The “Gorky” Hoax by Boris Sadovskoy

Abstract

The contextual analysis of Gorky’s letter to Sadovskoy (included in his memoir “Gorky in Nizhny”), which assessed the addressee’s poem “Ivan the Terrible”, made it possible to establish that this was a hoax. At the same time, additional arguments are proposed to prove the hypothesis put forward by I.N. Sukhikh that the letter by A.P. Chekhov to Sadovskoy published by the latter was also a hoax. It has been established that Chekhov’s letter and Sadovskoy’s article “L.A. May” from his collection of critical prose “Russian Kamena” served as sources for writing the “Gorky” letter. For his polemical purposes, Sadovskoy constructed the logic of Gorky’s letter in such a way that it produced a historical anachronism in Gorky’s assessments of the reign of the Tsar Ivan the Terrible: with his pre-revolutionary judgments, projected at the time of their publication, Gorky, as it seems, supported Stalin’s position on Ivan the Terrible and the oprichnina and, moreover, predicted it for decades. It is substantiated that the thesis about the ballads of Alexey Tolstoy, cited in Gorky’s letter, is associated primarily with Sadovskoy’s self-reflection, who always acknowledged his involvement with the artistic searches of this poet. In the aesthetic system of Gorky, the work of A.K. Tolstoy occupied an insignificant place, and the appeal to him in the literary disputes of the proletarian classic was not typical.