution of this fundamental question, as the reader himself will feel, is very important and

XX - Clinical archive of genius and giftedness. L., 1925 issue. III, v.1 p.93-109

*) I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the specified year (1887), because Gorky himself in My Universities, talking about his attempted suicide (XVI vol. of Gorky’s complete works, p. 76. GIZ Leningrad 1924) is satisfied with only one indication of the month this event. Having calculated that Gorky, suffering from his febrile delirium in 1889-90, I, based on what Gorky says, did not commit suicide during this illness only because two years ago he was convinced "how humiliating the stupidity of suicide" found 1887 the real year of Gorky's first attempt to commit suicide.

without it, it is impossible to move forward the problem of suicide and turn it from a "scientific question" into a scientifically substantiated truth that explains, quite satisfactorily, the phenomenon of suicide.

Unfortunately, this issue has not yet been resolved, and opinions differ.

I say "unfortunately" because this question is one of the most ancient questions, and in psychiatry it originated simultaneously with the emergence and modern development of this science in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (the French school -

Esquirol (Esquirol), and even if you do not believe the old wisdom of Goethe (Goethe), that no one thinks absolutely new, previously unspoken thoughts (“Wer kann was Dummes, wer was Kluges denken. Das nicht die Vorwelt schon gedach”), As far as the question of suicide is concerned, such a mass of all kinds of opinions have been expressed here that it is really difficult to guarantee that in the near future a completely new, radical solution of the question is to be expected. Let's get acquainted, however, with old and new scientific views on suicide.

According to Weichbrodt, there was no suicide among the Jews of the biblical era, and there is no word in the Bible that corresponds to the word suicide, which is found in all languages ​​*). In the Talmudic era, suicide is evident due to closer acquaintance with other peoples.

*) (The case of Saul does not coincide with this opinion of Weichbrodt. In the 31st chapter of Liber I Samuelis, there is a story about Saul's unsuccessful war with the Philistines, Saul, being completely defeated and not wanting to be captured, asked his armor-bearer to he killed him, which the latter did not agree to. Then Saul himself threw himself on the edge of his sword and died, - the armor-bearer followed his example. In the first chapter of Liber II Samuelis it is told that a certain Amalekite appeared to David a few days after this, declaring that he finished Saul, whom he found dying on his sword at his own request, thinking, obviously, to receive a reward for this, since Saul was David's enemy.However, David ordered to kill this Amalekite because he raised his hand against the anointed God. Judging by these biblical stories, suicide, however, in very rare exceptional cases, also occurred among the most ancient Jews, and this is a mere accident if the word denoting suicide did not get into the Bible.

spread among the Jews, and the Talmud distinguishes between two kinds of suicide: deliberately deliberate, quite consciously committed suicide, and suicide in a state of insanity, the suicide of the mentally ill, drunk, minors, as well as the suicide of a warrior who is in battle with the enemy in the event of an unfavorable outcome of the battle for him . Suicide was especially widespread among the ancient Jews at the time of the second destruction of the Temple and in connection with the catastrophic situation of the country, so that scientists began to fight against this evil. Josephus, who, incidentally, committed suicide himself when he was threatened with death at the hands of the enemy, wrote: “Why are we hastening to shed our own blood? Why do we want to forcibly break that close connection that exists between the soul and the body?... After all, everywhere in nature, everything living on earth is alien to the desire for suicide, which is a crime against God, our creator. There is no animal that will deliberately kill itself.”

All ancient and even primitive peoples - the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Indians, etc. suicide was very common, sometimes as a folk custom, sometimes as a means of "die well." “It is good to die” meant, according to Seneca, to avoid the danger of living badly ... Among the Germans, old people, feeling the approach of senile weakness, killed themselves; among the Heruli, a married woman should not have outlived her husband, like the Indians, who the servant on the death of the master committed suicide.

How widespread suicide was in antiquity, in particular among the Romans, can be judged by the fact that Tacitus, speaking of the suicide of the prefect of Rome, Lucius Piso, says that he died of natural causes! ..

Thus, among the ancient peoples, suicide was equal to natural death and was considered quite normal. The new and latest psychiatry looks at suicide differently. The father of modern scientific psychiatry, Esquirol defended the view that suicide in all cases is a pathological phenomenon; and it originates in painful states of the soul. He points to the hereditary nature of suicidal tendencies and reports a case where a grandmother, mother, daughter and granddaughter committed suicide. A similar case is reported by Voltaire. “I saw almost with my own eyes a suicide that deserves the attention of doctors. A mature person who lived in good conditions, engaged in serious work, not subject to any passions, committed suicide on October 17, 1769 and left the magistrate of the city in which he lived, death note in which he apologized for his actions. They did not find it necessary to publish this document for fear of calling other people to this kind of act. Up to this point, we do not see anything extraordinary, such cases come across everywhere.

