A M E R I C A N C O N S E R V AT O R Y T H E AT E R
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director
Heather Kitchen, Managing Director
PRESENTS
A Mother
by constance congdon
adapted from maxim gorky’s
VASSA ZHELEZNOVA
translated by tanya chebotarev
directed by carey perloff
geary theater
may 13–june 13, 2004
WORDS ON PLAYS
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
jessica werner
associate publications editor
paul walsh
resident dramaturg
carolyn joy lenske
literary and publications intern
This production is supported in part by
an award by from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a
great nation deserves great art.
© 2004 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
table of contents
1.
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of A Mother
5.
The Ultimate Black Comedy: a.c.t. Artistic Director Carey Perloff on A Mother
by Jessica Werner
10. A Kind of Folk Hero: Maxim Gorky (1868–1936)
14. Family at All Costs
by Paul Walsh
18. Observations by and about Maxim Gorky
23. The Disintegration of Personality: Thoughts on the Collective, the Individual, and
the Petty Bourgeoisie
by Maxim Gorky
26. Life in Gorky’s Russia
Compiled by Paul Walsh
37. A Timeline of Russian History, 1855–1939
Compiled by Paul Walsh
43. On Motherhood
Compiled by Carolyn Joy Lenske
45. Questions to Consider
47. For Further Information . . .
characters, cast, and synopsis of A MOTHER
The world premiere production of A Mother opened at American Conservatory Theater
in San Francisco on May 18, 2004. Maxim Gorky’s original Vassa Zheleznova received
one performance at Nezlobin’s Theatre in Moscow on February 21, 1911.
characters and a.c.t. cast
Vassa Petrovna Zheleznova
Anna, Vassa’s daughter
Pavel, Vassa’s elder son
Semyon, Vassa’s younger son
Natalya, Semyon’s wife
Liudmila, Pavel’s wife and Mikhail’s daughter
Prokhor Zheleznov, Zakhar’s brother
and Vassa’s brother-in-law
Mikhail Vassilyev, the business manager
Lipa, a maid
Olympia Dukakis
Marcia Pizzo
John Keating
Reg Rogers
Margaret Schenck
René Augesen
Tom Mardirosian
Louis Zorich
Jeri Lynn Cohen
place and time
A Mother takes place in 1909 in the Zheleznov family home in a small provincial town on
the Volga river.
synopsis
ct i. In the early hours of the morning, Vassa Zheleznova’s household is in turmoil.
Vassa’s husband, Zakhar, lies in an upstairs room dying of syphilis. Concerned that
her incompetent sons will inherit the family’s struggling peat and ceramic tile business and
withdraw their shares, causing the business to collapse and leaving the family impoverished, Vassa plots with her business manager, Mikhail, to forge a will that gives her sole
and unrestricted ownership of the business.
Meanwhile Lipa, the family’s maid, reveals that Pavel’s wife, Liudmila, did not come
home the night before, but spent it with Prokhor, Zakhar’s brother. The distressed Pavel is
comforted by his brother Semyon’s devoutly religious—and profoundly fat—wife, Natalya.
Annoyed, Vassa leaves to freshen up. Prokhor enters enraged because Pavel, seeking
revenge, has set a cat loose in Prokhor’s pigeon coop, killing three of his prized birds.
Semyon and Liudmila join the group and general bickering ensues.
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Anna, Vassa’s daughter, arrives home for the first time in years, having heard about her
father’s illness. She left the family to marry, against her father’s wishes, an alcoholic army officer. Her father paid her a settlement and cut her out of his estate; now Anna’s husband is ill
and she faces life alone with only his tiny pension to support her two children. She admits
that she now hopes to reinstate herself in the family inheritance. Greeted with affection by
Semyon and Liudmila, Anna hears about Liudmila’s own unhappy marriage to the pathetically doting and crippled Pavel: Liudmila married Pavel, who disgusts her, only because she
was pregnant by a young man who left her before the baby was born. Prokhor helped her get
an abortion to avoid the embarrassment of having an unbelievably premature child; she and
Pavel have never consummated their marriage, despite Pavel’s insistent pleading.
Pavel enters and, delighted to see Anna, begs her to save him from his matrimonial misery. Natalya brags that when Zakhar dies, she and Semyon plan to take their inheritance
and move to town. Prokhor announces that Pavel has tried to hurt him, this time by
removing the ladder to Prokhor’s elevated pigeon coop while Prokhor was inside without
any other means of descent. Vassa finally reappears; she immediately sends Semyon off to
the office and lambastes Prokhor for his dalliance with Liudmila. He reminds her that he
has invested thousands in the business and could ruin it in an instant by calling in his
share. He exits, leaving Vassa and Anna alone.
Anna, clearly afraid of her mother, offers to make a deal with Vassa: she will give her
mother her complete loyalty in the family fight for the business, in exchange for financial
support for herself and her children. Vassa drives a hard bargain, willing only to consider
Anna’s request after she hears what Anna can bring to the table. Anna tells her what she
has learned about Semyon and Natalya’s plans to leave, which upsets Vassa.
The village priest arrives to bless Zakhar on his deathbed. Lipa tells Vassa that Prokhor
had a visit from a lawyer the night before, but she couldn’t hear their conversation. Vassa
is angry that her spy is neglecting her duties, and reminds Lipa that she continues to protect her from prosecution for a crime Lipa committed long ago (on Vassa’s orders, she murdered an infant she had borne out of wedlock with Semyon, before he married Natalya).
Mikhail returns from sitting with Zakhar, and Vassa tells him that Lipa is getting cocky.
She tells him to make sure that Lipa never speaks a word about the baby’s death; a scandal
would ruin the business. They then speculate about Prokhor’s reason for meeting with a
lawyer; they think he’s planning to withdraw his capital, which would bring down the business, because there is no more capital to withdraw. Mikhail reminds Vassa that Prokhor has
a bad heart and that Lipa administers his medication when he has an attack. Mikhail knows
that Prokhor also takes pills to enhance his virility, and that the two medications would
fatally conflict if taken together. He suggests that Lipa might be persuaded to “forget” to
administer the correct dosage, thereby eliminating their problem with Prokhor.
Vassa leaves, the rest of the family enters the room, and Anna is officially welcomed
home. As the bickering begins anew, Vassa returns and orders everyone but Mikhail from
her sight: She wants to talk to her manager about Prokhor. They are interrupted by Pavel
and Prokhor, who have started fighting again. Pavel appeals to Liudmila for support, and
the argument quickly turns to the subject of their failing marriage. Liudmila blames
Prokhor for enraging Pavel and making him impossible to live with. Vassa and Mikhail
decide that Prokhor is at the center of the family’s problems and needs to be disposed of.
Pavel and Prokhor have a violent fight offstage. Amid the chaos that ensues, Lipa enters
and announces that Zakhar is dead. Semyon and Pavel are delighted to finally be free.
ct ii. Scene 1. The next day. Prokhor flirts with Anna; they talk about how Semyon
and Natalya met. Natalya was an “Old Believer” from across the Volga river and
Semyon was buying icons from her people to sell on the antiques market. Prokhor explains
that he lives in Vassa’s miserable home because all of his money is tied up in the family
business. He confesses that, now that Zakhar is dead, he plans to take his money and leave
for Moscow, where he has an illegitimate son whom he wants to legally recognize.
Prokhor leaves in search of Liudmila, and Anna and Semyon talk about Pavel’s continued fighting with Prokhor over Liudmila. Semyon tells his sister that he and Natalya want
to open a jewelry store in town.
Prokhor and Pavel begin fighting offstage again. Semyon leaves to break up the fight,
and Vassa sends Liudmila off to help him. Anna reports to Vassa about her sons’ plans to
take their shares and leave. Vassa is worried that without the business the family will be
reduced to poverty. Prokhor, Semyon, Natalya, and Liudmila return, bickering. Unaware
that everyone already knows about it, Natalya feels compelled to reveal Liudmila’s affair
with Prokhor to the family, but Vassa and Semyon send her away. Pavel enters with a bandage on his head, and Anna tries to convince Vassa to let him leave the family. She is afraid
he and Prokhor might do real damage to each other.
Lipa enters to announce that Prokhor is feeling ill and calling for Anna. Mikhail enters,
and Vassa leaves him to persuade Lipa to carry out her part in their plot to murder
Prokhor. Mikhail bullies Lipa into agreeing to their scheme, and she leaves to give Prokhor
his lethally mixed medications. Anna enters and says that after Lipa gave him his medication her uncle’s attack grew worse. Vassa loudly chastises Lipa for administering the
medications incorrectly, and the unstable servant is distraught, not understanding that
Vassa is staging the accusation to divert suspicion away from Mikhail and herself. Natalya
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runs in to announce that Prokhor has recovered from his attack, and Vassa and Mikhail
send Lipa away. Lipa hangs herself.
Scene 2. The next day, the day of the funerals of Zakhar and Lipa. Vassa tells Semyon
that she encouraged his own affair with Lipa to protect him from the syphilis that killed
Zakhar. Semyon reveals that he has known for some time that Lipa had strangled her baby,
and Anna is shocked by their callous indifference. Semyon did contract a venereal disease
in the village, despite Vassa’s efforts, and has probably passed it on to Natalya. Vassa insists
to Anna that all of her manipulations have been driven by a maternal determination to
ensure her family’s survival. Morality is a luxury she can’t afford. Anna admits that she
would do “what’s necessary” to provide for her own children.
