Pyeshkov's Part III

OTHER FIRES--Maxim Gorki--Appleton ($3).

Best-known Russians today are Dzhugashvili, Bronstein and Pyeshkov--but not by those names. Stalin, Trotsky and Maxim Gorki are the famed pseudonyms they have adopted. Least potent but most popular of the three is Gorki, Red Russia's Grand Old Man of Letters. Long before the Revolution, when it was still in the lower depths, he hitched his wagon to the Red star; as the star rose, so rose Gorki. His birthplace, Nizhni-Novgorod (chief navigation centre on the Volga River famed for its annual fair and now the site of a state automobile plant) has been renamed Gorki (TIME, Oct. 10).

Now he is writing a great historical novel of the Russia in which his life has been passed. Two volumes called Bystander and The Magnet (TIME, April 14, 1930 & April 27, 1931) have appeared; Other Fires is the third, next to last. Proletarian novels (say strict Communists) must have no hero to stand between the reader and the hymning of mass achievements. But Gorki's epic novel has a hero, one Clim Samghin, who is the central character in all three books. Even strict Communists should not find him uncanonical, however, for Hero Samghin is no real hero but merely a convenient eyewitness of Russia's revolutionary tides, a horrible example (if Soviet preachers want him for a text) of the treacherously ineffectual spectator.

First two volumes cover the period from the death of Alexander II to the year of the first revolution (1905). Other Fires ends just before the World War. Clim Samghin, lawyer and intellectual, has married his old flame. Varvara, but has discovered she is much too stupid for him. Interested, but never actively, in the social upheaval that is going on about him, Clim manages to keep his head above the emotional flood, picks a careful way between whirlpools. But revolutionary Moscow is no place for a spectator: he dodges bullets, gets beaten up on the street, finally leaves Moscow and his whimpering wife for the country. In a provincial town he has an affair with the singer Duniasha, then becomes legal agent for the beauteous Marina, high priestess of a mystic sect. Physically as well as emotionally stingy, he is afraid for a while that Marina may take him as her lover; finally he is afraid that he wants her to. But Marina has more sense. She tells him: "You are too clever, incorrigibly so, my friend. It is from such as you that the world is ill." Clim, tacitly admitting she is right, leaves her and Russia.

The Author. Alexey Maximovich Pyeshkov (Gorki) is 65. If he had had his own way he would have been dead at 19, when he tried to round off a rag-picking childhood and 15 years of poverty-pinched wandering, by a bullet through his lung. An operation saved him. He began to write for provincial newspapers, under the name Maxim Gorki (from gor'kii, "the bitter one"), then sociological novels and plays. He joined the Social Democrats, later the Bolshevist wing, was arrested on Bloody Sunday (January 22, 1905) in St. Petersburg. Exiled till 1913, he lived in Capri, corresponding with Lenin and working for the labor movement. After the Revolution he dedicated himself to cultural work among the Russian masses, but the Russian climate was too much for his bad lung; he went back to Capri and still lives there. But when he visits Russia (as in 1928 for the opening of the Gorki Museum) crowds cheer him. Tall, gaunt, droopy-mustached, with wrinkled brow and a spreading peasant's nose, Gorki's bass voice rumbles kindly tolerance. He has put all his bitterness in his name.

Other books : The Outcasts, Comrades, Foma Gordyeeff, Mother, Decadence, The Lower Depths (play).

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