The only striking thing is that his brother and father also committed suicide at the same age. What a secret bookmark of the spirit, what sympathy, what assistance of mental laws leads the father and his two sons to the fact that they, at the same age, in the same way, die from their own hands.

All the eminent psychiatrists of recent times and of the present day stand, with regard to suicide, on the point of view of Esquirol. Wernicke speaks on this point as follows: “Who, after losing a huge fortune, after being sentenced to a punishment of deprivation of honor, after the death of a loved one, lays hands on himself, acts under the influence of an overestimated idea (ubervertige idee), and we are forced to recognize this act as abnormal , although it cannot be reduced to mental illness. In each individual case, therefore, it will be necessary to establish whether we have before us an idea that is painfully overvalued, or one that fits within the boundaries of a healthy one. We are inclined to make the solution of this question dependent on whether the motive that endowed the given memory with this dominant affect is sufficient or not.

Gaupp (Gaupp) speaks of many people whom we can call mentally ill, who, however, show some morbid traits - these are nervous, psychopathic, degenerative personalities.

They are often born to mentally ill, nervously ill, binge drinkers, weak parents. Degenerates (degenerates) discover the structure of the spirit, which gives fertile ground for thoughts of suicide:

a tolerable mind, great agitation of feelings that do not differ in duration, weak impulses of the will that are not crowned with success, strongly emphasized egoistic instincts, increased sensitivity to unpleasant impressions and experiences - such a mixture of mental abilities turns out to be little capable of fighting the storms of life. These individuals are easily disappointed in life, and with increased affective arousal of such psychopathic personalities, things easily come to rash acts (suicide).

The greatest psychiatrist of the Russian land, Sergei Sergeevich Korsakov, looks at suicide at best as an act resulting from mental imbalance. “Suicide is a phenomenon that often occurs in life and is ranked among acts that do not go beyond the circle of actions that a completely normal person can commit.

Indeed, when a person decides to commit suicide out of a sense of duty or on the basis of the requirements of reason, then this can also be with a healthy mind. But statistics undoubtedly show that the majority of suicides come from psychopathic families, and in themselves often represent sharp signs of mental imbalance.

Therefore, in the vast majority of cases, one has to look at suicide, even caused by economic and social conditions, the lack of moral foundations and higher ideals, as an act of mental (perhaps short-term) disorder. And, indeed, we often see the desire for suicide in persons who are formally mentally disturbed, especially in melancholics.

Nevertheless, in Korsakov one can deduct, if not a direct, then at least an indirect indication of the possibility of interpreting suicide as not arising from the psychotic nature of a person. And some modern psychiatrists directly assert that the riddle of suicide cannot be solved by pointing to its psychopathogenic origin. Gruhle writes in his Psychiatry for Physicians:

“It is a futile game of concepts and words if the question is discussed whether suicide is a pathological act or whether it belongs to the realm of normal phenomena. It is a well-established fact that it often stems from moods that have abnormal depth and power. Another fact is firmly established that the fate and circumstances of a person's life are so confused that, with calm reflection on the situation, suicide seems to be the only possible way out of the situation.

Birnbaum (Birnbaum) speaks about the problem of suicide as it should: “Numerous interwoven internal and external links, all the tangled fabric in which mental inclinations and development, internal, motives and external circumstances, the mental situation and position in life, acting together , lead to this final point (suicide) - they can never be unraveled and resolved by one-sided attraction to some one thread of the ball. But the riddle of suicide is just as difficult to solve if one does not single out and evaluate properly the essentially pathological bias of the phenomenon. Suicide in itself is not yet a pathological phenomenon, yet it often happens to be such, and often it is such in the first line. Following then, Birnbaum once again emphasizes: "The riddle of suicide cannot be solved by one indication of its psychopathological genesis."

From the above opinions of psychiatrists about the nature of suicide, it is clear that all of them, in contrast to the prevailing in ancient world view of suicide as a normal phenomenon, they see suicide mainly as a manifestation of a morbid state of mind, and psychiatrists differ in their opinions only insofar as they are inclined to see in exceptional cases something “reasonable” in suicide, an act arising, so to speak, necessarily from coincidences of circumstances and representing the only way out.

There can be no solution to the problem of suicide in an abstract sense, i.e., regardless of the specific case, since it would have to come down to the conclusion that suicide is a phenomenon, sometimes normal, sometimes abnormal, which actually does not say anything about the very essence phenomena, and leaves us in indecision and even serious embarrassment. Each individual case of suicide is a very complex task, where physiology and pathology are so intertwined with each other that it is difficult to say exactly which element should be preferred and whether one should speak of "physiological" or "pathological" suicide.