Anna reveals that she has intercepted two letters from Prokhor to his illegitimate son,
inviting the young man to come to the house and sign some papers. In exchange for giving Vassa the letters, Anna makes her mother swear to provide for Anna and her children.
They set up a plan to intercept Prokhor’s future letters, with the promise that Anna and
her children will inherit Prokhor’s money.
Anna goes in search of Pavel as Natalya enters and warns Vassa that things will be different now that Zakhar is dead, implying that she and Semyon are now in control. Pavel
enters, and he’s been drinking. Natalya, thinking she has big news, tells Pavel that his wife
slept with Prokhor. He heard that information long ago. Pavel tells her that he plans to
leave, but his love for Liudmila is holding him back.
Anna brings the weakened Prokhor down to tea, and another family argument commences.
Prokhor feels another attack coming on, but Anna takes her time getting his medicine. The
arguing continues and Pavel strikes Prokhor, who collapses. He is carried to his room, and
Natalya declares that she and Semyon are now masters of the estate. Anna announces
Prokhor’s death, and Vassa strategically blames Pavel for causing his uncle’s fatal heart attack.
She tells her son that he must go to a monastery to atone for his sin and escape police inquiry.
Vassa produces the forged will, dashing her sons’ hopes of inheritance and escape from
the family. Pavel, now penniless and rejected by the family, agrees to go to a monastery, and
Liudmila rejoices in her freedom. Vassa then banishes Semyon and Natalya to live with
Natalya’s relatives on the other side of the Volga.
Left alone, Vassa asks Anna what happened upstairs with Prokhor. Anna replies:
“Survival, Mother.” Liudmila returns, and the three women discuss their future together.
They will take care of each other and the next generation. Yet, in this moment of apparent resolution, Vassa believes she hears someone screaming in the garden. Anna and
Liudmila hear nothing. In response to their concern, Vassa declares: “I am fine. But I will
never have a moment’s peace—never!”
the ultimate black comedy
a.c.t. Artistic Director Carey Perloff on A Mother
by jessica werner
W
hen American theater audiences think of Russian drama, they are most likely to conjure
Anton Chekhov’s spare poeticism, or perhaps Ivan Turgenev’s delicate elegies. By contrast, the frank and radically assertive, thoroughly unsentimental characters of Maxim Gorky’s
1910 play Vassa Zheleznova—the darkly comic family drama upon which Constance Congdon
has based her new comedy, A Mother, which has its world premiere at A.C.T. May 13–June 13—
are cut from an entirely different cloth. One of Russia’s most controversial writers, Gorky
(1869–1936) evoked in a prodigious barrage of stories, novels, and plays the turbulence of provincial Russian life during the painful transition from a medieval serf-based economy to the preRevolutionary commercial capitalism of the early years of the 20th century. In doing so, he created
a funhouse mirror of characters who reflect back to us our own faults and failings. We laugh, with
Gorky, at the crassness and bawdy humor of his outrageously rapacious characters—none more
venal and entertaining than Vassa Zheleznova herself, the matriarchal title character of A
Mother, played at A.C.T. by Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis—eking out lives on the
turbulent, unforgiving fringes of Russian society.
“This is Gorky’s Russia, a place of sudden and unexpected reversals, where each action and
emotion breeds its opposite,” says A.C.T. Resident Dramaturg Paul Walsh. Director Carey Perloff
elaborates: “The world in which A Mother takes place is far from Chekhov’s genteel nobility, far
from Tolstoy’s searching intellectuals. Of the great Russian playwrights, only Chekhov has found
an enduring place in the American repertoire, yet Gorky is a radical and risk-taking writer who
deserves a place at the table.”
Gorky’s unsentimental and vividly realized plays focus on individuals caught in a struggle
with society. In A Mother, this theme is played out hilariously and trenchantly by a recently
prosperous family, just a few steps above the desperate poverty of serfdom, about to face the
difficult process of inheritance. The patriarch is dying upstairs, while the children gather greedily
downstairs to claim their pieces of the family “fortune.” At the center is one of the great female
characters of Russian theater: Vassa Zheleznova, a steely, complicated, comically ambitious mother
who is devoted equally to her children and her fortune. As the family cracks apart, she tries every
ruse to sustain the business while safeguarding her bonds with her children. While Congdon—in
her own right an acclaimed playwright (No Mercy, Tales of the Lost Formicans), who translated Molière’s The Misanthrope to hilarious effect for A.C.T. in 2000—has worked her own
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comedic magic in creating A Mother. “The tone of the play is uniquely Gorky,” says Perloff, “biting, bitterly funny, and heartbreakingly true.”
In early April, on the first day of rehearsal of A Mother at A.C.T., Perloff shared her views
about Congdon’s outrageously inventive new play with the cast, the designers, and A.C.T. staff
and faculty, as well as her vision for the world-premiere production, which represents the culmination of more than three years of creative development.
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carey perloff: I have been thinking about what a long and amazing journey this has
been. This project started about four years ago with a phone call from Olympia in London,
at some odd hour, very excited: “Carey, I found a play!” Gorky was being done quite a bit
at that time in London. The National Theatre was doing Summer Folk, and Olympia had
found a published English-language radio drama version of Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova,
which none of us had ever heard of, and she brought it back and said, “This is an incredible piece, we should look at it.” Thinking now of the many readings we have done of this
play, I remember that at first we just looked at each other and thought, It is indeed a
remarkable play—and it needs Connie Congdon [laugh]. It became clearer as we worked
on the text how much it needed another writer. The odd thing is that this play has no real
production history. Gorky wrote the original version in exile in 1909. He had already
endured one of the most hair-raising childhoods of any writer I’ve encountered—which he
wrote about beautifully and chillingly in his autobiography (My Childhood, In the World,
and My Universities).
When I was reading My Childhood, I thought, How do you describe Gorky? And I realized you need to say, This is not Chekhov. It is not Turgenev. It is not Tolstoy. This is not
about nice people with samovars. It is not what comes to mind when we think about what
we’ve inherited as Russian drama. [Gorky] was a man who grew up in Nizhny Novgorod,
on the Volga, under unspeakably horrible physical conditions. He was terribly abused,
beaten, manipulated, and torn away from everything he loved. The opening of My
Childhood describes the young Gorky looking at his dead father spread on the ground, with
his mother weeping, and then they go to live with his grandmother. Gorky as a writer was
fascinated with powerful women, because the biggest influence on his life was his grandmother. She was the only person who was ever really kind to him; she told him incredible
folk stories and imparted to him her beliefs in the strange, magical aspects of Russian folklore. So this child with this very fertile imagination lived a horrifically damaging childhood. His uncles had a dye factory, an incredibly brutal enterprise, like the peat farm in A
Mother. Throughout his writing, there is this profound humanity and irony and wit, but
with very brutal and very real details.
Years later, when Gorky went back to Moscow in the 1930s, this 1910 play entered the
repertoire of the Moscow Art Theater. While it was in production, however, Gorky halted
everything, saying, “Please stop all the rehearsals. I have a new draft of the play.” And he
proceeded to rewrite the entire play to fit the circumstances of post-Bolshevik Russia. That
[revised] play, which is also called Vassa Zheleznova, is a rather humorless socialist piece,
and the original play disappeared. Many years later, in 1979 during the Gorbachev era, a
director in Russia revived the original version of this play, and that’s when the text came
back into circulation. The reason this is important is that the Russians have a deeply
ambivalent attitude toward Gorky. To many Russians, Gorky is a betrayer and a collaborator; he made a pact with Stalin. Yet he was much more complicated than that. Much more.
Gorky is such a great writer that it’s a shame that it’s probably going to be another generation before the Russians go back and embrace his work again. But the thing that is so
wonderful about A Mother is that it is a family comedy. It isn’t a propaganda play, not in
the sense of his later work, although it is in many ways quite political, but the characters
are extraordinary—deeply venal and hilarious. The text never really got shaken out in production, though, because although Gorky sent several plays back from Italy, he never saw
them produced. We realized when we read [the 1910 text] that we had a lot of questions.
So at first Connie worked with a Russian scholar on a literal translation, and about two
years ago we had a draft we actually thought we would produce, and then (this was to
[Managing Director] Heather [Kitchen]’s great credit), we all looked at each other and
agreed that the play needed time for Connie to really make it her own. So we pulled it from
the season. It was a tough decision, but the fascinating thing about doing a new play is that
you just don’t know exactly when it’s going to be finished. So Connie went back to the
drawing board and continued to work on it. Then we did this insane workshop during a
blizzard in Baltimore, as part of a Russian festival. Reg [Rogers, who plays Vassa’s son
Semyon in the a.c.t. production] was part of that workshop, as was Olympia. As we sat
there and worked on the play, the tone emerged as we realized that this is really the
ultimate black comedy.
