![]() ![]() And when he returned ten years later at Stalin’s invitation, he was called a Stalinist hack. When he left Russia four years after the Revolution to live in semi-exile, Russia’s émigr é writers claimed him as one of theirs. The poet Demyan Bedny, defender of proletarian purity, who produced upbeat propaganda for the masses, called him a “weeper”, and Lenin accused him of allowing his politics to be ruled by his “moods and feelings”.įor the Bolsheviks’ enemies, who felt nothing but disgust and loathing for the workers occupying the Tsars’ palaces, Gorky was an ill-educated propagandist. “Gorky approaches the Revolution with the caution of a museum curator”, he wrote. Yet in the days before and after October, Trotsky was often exasperated by Gorky, and his “fastidious hand washing”. Disputes between the old and new cultures were not to be “won” by one side or another, Bukharin wrote, there must be room for argument and differences, and he called the clash between communist and non-communist values a “valuable molecular process”, which would produce the new proletarian culture of the future. Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin and Anatoly Lunacharsky also endorsed the principle of literary diversity. 1 He sharply denounced any attempts to use literature for propaganda purposes, insisting that the Revolution must keep alive the best traditions of the old culture, and that while Russia was still in the painful transition to the new classless society, the proletariat must be free to experiment and create the culture best suited to its needs. He called for strict discipline for Party members, but freedom outside it for the arts to flourish: “The domain of art is not one the Party is called upon to command”. ![]() In his 1924 pamphlet Literature and Revolution Trotsky argued that fiction and poetry were not suited to being didactic. Trotsky coined the term “fellow travellers”, to describe writers like Gorky who were close to the Party, but wanted to produce high quality work free from Party interference. He saw it as a writers’ job not to glorify the Bolsheviks’ achievements, but to report truthfully what they saw, and he was often fiercely critical of them. But his relationship with the new government was often a tense and difficult one, and he never joined the Party. Idolised as a writer, he became a figurehead for the Revolution. He gave his money and support to the Bolsheviks, but was often politically and philosophically at odds with them. Gorky’s works were read by millions-intellectuals and newly literate workers and peasants-and they made him a celebrity in Russia and abroad, a deeply romantic figure, much interviewed, photographed and painted, who gave most of his great wealth from his writing to revolutionary causes, was jailed four times for his political activities and spent several spells in exile. He wrote of drunken despotic fathers selling off their daughters to pay their gambling debts, of child abuse, prostitution and domestic abuse, and women’s struggle to be free, and they are some of his most powerful characters. As a self-educated intellectual, he understood his wealthy peasants and self-made millionaires, Russia’s new merchant capitalist class, “masters of our lives,” and he was particularly sensitive to the position of women in Tsarist Russia. He wrote of Russia’s poor and oppressed, its factory workers, peasants and social outcasts, the rejects of capitalism, “people who were once human”. Like Tolstoy, he wrote of the cruelty and insanity of Tsarism, and his struggle to survive his brutal childhood turned him into a revolutionary. M axim G orky rose from poverty to become one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century, the father of Soviet literature and the heir to Tolstoy.
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