Gorky: In Search for the Honest Man

Abstract

One of the main themes that Maxim Gorky developed throughout his life was that of the honest (good) Russian man and the Russian intelligentsia’s endless role of enlightening him and protecting him from the authorities. This theme runs through all the writer’s major works, from the early Chelkash and the autobiographical trilogy to the final unfinished novel The Life of Klim Samgin. In continuing the theme of “the people” as it appeared in the nineteenth-century Russian literature, in works of such authors as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and especially his contemporaries - Nikolai Leskov and Anton Chekhov - who were close to him in spirit, Gorky not only testifies to the “bestial nature” of the Russian people, but, finding no intelligible explanation for that wildness, never hides his contempt for it. Gorky himself offers no opinions as to whether this wildness was the result of life in an extremely harsh natural environment or of centuries of foreign and later domestic slavery. This, however, should not be viewed as a reproach to Gorky, because in the more than eighty years since his death, we, his descendants, have found no such answers, either.