The Zheleznov family is absolutely relentless. Vassa actually loves her children very
much, but they haven’t come through for her as she’d hoped. She was hoping her boys
would inherit the business and prosper, but instead what everyone in the family wants is
to take their little piece of the business and flee—and she knows that if that happens,
everything will collapse. So this is very much a play about survival. Vassa has these wonderful lines in the first act of the play: “What do you think life is? About tea and morality? Morality is for the rich, Anna. I’ll tell you what life is—food, shelter, heat, and enough
money to pay for them, again and again.” Life and love are not sentimental concepts in
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Vassa’s world. This is not a middle-class family; the business is in terrible trouble, and they
live on a very thin margin, with no safety net, in constant fear that they’ll end up out on
the streets. And it is very important for us to remember that they are only one generation
away from the emancipation of the serfs. This is not a distant memory. They remember
serfdom very vividly, and now that they have finally scrabbled together a business Vassa
will go to unimaginable lengths to sustain it and keep her children from wandering off
with the money.
This family certainly has issues [laugh]. Like [Eugene] O’Neill’s work, this is a play
about the corruption of human feelings by materialism, about what happens to people
when they are so bent on material survival that basic things like human affection get
derailed. The Zheleznovs are a surreal family of grown-up children all living in the same
house—and they are all out for the cash. This household is a bit like the Balkans: one of
them is Montenegro, one of them is Bosnia, and one of them is Serbia, and they all inhabit
the same territory, fighting over the few available resources, damaging and invading each
other, yet having to somehow hold it all together.
We knew even when we read Connie’s first draft in Baltimore that we need audiences
to realize that these characters are so venal that they’re hilarious, or else the audience will
loathe them all. And we thought, We’ll know on the first page. Then we read the opening
lines:
vassa: How is he?
mikhail: Bad.
vassa: How bad?
mikhail: I’m not a doctor.
vassa: How could Zakhar leave me like this?
mikhail: He’s had a stroke.
vassa: That’s no excuse!
And the audience screamed with laughter. I remember that Baltimore audience of
Russian expatriates just howling, and we thought, OK, this is going to work. They will get
it. They will get that they can laugh at this.
One reason I love this play so much is that I think we are very dishonest about family
in this country. We sentimentalize family enormously, promoting the idea that families are
always loving and supportive, while the real truth is that most families are not so well
behaved, particularly when money and wills and inheritances are involved. It is amazing
how people’s true colors come out when they have to deal with questions like, Who’s going
to get the family portraits?
Gorky is very honest. I don’t think he in any way judges these people. He just presents
what happens in a circumstance like this, and that’s why it’s so funny. It’s like a French
farce gone horribly wrong, filled with fat grown-up children who refuse to leave the family nest and oversexed relatives looking for romance in all the wrong places. In the midst
of the chaos are three remarkable women who figure out how to hold on to what is theirs.
on the scenic design
carey perloff: It is very kinetic. I first told [scenic designer] Ralph Funicello that there
are a couple of things that are important to me in the design. The first is to say, This is not
Chekhov. So I didn’t want beautiful gardens and white furniture. I thought that people
needed to know that this is a different world. I also thought it was interesting that this
house is like a pawn shop, an explosion of things that represent everything that has ever
happened to this family, which they’ve never disposed of, because none of them has ever
left this house, except Anna. So there is this weird accretion of an unbelievable amount of
junk. And, because Connie’s play is a farce, I wanted many entrances so people could come
and go in different ways and collide with each other. This set should really be like another
character in the play. The house literally houses all the memories, everything they’ve ever
had in their marriages, all the lies, all the experiences.
on the text
constance congdon: First of all, Maxim Gorky wasn’t the name he was born with.
“Gorky” in Russian means “bitter,” and Maxim means “the most.” That is the name he
chose for himself. And for those of you who know The Seagull well, you will notice some
Seagull-like moments here. Gorky absolutely loved Chekhov’s plays. Chekhov was dead by
the time he wrote this play, so they might in fact be quotes that the audience would have
enjoyed, and Gorky may have just stolen them, as any good writer does.
perloff: One of the things we’ve worked on, since the workshop in Baltimore, is tightening and sharpening the text, so the pace is driven like a farce. There is a kind of kinetic
rhythm to this play that is really important and which we all have to think about. These
are not reflective people. That is the big difference from Chekhov. In Chekhov people stop
and think. They think a lot about their lives, they look at the snow, they wonder about their
destinies, and it’s all very beautiful in that sense. I think that’s something Gorky really
loved about Chekhov. In [Gorky’s] world, nobody has time to look out the window at the
snow. It’s like they’re holding the very structure up with their hands, and as cracks develop
they keep having to dam up the cracks. So it’s quite a different rhythm, in terms of how
the shape of the whole thing works. We’ll see!
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a kind of folk hero
Maxim Gorky (1868–1936)
leksei Peshkov (who would later take the name Maxim Gorky) was born in the city
of Nizhny Novgorod on the banks of the Volga on March 16, 1868. Gorky’s father, a
journeyman upholsterer, died of cholera when Gorky was five, and the boy went with his
mother to live with her parents. When his mother died a few years later of tuberculosis,
Gorky was forced by his grandfather to quit school and go to work. He passed in and out
of various apprenticeships, including positions with a shoemaker and an icon painter, while
bringing in extra money by working as a ragpicker and petty thief.
From his grandparents, Gorky learned firsthand about the brutality, poverty, and
simplicity of rural Russian life. His grandfather beat him (sometimes to the point of
unconsciousness), while his grandmother taught him to forgive and be patient. She also
passed on to him her almost religious fondness for literature and her deep compassion for
those less fortunate.
By the age of 12, Gorky had had enough and left home for good to make his way in the
world. While working as a dishwasher on a Volga steamer, the young man was taught to
read by a friendly cook, and literature soon became his passion. At 15, after a series of failed
apprenticeships and other employment—including work in a biscuit factory and as a
porter, a fruit seller, a railway employee, a bird catcher, and a clerk in a lawyer’s office—
Gorky moved to Kazan, hoping to enter the university. He failed his entrance exams the
following year, however, and turned to other employment to occupy himself. Oppressed by
the misery of his surroundings, and torn between two worlds—that of “workers and carefree students”—he bought a gun with the intention of killing himself. Aiming for his
heart, however, he missed, managing merely to puncture a lung. He had set forth his final
wishes in a fanciful suicide note:
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Please hold the German poet Heine responsible for my death: he invented
toothache of the heart. Herewith you will find my identity papers, which I have
had drawn up specially for this occasion. I ask that my body be dissected and
examined, to find out what kind of devil has been living in me lately. The passport included herewith will show that I am Alexei Peshkov, and I hope that this
note will show nothing at all.
The discovery of the note led to a meeting with an ecclesiastical tribunal, which excommunicated Gorky for seven years. The sentence left him unmoved.
When he had recovered from his bout of suicidal romanticism, Gorky left Kazan to
tramp around the country, intent on learning something of Russia and of himself. During
the course of this two-year journey of self-discovery, he traveled from Nizhny Novgorod
to the southern Caucasus and back, acquainting himself with the lowest segments of
Russian society—the derelicts, prostitutes, thieves, and wanderers who would later people
his stories and plays.
While living in the Crimea, Gorky published his first literary work, the short story
“Makar Chudra” (1892), adopting the pen name Maxim Gorky (“the bitter one”). He was
24. The success of this story encouraged him to begin to write regularly for newspapers. By
1898 these writings were collected in the three-volume Sketches and Stories (1898–99), which
established his reputation as a writer of directness and passion. Among his best are
“Chelkash” (1895), the story of a colorful harbor thief, and “Twenty-Six Men and a Girl”
(1899), which describes sweatshop conditions in a bakery. Although Gorky was periodically
jailed by the czarist authorities for his revolutionary leanings, his stories gained in popularity, touching the imagination of the Russian readership. He became a kind of folk hero
as the first Russian author to write sympathetically and realistically about the downtrodden underclass of late 19th-century Russian society.
In 1899, Gorky became literary editor of Zhizn and the following year became editor of
the Znanie publishing house in St. Petersburg, where he became a Marxist, supporting the
Social Democratic Party. In Foma Gordeyev (1899), his first novel, Gorky applied his preRevolutionary zeal to depicting the selfishness and greed of the capitalist merchants and
industrialists in Nizhny Novgorod.
As his writing career got going, Gorky was befriended by Chekhov and Tolstoy, whom
he visited in the Crimea in 1901. The previous year, rumors had started to reach the
Moscow Art Theater of “a tramp from the Volga with an enormous talent for writing.”
Chekhov, whose The Seagull had opened the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, introduced
Gorky to the company and encouraged him to write for them. In 1902 they presented his
first play, The Petty Bourgeois, in which workers were portrayed as superior to smug bourgeois intellectuals. By this point Gorky was under constant police surveillance for his
revolutionary leanings. The play was first denied a performance license, then heavily
censored, and finally licensed only for four performances to a carefully selected audience of
theater subscribers. The Moscow Art Theater decided to premiere the play on March 19,
1902, while on tour to St. Petersburg. Nemirovich-Danchenko writes: “Fashionable society
was informed with incredible rapidity and we were overwhelmed with requests for seats
and boxes for the families of high government officials and the diplomatic corps. The play
attracted a distinguished, elegant, politically influential audience that would not have been
11
out of place at a European congress.” As a cautionary measure, the theater was surrounded
by armed Cossacks on horseback, and police were placed inside the theater itself as
ushers. The controversy surrounding the play ensured it a measure of success with the
Russian public, though not the success that both the theater and the police had expected.