These are the results of the natural-scientific study of the problem of suicide, which boil down to solving the question of the naturalness (“normal” phenomenon) and unnaturalness (“not normal” phenomenon) of suicide, and which, unfortunately, cannot be called completely satisfactory. Let us now see how things stand on the philosophical side of the question. The "philosophy" of suicide revolves around the question of the morality and immorality of suicide, and the philosophical study of the question of suicide is much older than the natural scientific study of it. The need for this two-sided study of suicide is indicated in a very beautiful form in Goethe's Dichting ef Wahrheit, Book 13:

“Suicide is an event of human nature, which, although it has been discussed for a long time and very thoroughly, requires the participation of each person and in every era must be discussed anew. After all, it is unnatural that a person breaks away from himself and not only damages, but destroys himself; the aversion to life has physiological and moral causes, the first causes must be studied by the physician, the latter by the moralist.

Of the ancient philosophers, Aristotle looked at suicide as an immoral act, immoral not in relation to himself, but in relation to the state. Epicurus found a person who commits suicide because his life is tired of it, ridiculous, thus condemning a suicide as a person deprived of firm moral principles. In contrast to this view, the Stoics defended the opinion that everyone should be allowed to say goodbye to life, and suicide was considered in the philosophical school of the Stoics as a virtue. Zeno hanged himself at a ripe old age after he fell and broke his finger.

The people erected a monument to him with the inscription: "His life coincided with his teaching."

The Stoic doctrine of suicide found an adherent among the Roman philosophers in the person of Seneca, who defended the "freedom" to die as one likes. Pointing out that all people have only one entrance to life and many different exits from life, Seneca preached: “If misfortune persistently pursues misfortune, then he can leave life at any moment. The door is open. Those who do not want to stay longer can leave.

Do you see that steep slope? From there down the road to freedom! Do you see the sea, the river, the well? Freedom lives at their bottom! Do you see that little, withered, twisted tree? Freedom hangs on it! .. You ask what is the easiest way to freedom - every artery of your body is such a way to freedom!

Religious philosophy (monotheistic religions) condemns suicide as a crime, and only a few church fathers like Eusebius, Chrysostomas, Hieronymus excuse suicide in cases where innocence is endangered. Mohammed explicitly forbids suicide: “Don't be suicidal; whoever sins against this commandment, the fire of hell will devour him ”(Quran, Sura 4).

This religious agitation against suicide led to the fact that in the religious ages of the Middle Ages, with all the denial of life that characterized this historical era, suicide was a very rare occurrence and life was usually changed by arbitrary imprisonment in a monastery, and not by death.

Philosophy XVIII and 19th century in the face of some of its main representatives, she saw suicide as an immoral act. Kant (Kant) designated suicide as an immoral act, since the suicide humiliates our human dignity by this act in his face.

Schopenhauer says that suicide stands in the way of the fulfillment of higher moral goals, because instead of a real deliverance from the world of grief and torment, it gives only a fictitious salvation from the situation. However, he is far from declaring suicide a crime and says that suicide must be condemned in order not to be condemned to suicide.

We will not further express the opinions of various philosophers about the morality or immorality of suicide, since we will not extract anything new from these opinions. Views on suicide vary from philosopher to philosopher and, more interestingly, from the same philosopher, depending on what the motives for suicide are. So Hebbel (Hebbel) thinks that suicide is always a sin if it is caused by any one detail of life, and not by the totality of all the circumstances of life, not by "the whole of life." We see here how arbitrary the philosophical concepts of morality are and how difficult it is to build a morality of suicide or to declare suicide immoral once and for all, where people sometimes end up committing suicide because they cannot live otherwise than immorally, and suicide in this case, as an act pursuing a moral goal, Willy-nilly, one has to consider it a true moral act!

It was precisely with Gorky that one of the many motives for attempting suicide were crimes against morality, as he, Gorky, understood it. However, in order to properly evaluate Gorky's attempted suicide in a psychiatric sense and in all other respects, and in order to prove that Gorky's tentamen Suicidii is a manifestation of the suicidal mania from which he suffered for at least 1-2 months , we need to get acquainted with some of Gorky's literary works, which depict to us the life, character and emotional experiences of the author before and during the period of time immediately preceding the attempted suicide.

About the very fact of the attempt on his life, Gorky in My Universities reports the following:

“Having bought a drummer’s revolver at the market, loaded with four cartridges, I shot myself in the chest, hoping to hit my heart, but only pierced my lung, and a month later, very embarrassed, feeling incredibly stupid, I again worked in a bakery.”

