A Bit More Gnarled

Maxim Gorky man, what a life.  Ouch.  I read a Russian History text that explained a bit about his remarkable role before and after the October Revolution and realized that I hadn’t ever read anything by Gorky.  I didn’t have any idea who Gorky was.  How could I have taken a 19^th century and then a 20^th century Russian literature course in undergrad and never encountered the man?  Is it because he was taken down a notch as a Stalin sympathizer that he was passed over, between the Bely and the Mayakovsky?  

As it was he had a very uncompromising view of the Russian poor among whom he grew up.  Everyone beats everyone.  Everyone is very cutting and then, as might be the case for Christians, very forgiving and ready to weep and drink and move on from the sin, move on from the guilt and any responsibility for whatever they have done that was “wrong.” Gorky's grandfather was a tyrant and just a bit more gnarled and bipolar than the sawtooth grandmother and the menagerie of other unfortunate characters in his story. 

What a rough, mean world he inhabited.  The five-year-old views the world and endures the world and starts to adopt the behaviors of the compromised world around him. Of course, he will throw stones at his neighbors and steal from his parents and eventually come at his step father with a knife.  Gorky the narrator as a child makes the tale eerily palpable.

Later he lived on Capri.  One would think that might be a better place to go about one's business than Nizhny Novgorod.  I can remember the sun set there, looking back at Mount Vesuvius and thinking it was rather lovely.  But if you’re a broke author, and no one is reading you and the revolution has moved on it would presumably be a sunny, azure compromise.  And if the head of the Party is suggesting he’d make you a state hero and rename Nizhny Novgorod into your name and solicit your help to orchestrate national literature initiatives, well, perhaps you’d leave Capri, as Gorky did and find a way to make a cooperative compromise with the 'big-moustache.'

I kept putting down the book, very glad to be with my family.  Very glad to be here, in an environment, where despite all its challenges, people did not regularly abuse one another.

Tuesday 7/17/18