Gorky’s second play, The Lower Depths, did much better when it was produced later that
year. Drawing heavily on his experiences in the flophouses and itinerant camps of his
youthful travels, this protest against inhumanity was such an enormous success when it
premiered at the Moscow Art Theater under Stanislavsky’s direction that it soon was being
produced across western Europe and the United States, and in published form it had sold
35,000 copies by the end of the year. Ironically, the authorities had granted the play a
license because, after the mediocre showing of The Petty Bourgeois, they were convinced it
would fail. Terrified by the success of the play, a local critic wrote:
We must pity a society that, foolishly losing its self-awareness, forgetting its
principles and traditions, and giving in to moral corruption, rushes to the spectacle of novelty like the mob in the time of the Caesars and wildly applauds the
stench, filth, and vice of revolutionary propaganda . . . while the leader of the
derelicts, Maxim Gorky, using his pen as a lever, shakes the ground on which
that society was built. What a dangerous writer! How wretched and blind are
his admirers, readers, and spectators!
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In an effort to limit the success of The Lower Depths, the government demanded that
each performance receive special authorization and that the text be submitted to the
censors. They also banned all performances of the play in working-class theaters and in
languages of the empire other than Russian. Gorky followed the success of The Lower
Depths with a new play, Summer Folk, which the actress and producer Vera
Komissarzhevskaya produced in November 1904.
Gorky not only wrote about social injustice, he also acted against it. After the split in
the Social Democratic Party in 1903, he went with its Bolshevik wing, although he was
often at odds with the Bolshevik leader v. i. Lenin. Nor did he ever formally become a
member of Lenin’s party, though Gorky’s substantial earnings, most of which he donated
to the party, were one of the organization’s primary sources of income.
His participation in the events that came to be called the 1905 Revolution led to Gorky’s
arrest and imprisonment. He used the opportunity to write the play The Children of the Sun
(1905), set in a prison cell of the Peter and Paul Fortress—and penned with the prison
governor’s blessing during Gorky’s incarceration. When the czar finally agreed to political
concessions that led to the convening of the Duma, a strictly consultative legislative assem-
bly, Gorky participated in the founding of the first legal daily Bolshevik newspaper, New
Life, where he published his famous “Notes on the Petty Bourgeois Mentality.”
Following the violent defeat by government forces of the Moscow insurrection in
December 1905, Gorky was convinced by his comrades that, given the current reactionary
political climate, he best consider going into exile. He traveled through Finland to
Germany, France, and the United States, where he hoped to use his literary fame to raise
money for the Russian democratic movement. Fits of righteous indignation, however, gave
rise to spats of political outspokenness that mitigated Gorky’s success as a political
fundraiser. When, for example, he indignantly attacked a group of French financiers for
lending money to the czarist government, bankrupted by its war with Japan, he was pilloried in the press and ostracized from polite society for insulting France. He was similarly
ostracized in New York when it was learned that the woman with whom he was traveling
was not his wife. In all cases, Gorky was forthright in his indignation and outspoken in his
defense of the revolution. While in the United States, Gorky wrote the plays Barbarians
(1906) and Enemies (1906) and the greater part of his revolutionary novel of agitation,
Mother, today considered one of his most vivid and memorable contributions to world
literature. He eventually moved to Italy, settling on the island of Capri in the fall of 1907.
Gorky would spend most of his later life in and out of exile, caught in a kind of schizophrenic limbo between an idealistic love and agonized longing for his homeland and
growing disillusionment with and fear of the repressive tactics of the Soviet regime—an
opinion he expressed in his private journals while publicly glorifying some of the most
brutal aspects of Stalinism. He remained active as a writer, although much of his later
fiction explores the period before the 1917 Revolution. In The Artamonov Business (1925),
considered one of Gorky’s best novels, he expressed his continued interest in the rise and
fall of pre-Revolutionary Russian capitalism. There were more plays—notably Yegor
Bulychov and Others (1932) and Dostigayev and Others (1933)—but his most generally
admired work is a set of reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and other writers.
Gorky died suddenly of pneumonia in his country home near Moscow on June 18, 1936,
and was buried with full Soviet honors in Red Square. Rumors started soon after his death
that Gorky had been assassinated by his doctors, acting on Joseph Stalin’s behalf; in fact
Stalin’s chief of secret police, Genrikh Yagoda, confessed at his own trial in 1938 that he
had ordered Gorky’s death. When the kgb literary archives were opened in the 1990s,
however, nothing was found to support these rumors.
13
family at all costs
by paul walsh
“Only mothers can think of the future—
because they give birth to it in their children.”
Mastakov, in Queer People, by Maxim Gorky
“We do things for our children, hard things sometimes.
How far would a mother go? How far would you go? . . .
All mothers are remarkable—great sinners and great martyrs, at the same time.”
Vassa Zheleznova, in A Mother, by Constance Congdon
axim Gorky was living on the island of Capri in 1910 when he wrote Vassa
Zheleznova, the sardonic family drama upon which Constance Congdon has based
her hilarious black comedy, A Mother. In self-imposed exile following his participation in
the failed 1905 Revolution, Gorky ironically subtitled his tale of family greed and rapacious
savagery “a play about motherhood.” These larger-than-life characters with larger-thanlife appetites, living in a tiny Russian village on the Volga at the end of the first decade of
the 20th century, do their best to keep the chaos of the world at bay and stem the tide of
apocalyptic change threatening to remake Russia. What they don’t realize is that they are
themselves both harbinger and mainspring of that change.
Rapid industrialization transformed every aspect of Russian life following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, leaving many worse off than they had been under the old
system. Those who were able to enter the new commercial economy survived. Some even
prospered. But many found themselves tramping the countryside as dispossessed
vagabonds and homeless itinerants, in a world that was increasingly unrecognizable. This
is Gorky’s Russia, a place of sudden and unexpected reversals where each action and emotion breeds its opposite, as the author wrote in the second volume (In the World) of his
famous autobiography: “Too often, Russian gaiety unexpectedly turns to cruelty and
tragedy. A man dances as though breaking his chains, then suddenly he frees a ferocious
beast inside himself and, seized with frenzied anguish, hurls himself at everyone he sees,
tearing, biting, destroying.”
When Gorky came to literary prominence in the final years of the 19th century, it was
as a writer who gave voice to the disenfranchised vagabonds, thieves, and wanderers on the
outskirts of Russian society. Not only did he give voice to the lower classes, he was him-
M
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self from the lower classes. He dressed like a worker, and it was said, cursed like one, too.
His writing was as ripe with outbursts of bawdy peasant humor, political agitation,
incredulous dismay, and utopian vision as it was with vivid descriptions of the cunning, the
violence, the anger, and the raillery of the common people among whom he had spent his
childhood and youth.
Eschewing the refinement of humanitarian sentiments espoused in the writings of
Turgenev and Chekhov, and the mystical worship of simplicity and spiritual penance
preached by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Gorky wrote with the eyes of a revolutionary and the
heart of a romantic, recording with surprising candor the brutality, the eccentricity, and the
gregariousness he witnessed in the world around him. His world overflows with memorable aberrations and cockeyed oddities desperate to make sense of a world spinning out
of control. In a prodigious barrage of stories, novels, and plays, Gorky evoked, with clarity,
humor, directness, and compassion, the absurdity and injustice, the turbulence and poverty,
the hyperbole and rarity of provincial Russian life during the painful transition from a
medieval serf-based economy to the commercial capitalism of the new Russia. And in
doing so, he created a funhouse mirror of characters who reflect back to us our own faults
and failings. Even as we laugh with Gorky at the stupidity of what he called the pygmy
personality of the petty bourgeoisie, scorning their avaricious rapacity, their cupidity and
concupiscence, their obsessive acquisitiveness and self-centered individualism, we are
encouraged to renew our faith in essential human goodness.
possible futures
During his sojourn in the United States immediately following the 1905 Revolution, Gorky
wrote what today is considered one of his most vivid and memorable contributions to
world literature, the agitational novel Mother. How different from the theatrical portrayal
of mother and children in the Vassa Zheleznova of five years later is this touching exploration of a mother’s growing political consciousness as she joins her son in embracing the
revolutionary cause of the workers.
Mother tells the story of the politicization of Pelageya Nilovna, the widowed mother of
a leader of a Social Democratic circle of factory workers. When her son is arrested for leading a May Day demonstration, she dedicates herself to his cause, finding a true family
without violence or bitterness among her son’s comrades. In the end, when her son is exiled
to Siberia, Nilovna is arrested and beaten to death by the police for attempting to distribute copies of his incendiary defense speech. By engaging fully in the workers’ struggle
against economic and social oppression, Nilovna achieves a sense of personal freedom and
heroic individualism of which Vassa Zheleznova can only dream. In later years Lenin
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16
praised Gorky’s Mother as “a very timely book” that would help improve the social consciousness of workers by providing them with a positive model of possible futures.
The same cannot be said of Gorky’s devilishly ironic play about what happens when
motherhood is superseded by business. Vassa Zheleznova focuses on what the great
Hungarian literary scholar Georg Lukács indentified as Gorky’s “accusatory contention
that . . . Russian capitalism is a mass grave of murdered humanity.”