As for the motives for his attempted suicide, Gorky writes about them:

“I tried to describe the motive for this decision (to kill myself) in the story “An Incident from the Life of Makar”. But I did not succeed - the story came out clumsy, unpleasant and devoid of inner truth. It seems to me that one of its merits should be attributed precisely to the fact that this truth is completely absent in it. The facts are true, and their illumination was made as if not by me, and the story goes not about me. If we don’t talk about the literary value of the story, there is something pleasant for me in it, as if I stepped over myself.

After reading the story "An Incident from the Life of Makar" *), I could easily be convinced that Gorky was in vain to slander this most precious document for the study of his youth, declaring it devoid of inner truth. In Makar, I knew for sure that same Maxim Gorky, with whose life

*) Last story III volume (pp. 320-351) of the complete works of Gorky, GIZ publishing house. Leningrad - Moscow 1924.

I got acquainted in “My Universities” that for me there could not be any shadow of a doubt that Makar was an exact copy of the young Maxim Gorky, then only Peshkov, that I did not doubt for a minute the admissibility of the scientific processing of the facts reported by Gorky in “The Case from the life of Makar”, as such of his personal life, which, by the way, Gorky himself does not deny. As for the dubious inner truth, I tried to supplement, correct and illuminate the facts of the "Accident from the Life of Makar" such as those from "My Universities", so that if there really were in Makar's life, as Gorky claims, some incorrectly illuminated points and not in that least truthful, as Gorky himself would like, then, I dare to hope, they received their real truthfulness under my pen, and we will read here the true scientifically based history of Gorky's suicide addiction.

What was the young man Peshkov (Maxim Gorky) like in his heyday, when his soul was not tormented by disastrous thoughts of suicide?

Shortly before this (the decision to shoot himself), he (Makar) felt life was interesting, promising to discover many interesting and important things, it seemed to him that all the phenomena of life were beckoning him to unravel their hidden meaning.

Every day, from morning to night, they stretched one after another like variously forged links of an endless chain; stupid was replaced by cruel, naive - cunning, there was a lot of bestial, not a little bestial, and suddenly something deeply human flashes touchingly with a sunny smile.
ours”, as Makar called these lights of goodness and beauty, which, caressing the heart with great hope, kindle in it a burning desire to bring the future closer, to look into its area of ​​​​unexplored joys.

Life was like a cold spring night, when wisps of black clouds, torn by the wind, quickly float in the sky, drawing strange figures to the eye, and suddenly clear stars flash between them in a soft deep blue, promising a bright sunny day tomorrow. Makar was healthy and, like any healthy young man, he loved to dream of good things - he had a strong sense of unity and kinship with people.

In every person he wanted to evoke a cheerful smile, a cheerful mood; this he often succeeded in, and in turn increasing his strength, deepened his sense of unity with those around him.

He worked hard and read quite a bit, exuding an ardent passion everywhere.

Well adapted by nature to physical labor, he loved it, and when the work went on amicably, successfully, Makar seemed to get drunk with joy,

Filled with a cheerful consciousness of their need and life, proudly admiring the results of labor.

He knew how to ignite others with the same attitude to work, and when tired people said to him:

Well, what are you worried about? After all, even if you break into two, you can’t do everything! He objected vehemently:

Let's do it, and then walk freely! And he believed that if people were persuaded to take up the work of self-liberation together, they could immediately destroy, cast aside everything cramped that oppresses, distorts them, build a new one, be reborn in it, fill their veins with new blood, and then a new, pure, friendly life.

The more he read books and looked attentively at everything that was slowly and dirty boiling around, the more tangible and hot this thirst for a pure life became, the more clearly he saw the need to serve the great cause of renewal!

That's what the young man Gorky was like!

He was an ideally tuned young man who, seeing all the dirt of life, knowing well all the shortcomings of people, knew how to love life and people such as they are. The great skill that was so easily given to the young man Gorky, because he possessed extraordinary physical strength and a lively mind, which gave him the feeling of being able to build "in the well" new life and instilled in him the hope of turning the dirty and vicious into the ideal of purity, beauty and virtue.

However, Gorky's idealism, as is often the case with the idealism of inexperienced young men, deceived by the illusion of their extraordinary physical and moral strength, became the cause of a mental disorder, the development of which Gorky depicts for us as follows:

“Each today was taken by him (Makar) as a step towards a high tomorrow, tomorrow, going higher and higher, became more and more tempting, and Makar did not feel how dreams about the future take him away from the real today, imperceptibly separate him from people *).

