Maxim Gorky's "Pogrom": Jewish Victimhood and Russian Revolutionary Thought

Abstract

Maxim Gorky included his short story, "Pogrom," in the 1901 anthology, Aid to the Jews Suffering from Famine [Pomoshch-evreiam postradavshim ot neurozhaia]. The short piece is a first-person account of a pogrom that Gorky claims to have witnessed in the Volga region during the 1880s. Gorky, in the naturalistic tone of most of his short stories of that period, manages to describe vividly a pogrom from the perspective of one in the crowd of perpetrators. This new English translation of Gorky's 1901 story includes an introduction, which proposes that Gorky, with this story and his vocal concern for Russia's Jews, helped to usher in a modern Jewish literature in Russia, one that had a significant influence in Russia and beyond. It is impossible to fully appreciate the pogrom narratives of writers like Isaac Babel and Sholem Aleichem without a sense of the public debate that Gorky initiated with the publication of his story.