Vassa is bound by the avarice of the petty merchant, but deep down she cannot escape
a motherly concern for her sons or the desire to have them love her. Her desperate efforts
to hold the family together at all costs—and keep their amassed capital invested in the
family business—are mitigated by her conviction that she is doing it all for the benefit of
her children. Ultimately, however, it is business that pollutes the family with the same
“endemic plague of hostility” that had polluted the childhood home of Gorky’s maternal
grandfather, in which he grew up and which he describes in such graphic detail in the first
part his autobiography, My Childhood.
Throughout the troubled years that followed the 1905 Revolution, Gorky tended his
garden on Capri, enjoying what he would later describe as “the cheerful scenery of the
island, the caressing beauty of the sea, and the genial attitude of the Caprians to the
Russians.” His garden was a gathering place for expatriates, wandering vagabonds, literary
hangers-on, and exiled Russian revolutionaries who came to visit the famous author and
man of the people. Lenin came twice to Capri to fish and play chess with Gorky. During
these years of peaceful exile, Gorky continued his prodigious productivity. He wrote My
Childhood (1913–14), the plays The Last Ones (1908), Queer People (1910), and the first
version of Vassa Zheleznova (1910), as well as the novels The Life of a Useless Man (1907),
The Confession (1908), Summer (1909), The Meetings (1910), and The Life of Matvei
Kozhemyakin (1910–11). He also organized a clandestine school to teach techniques of revolutionary communication and propaganda to a group of workers brought from Russia.
For Gorky, work was both preparation and achievement. Even as he contemplated his
return to the country and the people he loved, he wrote to explain those people to themselves and to the world.
Gorky feared that the passionate acquisitiveness and violent outbursts among the merchants and industrialists so prominent in the Nizhny Novgorod of his youth, their brash
disregard of those in need, their derision of human virtues and compassion, would come
to define Russia in the new century. The thought alarmed him, and from his retreat on the
island of Capri he did his best to warn his beloved country of what it was on the verge of
losing. As the revolutionary zeal of 1905 retreated in the wake of renewed tsarist repression
at home, the idealistic resolve of Mother gave way to the caustic laughter and chilling mystery of Vassa Zheleznova.
In 1913, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, the tsar
granted amnesty to exiled Russian writers previously convicted in absentia of sedition.
Gorky took this opportunity to return to Russia, where he aligned himself with the
Bolsheviks. Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, as the violence of the new order
began to resemble that of the old, Gorky came to regret his decision, and in 1922 he went
again into exile.
In 1930, Gorky was persuaded to return to his beloved Russia by Joseph Stalin who promoted him as the voice of the Soviet people. Just months before his death in 1936, Gorky
returned to his play Vassa Zheleznova, rewriting it to better accord with the ideals of the
new Soviet Russia. That later version interests us less today than the version of 1910. There
is something unconvincing about the need to rescue the failed mother from her own misdeeds in the revised version of the play, something tame and doctrinaire that blunts the
directness and hyperbole of Gorky’s original. That is why Constance Congdon has gone
back to the 1910 version of Vassa Zheleznova as the starting point for her farcical comedy,
A Mother. The specter of greed and lust that Gorky feared was murdering the humanity of
the Russian people has not yet been exorcised from the world. It haunts us still. And so we
laugh at ourselves as we laugh at these characters, at the passions and excesses that consume them, and the meager excuses they hide behind. And deep down we hear the cautionary reminder of a forgotten humanity and the possibility of change.
17
observations by and about maxim gorky
observations on the theater
18
In a play all the characters must act independently of the will of the author, according to
their natural and social inclinations; they must follow the inspirations of their “fate,” and
not of the author. They must of themselves create the different comical and tragical events,
by submitting to the power of their contradictory natures, interests, and passions. The
author, on his part, is supposed to act like the host at a party to which he has invited these
imaginary guests; and, without preventing them from tormenting or mutilating one
another in every manner, morally as well as otherwise, he describes with perfect composure the manner in which they do it.
If an author takes such an attitude, he becomes capable of writing a play that is a pure
work of art—a totally impartial play which merely pictures the struggle of differently
directed wills, but is devoid of any moral tendencies imposed by the author. Incidentally,
in all European literature I know of no drama that is compassed according to this principle. Personally, I should not be able to write on such a principle.
But I think I know of people who could create plays penetrated with an inner harmony.
The artificiality in such plays is not discernible—it is replaced by art. I consider the comedy of j. m. Synge, the Irishman, entitled The Playboy of the Western World, to be such a play.
In it the comical side passes quite naturally into the terrible, while the terrible becomes
comical just as easily. Synge, like a truly wise artist, does not inject his own point of view;
he just exhibits the people: they are half gods and half beasts, and are possessed of the
childish desire to find a “hero” among themselves. (This is, to my mind, an absurd desire,
for every one of us is a hero, if he happens to remember all the victories and defeats he has
met with in the struggle for life.)
The characters of Synge act in exactly the same way as people actually act and as we
shall probably all act for a long time to come; they create heroes in order to ridicule them
afterwards. In Synge’s play I feel a subtle irony on the cult of the hero. That irony is not
very remote from sadness over the stupidity of mankind, but there is in it, I repeat, nothing artificial; it is merely a pure and lawful irony of facts. . . .
It may be that British and American theater managers will not be sufficiently interested
in this play for them to undertake its production. It seems to me that among Anglo-Saxons
the theory of purifying the soul through suffering is not so popular as it used to be in
Russia. I say “used to be,” in the hope that Russia may have gone through enough torture
to have acquired an organic revulsion against suffering. However, I have no definite idea
concerning the tastes and tendencies of the contemporary theater. But rarely do I go to see
a play, and when I do it is only after I have made sure that the theatrical performance will
permit me to rest from the tragedy of reality which is so abundant in our day.
I should like to see the theater of today as the Pool of Siloam, from which a man may
emerge softened and restored physically. I think that the most wholesome theater is that
in which one can gaily and harmlessly laugh over the stupidity of mankind. It is exactly
this stupidity that men consider to be their “fate.” It is extremely healthful, for an hour or
two, to forget this reality which we ourselves create so heedlessly and inconsiderately, and
which, in making us collide with one another, easily breaks our hearts and heads.
A man works so much that he fully deserves a gay and wholesome leisure period. The
play for such a rest ought, to my mind, to be the theater.
“Observations on the Theater,” by Maxim Gorky, translator unknown,
originally published in the English Review (April 1924)
VA S S A Z H E L EZ N OVA
Gorky wrote the first version of Vassa Zheleznova in 1909 while living in exile in Italy.
There was a saying in Nizhny Novgorod, where Gorky was born in 1868 and which is now
named after him: “The houses are made of stone—the people of iron.” Gorky remembered
this and in real life had come across such iron people. In particular he remembered several
powerful and ruthless women who dominated the commercial life of Nizhny Novgorod,
and who were to serve him as prototypes for his play Vassa Zheleznova. Nizhny Novgorod
in Gorky’s childhood was a small provincial town where the meshchane, the new petit bourgeois class, was beginning to make itself felt.
There are two versions of the play. Whereas the Vassa of the first version was to some extent
based on a variety of real life characters, Vassa of the second version (written in 1935) is modeled
to a much greater extent on one real life character, Maria Kapitonovna Kashina—“the shrewd
proprietress of a large shipping concern,” as Gorky described her in a letter to Olga Forsh in 1926.
The two versions differ widely in both tone and content. Gorky wrote the second
version in December 1935 but died before he could see a stage performance. It was in fact during a rehearsal of a revival of the first version at the Moscow Art Theater in 1935 that he
telegraphed to the producer, i. n. Berseyev: “Please stop all rehearsals. In January I shall submit a completely new text.” But nobody expected the second version to differ so much from
the first. It was in fact a competely new play. The only similarity between the two plays was
in the title and in the names—and even there Vassa’s patronymic has been changed from
Petrovna to Borisovna. Even the location of the play changed from the small provincial
Russian town of Gorky’s childhood to a large city on the Volga. Vassa’s husband is no longer
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20
the narrow-minded meshchanin, the representative of the petit bourgeoisie in Russia who has
only recently shed his peasant roots and has managed to build up a brick and tile business. In
the new version he becomes a member of the wealthy merchant class, the ruthless head of a
vast shipping concern on the Volga, who has married the boss’s daughter to enhance his career.
Gorky also brought a new political element into the play by introducing an entirely new character, Rachel, a social revolutionary who challenges Vassa and all the values of the past.
Gorky insisted that the second version should be the definitive version and not an alternative play. It is this version that has been in the repertoire of the Moscow Art Theater and
has also been turned into a great Soviet film. It is the play that most people know.
However, from time to time the first version is still played on the Russian stage and as
recently as 1979 Anatoly Vassilyev directed it in Moscow.
It is easy to see why Gorky felt that his play needed such drastic revision. From 1921 to
1933 he had again been living out of Russia, and the country he returned to was greatly
changed. The meshchanin no longer existed, and the sharply political atmosphere of the ’30s
seemed to require a play where the clashes between the characters were more starkly drawn
and politically motivated than had been called for in 1909 when the first version was written.
But whatever Gorky may have felt at the time, a great deal was lost in the 1935 version.