Books greatly helped this: the quiet rustle of their pages, the rustle of words, like the clatter of a forest enchanted at night or the spring rumble of fields, told intoxicating tales about the imminent possibility of the kingdom of freedom, painted marvelous pictures of a new being, the triumph of reason, great victories of the will.

Going deeper and deeper into the distance of his dreams, Makar for a long time did not feel how a cold emptiness was gradually forming around him. Book imperceptibly obscuring life, gradually became a measure of his relationship with people and, as it were, devoured in him a sense of unity with the environment in which he lived, and at the same time as this feeling melted, the endurance and vigor that sated Makar melted.

At first, he noticed that people seemed to get tired of listening to his speeches, did not want to understand him, and at the same time, an imperative attraction to loneliness appeared in him. Then, every time his opinions were challenged or someone ridiculed their naivety, he began to feel something close to resentment towards people. His thoughts cost him dearly, he collected and accumulated them in difficult conditions, sleepless nights due to rest from day labor. He was self-taught, and he had to expend more effort on reading books than is necessary for a person whose mind is adapted to school work from childhood.

*) All the italicized places in Gorky's text are underlined by me, not by Gorky.

Having lost a sense of equality with the people among whom he lived and worked, but too lively and sociable to endure loneliness for a long time, Makar went to people of a different circle, but in their environment even more and even organically, alien to him, he did not meet that what he was looking for, and he could not have clearly defined what he was looking for.

He simply felt that a dark cold gap had formed in his chest, from where, as from a deep hole, an unfamiliar, disturbing feeling of fatigue, boredom, acute dissatisfaction with himself and people spreads through the veins, thickening the blood.

Already in these descriptions of Gorky, it is clearly felt that serious changes began to occur with the healthy, cheerful, philanthropic youth Gorky, which lead to a complete metamorphosis of his character and his entire mental essence in the sense of the development of a pronounced psychopathic state. A very dangerous autism develops in Gorky, consisting in a complete loss of the meaning of the real and the replacement of the real world, “the real today”, as Gorky says with utopias read in books, “wonderful pictures of a new being”, which he cannot make clear either to himself or to other people . Gorky loses his natural sociability, feels an irresistible tendency to loneliness, which is all the more disastrous for him because it contributes to the development of his autism and misanthropy, which is expressed so far in acute dissatisfaction with people, in "resentment towards people." Gorky's stamina and vigor are melting away, mainly in the fruitless struggle for ideals, which, due to the intellectual weakness of the young man Gorky, are clear to him and around and inside him a "cold emptiness", a "dark cold gaping" is formed, which he is not able to do something. Being in such a miserable state of complete spiritual collapse, Gorky seeks salvation from people of the highest circle, but “the people of the new circle were even more bookish than he was, they stood further from life, they did not understand much about Makar, he also poorly understood them dry bookish language, ashamed of its lack of understanding, did not trust them and was afraid that they would notice this distrust.

These people had an unpleasant habit: introducing Makar to each other, they usually added in an undertone or whisper, and sometimes loudly:

Self-taught... From the people...

This weighed heavily on Makar, as if relegating him to some special place.

One day he asked a fellow student:

Why do you always say that I am self-taught, that I am from the people and the like? - Yes, it's "dad, a fact!".

Here is the place to elucidate in more detail the relationship of the young Gorky to the intelligentsia in general and to students in particular in order to get a clear idea of ​​the role played by these relationships in the development of Gorky's psychopathic state, which ended in suicide mania.

Reading "My Universities", we can easily make sure that students for Gorky were superior people and he them for a long time deified. He literally lived and worked for students, defending them in every possible way from the attacks of his comrades, who were often not just ideological, but physical, tangible fist strikes. For a long time, students were ideal people for Gorky, thoughts about which helped him fill that spiritual emptiness that terrified him so much. But no matter how hard Gorky tried to save this ideal of his from desecration, he did not succeed, and he even had to debunk his ideal himself, especially after the next incident.

The young man Peshkov visited from time to time with his comrades, bakers, brothels, where Peshkov, however, did not deprive himself, in his words, of innocence. Once the housekeeper of the brothel told the bakers the following: “The most incomprehensible people are, of course, the students of the academy, yes. They do this about girls: they tell them to anoint the floor with soap, they put naked girl on all fours, hands and feet on the plates and pushing her in the ass - how far will she go on the floor? So, one, and the other. Here.

Why is this?

