The Symbolist Contamination of Gor'kij's “Realistic” Style

Abstract

I am concerned in this paper with investigating the complex relationship of Maksim Gor'kii with the literature of his day, including the so-called realists, but particularly with the decadents, the symbolists, and other writers generally thought of alien to Russian whether critical or socialist. The stereotype of Gor'kii still dominant in some quarters presents him walled off from decadent and bourgeois literary styles and from the carriers of such contamination. But Gor'kii was much more complex and more interesting than we have supposed, and he functioned during much of his career part of a literary world in which symbolism, rather loosely defined, was the dominant literary tendency. I would like to adduce evidence of the effect on his writing of symbolist and other modern influences and of his close relationship, at the same time, to the popular culture of the day. A striking illustration of such contamination, and one of Gor'kii's best stories by any criterion was the one entitled zhizn', first published in 1925 in Rome, in an Italian version translated from the author's manuscript and entitled La vita azzura, with an introduction by E. Lo Gatto. During the same year it was published in an English translation in New York and in the original Russian in Berlin. Until recently an English translation by George Reavey was available in a collection entitled The Sky Blue Life and Selected Stories, one that I eagerly ordered for my students to read, when it had become clear to me a number of years ago that Gor'kii's Mother, the perennial fare of long-suffering undergraduates, had been a thing of contempt for many knowledgeable critics, including some Marxists and even Gor'kii himself; that it was probably not at all the prototype of socialist realism, Soviet critics had designated it; and that Lenin's enthusiastic endorsement of the novel might in itself have given cause for misgivings. So we began reading and students, who, having been weaned on modern novels, had no difficulty with Andrei Belyi or James Joyce and who were free of any preconceptions about Gor'kii, found in that story a symbolic structure that seemed to place it in the company of modern western literature. The story shattered all the well-worn cliches about Gor'kii as man and writer and invited a new approach, unhampered by the old stereotypes that had obscured Gor'kii: the realist who is somehow a romantic, the naturalist, the barefoot Nietzschean, the healthy, robust proletarian. The central character in Golubaia zhizn' is Konstantin Mironov, a householder, whom we meet in the very first lines sitting at his window, looking out at the street, and trying not to think. The figure of Mironov, withdrawn from the real world, utterly holed up in himself so to speak-in fact a powerful image of the rejection of life-is the dominant symbol in the work. The narrative viewpoint of Mironov shapes and dominates the story. The usually very much present Gor'kii narrator, full of sententious asides and helpful comments, is absent until the very end, when he makes, we shall see, a rather surprising and cryptic comment. Mironov ie not quite sane, in fact is fi-