The first play [the basis for A Mother, Constance Congdon’s new adaptation for a.c.t.,]
has a strength and unity of theme and structure, and a warmth in the characterization, that
are lacking in the second version. It is first and foremost a remarkable study of the central
character, Vassa Petrovna. At its core is the struggle for the inheritance of Zakhar
Zheleznov, who is on his deathbed. Vassa’s children and brother-in-law want to take their
shares out of the business and move away from the family. But Vassa, a passionate matriarch, is prepared to commit crime to preserve the business she and her husband have
sweated to build up and to keep the family together. To this end she arranges the forgery
of her husband’s will; is a party to the murder of her brother-in-law, the “enemy of the family”; sends a son into a monastery; and browbeats her other children. The Vassa of the first
version does not set out to grab the business for herself. The motivation of her behavior is
the preservation of the family and the protection of the inheritance for her children and
grandchildren. Gorky’s subtitle for the play was “A Mother.” “I too am a mother,” Vassa
says to her daughter Anna, “remember, for the sake of your children, in their interest, nothing is shameful, nothing is ever a sin.” The play is a strong attack on the meshchane class,
the beginnings of petit bourgeois values and materialistic attitudes that destroy the family.
It is also about the corruption of human feelings and decency by material possessions.
Gorky shows us how Vassa’s human and maternal feelings are misguided. Due to the bour-
geois values which she has acquired she is unable to see any other way by which the family can be kept together except by holding onto the business and the money.
Gorky was always fascinated—even in private life, by strong women. The study of the
central character, torn by her internal struggle and the tragedy of finding herself fighting
against her children while fighting for them, is so powerful that in spite of all the terrible
things she does we can’t help feeling some sympathy for her. The strength and ruthlessness
of her character alternately arouse feelings of repulsion and sympathy in us.
“Introduction,” by Tania Alexander and Tim Suter, to Vassa Zheleznova (1988)
maxim gorky: the writer
The basic reason why Maxim Gorky receives such adulation in the Soviet Union lies in the
fact that a new literature was necessary for the new society and for all Russian writers in any
way eminent Gorky was clearly the most suitable for official elevation to the status of its
founder and fountainhead. There are certain reasons why he does not fit the description of
proletarian writer—he was of petty bourgeois origin, he was never an industrial worker, he
did not describe the lives of the workers, he was a religiously minded man and a romantic
revolutionary who felt himself—in his own words—“to be a heretic in every party.” On the
other hand certain dominant characteristics of Gorky’s thought and personality harmonize
perfectly with the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of the Soviet Union. We may note
first of all his burning patriotism and his absolute faith in the power of the Russian people
to achieve miracles of constructive labor if their talents and energies are properly developed
and exploited; linked with this faith is his reverence for all forms of education as the infallible means of bringing human ability to fruition and his exaltation of work as a force
capable of transforming the condition of mankind on earth. Absolute faith in human talent
and in the efficacy of work means confidence in the ability of men to conquer their environment and rejection of their need of any form of divine guidance in everyday affairs or of
priestly consolation in misfortune. Human beings can find strength and solace in their sense
of community with each other. Man is the be-all and end-all of existence. This was Maxim
Gorky’s distinctive faith, and it echoes some of the positive elements of Soviet teaching.
Maxim Gorky the Writer: An Interpretation, by f. m. Borras (1967)
stanislavsky on gorky
The general unrest and the coming revolution brought to the boards of our theater a series
of plays that mirrored the social and political mood of discontent, protest, and dreams of
a hero who would bravely tell the truth.
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22
The censorship and the police administration were at the height of their activity, the blue
pencil made endless journeys across the text of the plays, crossing out the slightest hints that
might evoke unrest or the breaking of the peace. There was fear that the theaters would become
the arena for propaganda. And to tell the truth, attempts were made in that direction. . . .
We knew that Gorky was writing two plays. . . . We were interested in the first, for in
that Gorky had chosen the life of the people he loved, those “creatures that once were men”
who created his fame as a writer. We insisted that Gorky finish his first play at once so that
we might open our new theater, built for us by Morozov, with its production. But Gorky
complained about the persons of the play and could not finish it.
“You see, the trouble is that all these people of mine have surrounded me, and are
crowding me and themselves, and I can’t get them to take their proper places or make
peace between them. The devil take them! They talk, talk, and talk, and they talk so well
that it is a pity to stop them, by God. My word of honor!” . . .
The production was crowned with tremendous success. There were endless curtain calls
for the actors, the stage directors, and for Gorky himself. It was very funny to see him
appear for the first time on the stage, and stand on the boards with a cigarette in his teeth,
smiling and lost, and not knowing that he was supposed to bow to the audience and to take
the cigarette out of his mouth.
“Just see, my little brothers, this is success, by God, my word of honor,” Gorky seemed to
be saying to himself. “They are clapping, really. They are yelling! There’s a wonder for you!”
Gorky became the hero of the day. He was followed in the streets. Mobs of admirers, especially of the fair sex, gathered about him. In the beginning he was confused. He would
approach them, pulling at his rusty, cropped mustache, and running his strong fingers through
his long hair or throwing his head back so as to clear his face and forehead of the mass of hair
that fell over it—trembling, distending his nostrils, hunching his body in confusion.
“Brothers,” he would say to us, smiling guiltily, “You know—somehow, it is not comfortable—really—my word of honor!—Why do they eye me like that? I am not a singer or
a dancer.—Who would ever have thought it!—By God!—My word of honor—”
But his funny confusion and peculiar, bashful manner of speech intrigued and attracted
admirers more and more. Gorky’s personal attraction was strong. He had his own beauty
of plastics, freedom, and ease. There is an imprint in my visual memory of his fine pose
when he stood on the shore of Yalta, waiting for my steamer to leave. Carelessly leaning
against bales of baggage and supporting his little son Maxim, he looked thoughtfully into
the distance, and it seemed that in another moment he would rise from the shore and fly
into the boundless blue in the wake of his dreams.
My Life in Art, by Constantin Stanislavsky, translated by j. j. Robbins (1924)
the disintegration of personality
Thoughts on the Collective, the Individual, and the Petty Bourgeoisie
by maxim gorky
the formation of the collective
Let us take the clan in its ceaseless struggle for existence. A small group of people, surrounded on all sides by incomprehensible and often hostile natural phenomena, lived in
the closest contact with one another. . . . Each member of the group felt an instinctive urge
to unburden himself of all the thoughts that arose in him, something prompted by his feeling of helplessness against the awe-inspiring forces of the forests around him and the
beasts that prowled in it, the sea and the sky, night and the sun. It was evoked, too, by his
night-dreams and by the strange life of shadows of the day and the night. In this way, individual experience immediately merged with the collective’s, and the entire experience
amassed by the collective became the property of each of its members. . . .
the degenerating individual
The individual was, in fact, the embodiment of a certain fraction of the group’s physical
forces and, at the same time, of the whole of its mental energy. The individual might
disappear, devoured by beast or killed by lightning, crushed by a falling tree or rock, or
swallowed up in a river or a quagmire. . . . At the burial feast that would ensue to honor
the departed, the clan would for the first time bring forth the concept of intelligence, the
individual; by heartening itself and, as it were, issuing some kind of challenge, the clan
attributed to that personality all their own skill, strength and intelligence, all the qualities
making both the group and the individual firmer and stronger. . . . In this manner there
arose over and above the clan the concept of the hero, who was the embodiment and
vehicle of the clan’s entire energy, now translated into deeds, and a reflection of the clan’s
spiritual strength. . . .
As they multiplied in number, “individuals” began a struggle among themselves for a
plentitude of power and for the protection of the interests of an “I” ever more greedy of
fame; the collective was splitting up and could keep the individual supplied with an everdiminishing stock of energy. Psychological unity was melting away and the individual grew
more pallid. He now had to hold on to his gains in the teeth of the tribe’s opposition and
was obliged to guard with ever greater vigilance his personal status, his property, wives, and
children. The problems of the individual’s self-contained existence became ever more com-
23
24
plex, calling for immense efforts. In the struggle for the liberty of his “I,” the individual
completely lost touch with the collective and found himself in a terrifying vacuum that
soon wore down his forces. There began an anarchic struggle between the individual and
society—a picture presented to us by the course of world history—a struggle that is beyond
the powers of the devastated and impotent individual of today.
Private property developed, which disunited people, embittering their relations and
engendering irreconcilable contradictions. Man had to strain every effort to escape being
engulfed in poverty. In defending his private interests, the individual lost every nexus with
the tribe, the state, and society; it is with difficulty that he can today put up with the discipline imposed by his party, and he is wearied even by his family. . . .
While individualism lay on its deathbed, the remorseless grip of capitalism was, against
its own will, recreating the collective, compressing the proletariat into a solid moral force.
Gradually, yet with ever-mounting speed, this force is beginning to realize that, as the
world’s great collective soul, it alone is charged with the mission of freely creating life.
To individualists the emergence of this force seems a dark storm cloud on the horizon.
It frightens them in the same degree as death of the body does, for to them this force spells
social death. Each of them considers his “I” deserving of special consideration and high
appraisal, but the proletariat, which will breathe new life into the world, does not wish to
bestow upon these “aristocrats of the spirit” the charity of its attention. Aware of this, these
gentlemen have a hearty loathing of the proletariat. . . .