After this story, the bakers vowed to beat the students, and for the first time Peshkov did not have the courage to defend the students, to whom, after that, little by little, he gradually lost interest. It was just at the time when Gorky's ideals were crumbling one after another, and he more and more felt only the emptiness of life and people. It is clear, therefore, that “be that as it may, in this environment Makar could not strengthen his sick soul. He tried to tell something about the eclipse of the soul, was not understood and walked away without offense - with a clear feeling of his uselessness to these people. For the first time in his conscious life, he felt this uselessness, it was new and painful.

Then overwork probably took its toll, sleepless nights, exciting books, heated conversations echoed - Makar began to feel physically lethargic, and something always fluttered in his chest, nerves, as if piercing the skin, stuck out over it, like needles, and every touch painfully irritated them.

Makar was 19 years old, he considered himself indefatigably strong, never fell ill, liked to show off a little about his endurance, and now he became disgusted with himself, ashamed of his indisposition, trying to hide it, caustically condemning himself, but all this did not help much, and anxiety , weakening the soul, became heavier ...

At the same time, he felt in love, but could not understand who exactly: Tanya or Nastya, he liked both. The full-breasted, tall and slender clerk Nastya had just finished studying at the gymnasium, rejoicing in her freedom, she cheerfully and clearly smiled at the whole world with large, dark eyes like cherries and showed white, dense teeth, as if declaring her readiness to eat a lot of all sorts of things. delicious things. Tanya was small, blue-eyed, as white as a daisy; she spoke affectionately to everyone, in a weak, monotonously ringing voice, words soft as cotton wool, and laughed with a quiet, melting laugh.

Makar did not hide his feelings in front of them, and this equally amused his girlfriends - they were cheerful. He approached them like a homeless, chilled man, winter night warming himself, near the fires burning at the crossroads of the streets, he thought that these clever girls could do one or the other, all the same - tell him some kind of their own, affectionate feminine word, and it would immediately dispel in his chest an overwhelming feeling of rejection, loneliness, longing.

But they joked about him, often reminding him of his 18 years and advising him to read serious books, and Makar's tired head no longer perceived bookish wisdom, being filled with ever darker thoughts.

We see in this way that the failures of the young man Gorky accumulated in a fatal way for him and inevitably had to lead to disaster.

Gorky seeks salvation from the worm of despair in love that is eating away at him and thinks that one kind word from his beloved woman will save him from the feeling of loneliness and abandonment that is disastrous for him at this time.

However, this word does not come, and Gorky plunges into dark thoughts.

“There were an infinite number of them, as if they had been hiding somewhere deep in him and everywhere around him for a long time; at night they rose from the bottom of the soul, crawled from all corners, like spiders, and more and more separating him from life, made him think only of himself. These were not even thoughts, but endless row memories of various grievances and scratches once inflicted by life and seemed so well forgotten, as they forget about the dead. Now they were resurrected, revived, their round dance continuously twisted - a quiet triumphant dance; they were all small, insignificant, but there were many of them, and they easily concealed the good that had been experienced among them and with them.

Makar looked at himself in the dark circle of these memories, succumbed to suggestions and thought:

I don't fit anywhere. Nobody needs".

These painful thoughts about their uselessness were perhaps the most terrible and most painful for the young man Gorky? How deeply they settled in Gorky's young, sick mind, and how they tormented his sick soul can be judged by his other story, which is very important for Gorky's biography and for the study of his personality: "Makar Chudra" (1892) *). Gypsy Makar Chudra is a variation of Makar from the story: "An incident from the life of Makar" and under the gypsy Makar one must understand the same young man Gorky, who attempted suicide in the nineteenth year of his life. The proof of this assumption of mine, which is for me personally an irrefutable truth, I see in the following points.

1). Makar Chudra, while in prison, also made an attempt on his life, though by hanging, and develops a philosophy of suicide, rooted in the same way in the belief that a person is useless. 2). Makar Chudra is a gypsy, while Gorky has a gypsy symbol of a baker. Telling in “A Case from the Life of Makar” about how he was visited in the hospital, where he lay wounded after an unsuccessful attempt on his life, by one of his fellow bakers, he compares him with a gypsy. Gorky, as you know, was a baker in his youth, and therefore it is not surprising that he portrays himself in the person of a gypsy. Finally, in 3). I cannot see it as a mere coincidence that Makar Chudra, who attempted suicide of a gypsy, who developed the philosophy of the uselessness of a person as the main justification for suicide, was called Makar, and not by any other name. Thus, there can be no doubt that Makar Chudra is ideologically the same Makar as in The Case from the Life of Makar, and Gorky, who obviously remained for the rest of his subsequent life very interested in the state of his soul that led him to commit suicide in his youth. , tried for the first time to give a description of this state of his in Makar Chudra and put forward only one moment of his uselessness, which responded especially painfully to his state of mind, and perhaps in the first place led Gorky to suicide. However, perhaps not, for Gorky writes in “A Case from the Life of Makar:

*) The first story of the first volume of the complete works of Gorky Guise. 1924.

