Twenty-six and One and Other Stories: Preface

Preface

MAXIME GORKY

Russian literature, which for half a century has abounded in happy
surprises, has again made manifest its wonderful power of innovation.
A tramp, Maxime Gorky, lacking in all systematic training, has suddenly
forced his way into its sacred domain, and brought thither the fresh
spontaneity of his thoughts and character. Nothing as individual or as
new has been produced since the first novels of Tolstoy. His work owes
nothing to its predecessors; it stands apart and alone. It, therefore,
obtains more than an artistic success, it causes a real revolution.

Gorky was born of humble people, at Nizhni-Novgorod, in 1868 or
1869,--he does not know which--and was early left an orphan. He was
apprenticed to a shoemaker, but ran away, a sedentary life not being to
his taste. He left an engraver's in the same manner, and then went to
work with a painter of ikoni, or holy pictures. He is next found to
be a cook's boy, then an assistant to a gardener. He tried life in
these diverse ways, and not one of them pleased him. Until his
fifteenth year, he had only had the time to learn to read a little; his
grandfather taught him to read a prayer-book in the old Slav dialect.
He retained from his first studies only a distaste for anything printed
until the time when, cook's boy on board a steam-boat, he was initiated
by the chief cook into more attractive reading matter. Gogol, Glebe
Ouspenski, Dumas pere were revelations to him. His imagination took
fire; he was seized with a "fierce desire" for instruction. He set out
for Kazan, "as though a poor child could receive instruction
gratuitously," but he soon perceived that "it was contrary to custom."
Discouraged, he became a baker's boy with the wages of three rubles
(about $1.50) a month. In the midst of worse fatigue and ruder
privations, he always recalls the bakery of Kazan with peculiar
bitterness; later, in his story, "Twenty-Six and One," he utilized this
painful remembrance: "There were twenty-six of us--twenty-six living
machines, locked up in a damp cellar, where we patted dough from
morning till night, making biscuits and cakes. The windows of our
cellar looked out into a ditch, which was covered with bricks grown
green from dampness, the window frames were obstructed from the outside
by a dense iron netting, and the light of the sun could not peep in
through the panes, which were covered with flour dust. . . ."

Gorky dreamed of the free air. He abandoned the bakery. Always
reading, studying feverishly, drinking with vagrants, expending his
strength in every possible manner, he is one day at work in a saw-mill,
another, 'longshoreman on the quays. . . . In 1888, seized with
despair, he attempted to kill himself. "I was," said he, "as ill as I
could be, and I continued to live to sell apples. . . ." He afterward
became a gate-keeper and later retailed kvass in the streets. A
happy chance brought him to the notice of a lawyer, who interested
himself in him, directed his reading and organized his instruction.
But his restless disposition drew him back to his wandering life; he
traveled over Russia in every direction and tried his hand at every
trade, including, henceforth, that of man of letters.

He began by writing a short story, "Makar Tchoudra," which was
published by a provincial newspaper. It is a rather interesting work,
but its interest lies more, frankly speaking, in what it promises than
in what it actually gives. The subject is rather too suggestive of
certain pieces of fiction dear to the romantic school.

Gorky's appearance in the world of literature dates from 1893. He had
at this time, the acquaintance of the writer Korolenko, and, thanks to
him, soon published "Tchelkache," which met with a resounding success.
Gorky henceforth rejects all traditional methods, and free and
untrammeled devotes himself to frankly and directly interpreting life
as he sees it. As he has, so far, lived only in the society of tramps,
himself a tramp, and one of the most refractory, it has been reserved
for him to write the poem of vagrancy.

His preference is for the short story. In seven years, he has written
thirty, contained in three volumes, which in their expressive brevity
sometimes recall Maupassant.

The plot is of the simplest. Sometimes, there are only two personages:
an old beggar and his grandson, two workmen, a tramp and a Jew, a
baker's boy and his assistant, two companions in misery.

The interest of these stories does not lie in the unraveling of an
intricate plot. They are rather fragments of life, bits of biography
covering some particular period, without reaching the limits of a real
drama. And these are no more artificially combined than are the events
of real life.

Everything that he relates, Gorky has seen. Every landscape that he
describes has been seen by him in the course of his adventurous
existence. Each detail of this scenery is fraught for him with some
remembrance of distress or suffering. This vagrant life has been his
own. These tramps have been his companions, he has loved or hated
them. Therefore his work is alive with what he has almost
unconsciously put in of himself. At the same time, he knows how to
separate himself from his work; the characters introduced live their
own lives, independent of his, having their own characters and their
own individual way of reacting against the common misery. No writer
has to a greater degree the gift of objectivity, while at the same time
freely introducing himself into his work.

Therefore, his tramps are strikingly truthful. He does not idealise
them; the sympathy that their strength, courage, and independence
inspire in him does not blind him. He conceals neither their faults,
vices, drunkenness nor boastfulness. He is without indulgence for
them, and judges them discriminatingly. He paints reality, but
without, for all that, exaggerating ugliness. He does not avoid
painful or coarse scenes; but in the most cynical passages he does not
revolt because it is felt that he only desires to be truthful, and not
to excite the emotions by cheap means. He simply points out that
things are as they are, that there is nothing to be done about it, that
they depend upon immutable laws. Accordingly all those sad, even
horrible spectacles are accepted as life itself. To Gorky, the
spectacle presented by these characters is only natural: he has seen
them shaken by passion as the waves by the wind, and a smile pass over
their souls like the sun piercing the clouds. He is, in the true
acceptation of the term, a realist.

The introduction of tramps in literature is the great innovation of
Gorky. The Russian writers first interested themselves in the
cultivated classes of society; then they went as far as the moujik.
The "literature of the moujik," assumed a social importance. It had a
political influence and was not foreign to the abolition of serfdom.

In the story "Malva," Gorky offers us two characteristic types of
peasants who become tramps by insensible degrees; almost without
suspecting it, through the force of circumstances. One of them is
Vassili. When he left the village, he fully intended to return. He
went away to earn a little money for his wife and children. He found
employment in a fishery. Life was easy and joyous. For a while he
sent small sums of money home, but gradually the village and the old
life faded away and became less and less real. He ceased to think of
them. His son Iakov came to seek him and to procure work for himself
for a season. He had the true soul of a peasant.

Later he falls, like the others, under the spell of this easy, free
life, and one feels that Iakov will never more return to the village.

In Gorky's eyes, his work is tainted by a capital vice. It is unsuited
to producing the joy that quickens. Humanity has forgotten joy; what
has he done beyond pitying or rallying suffering? . . . These
reflections haunt him, and this doubt of his beneficent efficacy
imparts extreme sadness to his genius.

IVAN STRANNIK.

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