Reduced to spiritual beggary, caught up in the toils of contradictions, and always ridiculous and pitiful in its attempts to find itself a cozy nook to shelter in, individualism is
disintegrating and becoming more and more paltry in its mentality. Feeling this, and overcome by despair, which it may realize or try to conceal from itself, individualism is on the
rampage in search of salvation, sinks into metaphysics or vice, seeking after God but prepared to believe in Satan; all its seekings and turmoil show a foreboding of the imminence
of death, and horror at its inexorable future, acutely sensed if not consciously realized. The
present-day individualist is in the clutches of anxious dejection. He has lost his bearings, is
bending every effort to keep his hold on life, but his strength is giving out, and the only
thing left is his cunning, which somebody has called “the wisdom of fools.” A mere husk of
his former self, weary in soul and racked by vexation of spirit, he now flirts with socialism,
now toadies to capitalism, while his presentiment that his social death is at hand accelerates
still more the disintegration of his puny and sickly “I.” His despair more and more frequently develops into cynicism, and the individualist begins to hysterically deny and burn
that which he worshipped but yesterday, the full impact of his negativism inevitably throwing him into a state of mind bordering on hooliganism. I use the term not from a desire to
insult those that have already been insulted or to humiliate the humiliated—life has been
doing that far more heavy-handedly and bitterly that I ever could; no, hooliganism is simply the result of the mental and physical degeneration of personality, indisputable proof of
the ultimate degree of its disintegration. This is probably some chronic disease of the cerebral cortex brought about by social malnutrition, some ailment of the organs of sense, which
become ever duller and more sluggish and receive ever less acutely the impressions created
by the environment, this causing a kind of anesthesia of the intellect. . . .
the petty bourgeoisie
Life was becoming ever more complex and exacting and with every new decade technology
was speeding the course of life, something it is still doing and will continue to do. Each new
business day and year demanded greater and greater effort from any individual who would
hold a position of command. In the early years of the last century the petty bourgeois, who
had just thrown off the shackles of the nobility’s state, was sufficiently fresh, strong, and well
equipped to wage the struggle on his own, for the conditions presented by industry and
trade were not too much for the individual’s forces. With the growth of technology, competition, and the bourgeois’s greed, with the development of the philistine’s sense of
supremacy and his urge to consolidate that supremacy for all time with the aid of gold and
bayonets, with the inevitable aggravation of anarchy in the sphere of production, which has
made it still harder to resolve such problems—the gulf between the individual’s capacities
and the demands put to them has grown ever wider. The nerves have been drained by
overexertion; one-sided exercise of the intellect has deprived it of balance, so that we see
how neurasthenia and crime are spreading among the bourgeoisie and how typical degenerates make an appearance already in third-generation bourgeois families. It has been
observed that degeneration is most frequently to be met in bourgeois families in Russia and
the United States. These historically young countries of the most rapid bourgeois development have produced an extremely high insanity rate among the financial and industrial
bourgeoisie, this in all probability reflecting insufficient historical training: people have
proved too puny to saddle capital, which has come to them in all the panoply of might,
enslaved them, and rapidly sucked them dry of their immature energy. If he would specialize in some sphere, man has to limit the growth of his spirit, but the bourgeois has no choice
but to specialize: he must ceaselessly spin his never-changing web if he is to live. Anarchy
is the acknowledged and undisputed outcome of bourgeois activity, and it is to that anarchy
that we owe the waning of the soul that is making itself felt more and more acutely.
Excerpted from “The Disintegration of Personality,” by Maxim Gorky, translated by Julius Katzer (1909).
25
life in gorky’s russia
compiled by paul walsh
the crimean war, 1854–55
Launched in 1854 by Great Britain, France, and the newly formed kingdom of Sardinia
against Russia in order to save the Ottoman Empire from czarist encroachment, the
Crimean War ended the following year in a disastrous military defeat for Russia. While St.
Petersburg could boast that it commanded the largest army in Europe, poor roads, antiquated weapons, and low morale prevented its effective use.
Not only did the Crimean War cost Russia 600,000 lives, but defeat revealed unexpected weaknesses in the structure of the Russian state, proving to the czarist autocracy
that Russia had fallen dangerously behind its western neighbors and was vulnerable to
future attack and invasion. Army leadership and material preparedness proved inadequate
to the demands of modern warfare. Moreover, the Russian economy buckled under the
strain of war, bankrupting the country as great waves of peasant unrest swept the
countryside.
emancipation of the serfs, 1861
26
The shortcomings revealed by the Crimean War convinced Czar Alexander II that the
only way to guarantee the internal order and external power of his empire was to coax
Russia into the modern age. This meant modernizing the economy to facilitate industrial
manufacturing and commercial capitalism, as well as modernizing the army by changing it
from a large standing force to a reserve force of conscripts that could be mobilized in times
of need.
Thus on February 19, 1861, Czar Alexander ii issued the Edict of the Emancipation of
the Serfs. The emancipation of the serfs was less an act of compassion on the part of the
czar than an attempt to quell peasant unrest on the one hand and shore up his empire by
taking immediate steps to modernize Russia on the other. The goal was a new Russia, able
to compete both militarily and economically in the modern world. In this sense, emancipation of the serfs was a necessary first step in the relatively rapid modernization of
Russia’s feudal economy, which dated back to the Middle Ages.
Before emancipation, serfs could not receive military training and then return to their
owners. The abolition of serfdom changed all this, making them eligible for military service while relieving the strain on other classes of the demand for military service. The eman-
cipation of the serfs also meant detaching them from the land and making them available
as industrial workers and wage earners. This contributed to the rapid transformation of the
Russian economy.
While emancipation gave serfs “the status of free rural inhabitants,” many aspects of
their day-to-day lives worsened with emancipation. They were still subject to exorbitant
taxes and a passport system that restricted movement around the country, but they no
longer had the support of or position within a stable feudal economy. Moreover, while
emancipation included a system of land reform that required landlords to sell a plot of land
to each former serf, the system was badly organized. Many of the freed serfs ended up with
less land after emancipation than had been available to them before. Within a few days of
emancipation, reports of unrest and uprising among the serfs began to filter into St.
Petersburg.
While many peasants continued to honor the czar, their “little father,” as their savior
and liberator, they now found themselves increasingly dispossessed of the little wealth and
property they had. At the same time, the relatively rapid rise of a merchant class of former
serfs, ruthless in their pursuit of property at any price, pushed Russia toward commercial
capitalism, furthering the suffering of those who were displaced by emancipation. At the
same time, a decisively large portion of the population, dispossessed of everything, found
themselves without property or means of support. This population of derelicts, vagabonds,
wanderers, thieves, and prostitutes contributed to a growing sense of crisis and chaos in
Russia as madmen, preachers, and revolutionaries spoke of a coming apocalypse.
the “great reforms”
While historians suggest that the majority of former serfs were by and large worse off in
1900 than their ancestors had been a hundred years before, the social, economic, and political changes in Russia were unprecedented. The Edict of Emancipation signaled only the
beginning of a series of modernizing changes in Russia that have come to be known as the
“Great Reforms.”
local government reform
With the liberation of the serfs, a vast numbers of new citizens now populated the countryside. A system of elected local governments, or zemstvos, arose to replace the old institutions of landlord rule. These assemblies, with separate seats for peasants, townspeople,
and private landowners, were responsible for maintaining the local infrastructure and
industrial development. Through taxation of all classes, the zemstvo built bridges, roads,
hospitals, and prisons and provided essential services, such as healthcare and poverty relief.
27
education reform
At the call of the Elementary School Statute of 1864, a litany of elementary schools sprang
up across the country, though funding was remanded to the local government, to overcome
the massive illiteracy that plagued the former serfs. The 1863 University Statute reorganized colleges and universities into effective self-governing corporations, with considerable
freedom for both faculty and students.
judicial reform
The Judiciary Statute of 1864 overhauled the Russian court system based on the liberal
principles of equality of all before the law, an independent judiciary, jury trial by propertied peers, public legal proceedings, and the establishment of an educated legal profession.
expression reform
Alexander’s Temporary Regulations of 1865 abandoned precensorship—the censorship of
journals or groups before publication—in favor of punitive measures after the fact. New
and stricter censorship laws were reinstated, however, by the Reinforced Safeguard Decree
of 1881.
28
military reform
Defeat in the Crimean War had pointed up the obvious failure of the Russian army to
modernize. This led almost immediately to a cry for a complete overhaul of the military,
though no action was taken until the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) demonstrated the
necessity of building a modern army to prevent invasion from Europe. The Universal
Military Training Act of 1874 introduced universal male military service at age 20. Military
service would last six years for uneducated draftees, two years for draftees with a secondary education, and six months for draftees with university education.
The Universal Military Training Act of 1874 established all-class conscription and called
for technological improvement, elite reorganization, and new military schools. These
reforms not only modernized the bureaucratic administration of the army and created the
position of chief of the general staff, they also gave the army a role in teaching peasants to
read and in pioneering medical education for women. Despite reforms, the army remained
backward. Officers often preferred bayonets to bullets, worrying that long-range sight on
rifles would induce cowardice. In general, Russia did not keep pace with western technological developments in the construction of rifles, machine guns, artillery, ships, and naval
ordnance. Russia also failed to use naval modernization as a means of developing its industrial base in the 1860s.
the reinforced safeguard decree of
1881
Following the assassination of Alexander ii in 1881, his son Alexander iii (r. 1881–94)
reversed his father’s reforms, reaffirmed the ancient principles of czarist autocracy and
absolute rule, and initiated a period of political repression more severe than anything that
had existed in prior centuries. By 1890, counterreforms in censorship, education, and land
redistribution reversed Alexander ii’s liberalizations.