“And, remembering the ardent speeches with which he had recently stunned people like himself, inspiring them with vigor and awakening hopes for better days remembering good attitude to him, which these speeches evoked, he felt like a deceiver and - then decided to shoot himself.

Here we have come to that fact in the history of the development of Gorky's suicide addiction, which served as the starting point for our study of this history:

a crime against morality, a point that, according to Gorky, was of decisive importance and finally determined his course of action. We see that this crime can hardly be qualified as such, and, legally speaking, no crimes were committed for Gorky by that time. However, Gorky was in such a morbid state that his overheated fantasy made, as they say, "out of molehills." We are therefore not surprised that "crime" was of decisive importance in Gorky's tentamen suicidii.

Fortunately, it can now be said for all of Russia, Gorky's suicide ended in failure, and Russia is destined to see another of its brilliant sons successfully fertilize the gloriously rich fields of Russian literature to this day.

If we now, having completed the analysis of all the circumstances that led young Gorky to attempt suicide, try to characterize the state of mind in which Gorky was lately before the attempt on his life, then we will be forced to say without any reservations that Gorky was At that time, a mentally ill person suffered from psychosis, which in German psychiatry is known under the name Erschopfungs - psychose - in Russian, a psychosis of exhaustion or exhaustion. There is evidence that Gorky's psychosis developed on the basis of overwork and exhaustion of forces in "The Case from the Life of Makar", where Gorky says that he worked day and night without rest, either physically or mentally straining too much during this latest work, and that, moreover, he experienced strong emotional upheavals, trying to instill his ideas in other people and often suffering complete failure. As a result of Gorky's superhuman efforts to work physically and mentally without rest, so that he caused general surprise, and his hard work was defined as "madness" (-Well, why are you mad? nervous system stretched to the maximum possible, the nerves, as Gorky figuratively puts it, from extreme straining, as if turned into sharp wires, which, having pierced the skin, stuck out over it, like needles, painfully irritated with each touch.

Such tension and constriction of the nerves could not end in anything else than their subsequent extreme weakening with complete deprivation of the ability to stretch again and come to a state of tension necessary for successful human activity. In the young baker Peshkov-Gorky, the intellectual side, as the weaker one, suffered the first, and Gorky's weak mind refused to obey him. His mind did not perceive anything anymore, Peshkov-Gorky was not able to think, could not continue that community service, which he led, and in connection with this he developed a very dangerous feeling its insufficiency, its unsuitability, worthlessness, its uselessness, finally. This very painful feeling received all the more nourishment because, in connection with the impossibility of continuing his former social activities, Gorky developed autism and an imperative attraction to loneliness, and the feeling of abandonment was bound to grow the bitterest fruits of despair in a person who saw the whole meaning of life in an incessant noisy work in a circle of people who are strong in mind and body for the benefit of the same - outstanding other people. Exhausted by work, the diseased mind of the young Peshkov-Gorky could not lead him back to the path of well-being, thoughts one another blackened the mind that had long lost its vital brilliance, and Peshkov-Gorky saw no other outcome in front of him, like final death hastened by suicide ...

We are now quite clear about the roots of Gorky's attempted suicide, which lurked in a severe psychosis of exhaustion. If I am in the title and many times in my discussions about Gorky's tentamen suicidii I am talking not just about an attempt to commit suicide, but about Gorky's suicidal mania, this is due to the fact that in Gorky we are not dealing with a fleeting, soon transient attraction to suicide, but with a deeply rooted desire that tormented Gorky for a long time after he was unlucky in suicide. This is evidenced by the following passages from Makar's Incident (after his suicide), which I cite one after the other in chronological order.

“I didn’t think about death - Makar was calmly sure that as soon as an opportunity presented itself, he would kill himself. Now it has become more inevitable and necessary than it was before: to live sick, mutilated, like these people (sick) - there is no point.

“It seemed to him that this was the decision of his heart, but at the same time he felt something else, silently, but more and more urgently arguing with this decision: he could not understand what it was? And he was worried, trying to discreetly peep the face of the brewing contradiction.

Why did he come, thought Makar, when the Tatar left.

For what? Looking for an answer to this question was a pleasure.

He felt more and more healthy every day, and in his soul it became darker and more confused and somehow imperceptibly for him, the thought of death moved from his heart to his head. There she lay down firmly, all other thoughts shattered against her black corner, her heavy shadow easily and simply covered all questions and all desires.

Why live? thought Makar, and she immediately prompted her simple answer:

No need.

What to do? - Nothing. You won't do anything.

At night, when everyone was sleeping, he, opening his eyes, thought about how insulting, disgusting, pitiful everything around him was, most importantly, insulting, humiliating. How good it would be if stubborn, resilient people would come into life and say to all this:

We don't want anything like that. We want everything to be different. He could not imagine how it could be otherwise, but he clearly saw: here, calm people are angry, agitated, swarming, having resolved all issues, obeying their habit of living according to the rule chosen by them; with these rules, as with axes, they cut off the living branches of the variously flowering tree of life, leaving a gnarled, mutilated, robbed trunk, and it was truly meaningless on earth!...

It was good to think about it, but when Makar recalled his loneliness, the pictures of the desired, stormy, fighting life became dull, thoughts about it languidly faded, the heart was again filled with a feeling of powerlessness, uselessness.

And in contempt for himself, the thought of death flared up again. But now it was no longer rising from within, but approaching from outside, as if from these people who triumphantly said to him with all their words:

You are a fictitious person, you are no good, you are not needed for anything, and you are stupid, but we are smart, we are real, there are many of us and this is what keeps our whole life.

They all breathed this thought, they smiled with it, condescendingly ridiculing Makar, it flowed from their eyes, was as rotten as their faces, threatened to poison.

Makar was gloomily silent...

So young Peshkov-Gorky struggled with death, with the thought of suicide, fought for a long time, fought hard, until he miraculously defeated his illness and returned to a new, later so glorious life!

Gorky subsequently condemned suicide as "humiliating stupidity", and thus went far from all those writers, philosophers and scientists who tried to find any justification for suicide. And the psychiatrist, having familiarized himself with the details of the history of Gorky's suicide addiction, should once again seriously think about the question: “Is it not rooted

an unnatural act of suicide in a severe mental disorder of a suicide, and is not every suicide, simply speaking, a mentally ill person?

Alexey Peshkov, more known to the world as Maxim Gorky, was born in 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod. So difficult trials fell on him in childhood and adolescence that he took on the pseudonym "Bitter". The writer Maxim Gorky vividly described interesting facts from his life in his own literary works. In his biography, the following facts can be called the most interesting.

Facts from the life of Gorky

• The writer's father, Maxim Peshkov, stole his wife Varvara Vasilievna Kashirina from her parents' house, and the young people secretly got married in the church. For this, Varvara's father threatened to deprive her of her dowry and did not communicate with her daughter for a long time.
• When Alexei Peshkov was 3 years old, he fell ill with cholera. His father, who dearly loved his son, took care of the baby and eventually left him, but paid for it with his own life: having contracted a dangerous disease, Maxim Savvateevich died. Alexei's mother, subconsciously blaming the boy for her husband's death, moved away from the child after these tragic events.
• Gorky was orphaned early, his grandmother Akulina was involved in his upbringing.
• The writer was so often beaten as a child that, as an adult, he experienced almost no physical pain. But heartache for people, for the injustice of life in Russia, tormented the writer until his very last breath.
• Gorky's contemporaries claim that the writer made attempts on his life more than once. For one of his suicide attempts, he was excommunicated from the Church for as much as 7 years.
• The writer did not have higher education, he studied only at home and at the Nizhny Novgorod Kunavinsky School. His attempts to enter Kazan University were unsuccessful.
• Gorky's first wife, Ekaterina Volzhina, was a noblewoman by birth. The writer married her in 1896.
• Literary fame came to Gorky after the release of his first two-volume Essays and Stories. None of the Russian writers had such success during their lifetime.
• The loud glory of Gorky is largely the result of right choice themes of the works. The reputation of a “tramp”, a native of the grassroots and a revolutionary made the writer interesting a wide range readers.
• In 1906, the writer, together with his common-law wife Andreeva, traveled around the United States. When it became known that the couple was not officially married, all the hotels in the country refused to accept this strange Russian family. Gorky had to settle with private individuals, in which Lenin himself helped him.
• It was thanks to the activities of Maxim Gorky that the United States refused to give Russia money to suppress the revolution.
• Briefly, the biography of the writer is described in many textbooks, but many interesting details about his life can be found in the stories "Childhood", "In People", "My Universities".
• In 1933, the Literary Institute was opened in the USSR, named after Alexei Maksimovich.
• The most interesting facts about Gorky include his mysterious death. Tuberculosis was officially declared the cause of the writer's death, a disease from which he suffered all his life. But then they began to say that he became a victim of the Trotskyists. A criminal case was initiated against the doctors who treated Gorky. There were rumors that he was ordered to be killed by G. G. Yagoda, the head of the GPU. The writer died at the age of 68.

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