At the same time, the Reinforced Safeguard Decree of 1881 asserted that, since ordinary
laws had proved insufficient to preserve order in the empire, “extraordinary” procedures
must be introduced. These new procedures placed autocratic power in the hands of the
political police, which had become the essence of the Russian monarchy. In effect, the new
power given the police to cope with revolutionary threats to state security bolstered the
bureaucracy and the police at the expense of the monarchy itself, whose existence came to
rely on the police.
The principal, if unintended, accomplishment of the proto–police regime was to radicalize Russian society. Its definition of political crimes was so comprehensive that the
far-flung nets of security precautions caught and united people who had next to nothing
in common with one another.
the russian peasant
The true religion of the Russian peasantry was fatalism. The peasant rarely credited any
event, especially a misfortune, to his own volition. It was “God’s will,” even where responsibility could clearly be laid at his own doorstep, e.g., when carelessness caused a fire or the
death of an animal. Russian proverbs are full of fatalistic sentiments. When, towards the
end of the 19th century, the muzhik began to be acquainted with the Bible, he first learned
the passages stressing humility and passive acceptance of one’s fate.
Finally, as concerns politics. The Russian peasant was undoubtedly a “monarchist” in
the sense that he could conceive of no source of worldly authority other than that emanating from the czar. He regarded the czar as God’s vicar on earth, a bolshak of all Russia,
created by the Lord to give him order and to take care of him. He gave the czar credit for
all that was good and blamed whatever went wrong either on God’s will or on the landlords and officials. He believed the czar knew him personally and that if he were to knock
on the door of the Winter Palace he would be warmly received and his complaints not only
heard but understood in their smallest detail. . . .
A powerful factor in the peasant’s monarchist sentiments was the firm belief that the
czar wished them to have all the land, that his desire was frustrated by the landlords, but
that some day he would overcome this resistance. Serf emancipation in 1861 transformed
29
this belief into firm conviction. The socialist-revolutionary propagandists of the 1870s were
driven to desperation by the peasants’ unshakeable faith that the “czar will give” (czar’ dast).
Russia under the Old Regime, by Richard Pipes (1974)
gaiety and violence
Too often, Russian gaiety unexpectedly turns to cruelty and tragedy. A man dances as
though breaking his chains, then suddenly he frees a ferocious beast inside himself and,
seized with frenzied anguish, hurls himself at everyone he sees, tearing, biting, destroying.”
In the World, by Maxim Gorky
old believers
30
“Old Believers,” also known as “Old Ritualists,” were Christians who split from the
Russian Orthodox Church in opposition to the 17th-century liturgical reforms of Patriarch
Nikon (1605–81), introduced to bring Russian liturgical practices into conformity with
those of the Greek Orthodox Church. Old Believers felt that the Russian church had the
right to adopt its own traditions and so keep such ancient practices as crossing oneself with
two fingers, singing two alleluias instead of three, bowing low to the ground, using only
old liturgical books, and venerating only ancient icons. In addition, the cross of the Old
Believers bears an oblique bar below the longer arm.
The Old Believers, at one time as much as 10 percent of the Russian population, were
persecuted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by both the czarist government and the
church as heretics and dissidents. As a result they lived in isolated, closed communities for
centuries. Many Old Believers fled into Asia and others were forcefully exiled from
European Russia. Since no Orthodox bishop had joined the Old Believers, the group was
deprived of a hierarchy. This, along with the fact that the communities were spread over
vast areas, caused them to split into as many as a dozen splinter groups, each with its own
characteristics.
Because Old Believers only accept the veneration of ancient icons, they established
themselves, from the time of Peter i (r. 1682–1725), as famous icon collectors. Their
churches were always decorated with impressive collections of ancient icons and their
monastic schools taught children the basics of icon painting, thus producing many excellent copies of ancient icons and contributing to the preservation of traditional Russian
iconography at a time when the official church supported more modern art forms.
In 1905, Czar Nicholas ii issued the Edict of Toleration, allowing Old Believers to live
and worship freely in Russia.
the wanderers
The Russian countryside has always been crossed by a wandering population of itinerants,
vagabonds, and pilgrims, but their numbers increased in the late 19th century with the
emancipation of the serfs. It was among these itinerate peoples and communities that
Gorky lived during his own two-year tramp through Russia.
Among the general population of itinerants who tramped the Russian countryside in
the 19th and early 20th centuries were apocalyptic holy men, mysterious soothsayers, pious
pilgrims, ancient storytellers, gossips, and informants. Well known among them was the
sect of militant fundamentalist Christians who called themselves “Christ’s People” and
were popularly known as the “Wanderers” or “Fugitives.” Considering it sinful to live
peaceably among a heretical or nonbelieving population, and in fact to have any dealings
with people who do not share their views, the Wanderers lived as hermits in the forests and
beggars in the fields. They opposed all aspects of the existing political and social organization of the state, condemning military conscription, payment of taxes, acceptance of
passports, and everything connected with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of Russia.
These religious anarchists condemned the czar as “the vessel of Satan” and the Russian
Orthodox Church as “the dwelling-place of the Father of Lies.” The most extreme of them
opposed all paid labor, living off scavenging and begging.
The Wanderers believed that anyone who wished to be saved from the wrath that was
to come had to escape the sinfulness of the world. They must abandon all property, own
neither houses nor fixed abode, sever all ties that bind them to the world, and accept a life
of wandering continually from place to place. “True Christians are but strangers and pilgrims in the present life,” they preached, “and whoever binds himself to the world will
perish with it.”
Before the Revolution: A View of Russia under the Last Czar,
by Kyril Fitzlyon and Tatiana Browning (1978)
the military
In a peasant country like Russia the army was, of course, an overwhelmingly peasant army.
With the spread of education and the rise in educational standards, the same was
inevitably becoming true of its officers, though the proportion of officers from the urban
middle class was also rising, at the expense of those from gentry families. On the eve of
Nicholas ii’s reign [1894], officers of peasant origin made up only 5 percent of the officer
corps; by 1914 the figure rose to 19 per cent. By 1916 the immense casualties of the war
helped to reinforce the normal social process, and in that year as much as 70 percent of
officer trainees were of peasant origin. General Denikin, head of the White Army fight-
31
ing against the Bolshevik forces, was no exception in being, like Lenin, the grandson of a
serf. The same was true of many of his fellow officers in the Russian Imperial General
Staff.
Technological advance increased the demand for technically qualified officers, irrespective of their social origin. This reinforced the steady rise in the number of officers from the
urban middle class. By 1916 they supplied 26 percent of officer trainees, while gentry families supplied a mere 4 percent. The guards, of course, formed an exception to this trend.
They alone carried on the tradition, established very soon after their regiments were
formed a couple of centuries before, of recruiting their officers exclusively from
gentry families.
Paradoxically, at first sight, the officer corps remained “noble.” The reason was that quite
a low rank of even simply a decoration carried with it a patent of nobility—personal below
the rank of colonel and hereditary for colonel and above.
Before the Revolution: A View of Russia under the Last Czar
DVO RYA N ST VO
32
It is in any case difficult to talk about “gentry” or “nobility” in Russia, for the Russians have
no word for either. The usual term is dvoryanstvo, which covers both—and much more
besides—without any real correspondence in meaning. For, like the peasants, the nobles
(dvoryanye) formed not a class, but an “estate.” Within it there were, in effect, several
classes, in the western sense, and membership in the estate could be acquired fairly easily.
It was, as has just been said, automatic following promotion to a certain rank in the armed
forces (army colonel, naval captain) or the civil service, or even following the grant of a military or civil decoration. A somewhat lower rank or decoration entitled the holder to
“personal” or life nobility, which became inheritable if two generations—father and son—
happened to be granted it. The degree of social mobility that this implied was, of course,
very high indeed. Thus, while Lenin’s grandfather had been a serf, Lenin himself was born
a noble, since his father—the serf ’s son—had acquired hereditary dvoryanstvo on his
appointment as chief school inspector with an appropriate civil service rank and the order
of St. Vladimir.
Before the Revolution: A View of Russia under the Last Czar
country estates
The country houses of even the most aristocratic and richest of these families were, by
British standards, of very recent date—mostly 19th century and none earlier than mid
18th—and (with very few exceptions) of relatively modest appearance. No medieval castles,
no equivalent of the great Tudor mansions of the English countryside. The absence of a
feudal system in the past, no law of entail, and the scarcity of building materials other than
timber had seen to that. There were, of course, exceptional houses on a par (or almost) with
Blickling or Chatsworth in England, though of later date. . . .
But on the whole, the Russian aristocracy were mainly absentee landowners who lived
mostly in one of the two capitals, Moscow or St. Petersburg, preferably the latter, where
they occupied some function at court or served in one of the smarter guards regiments,
such as the horse guards or the cavalier guards (corresponding to the household cavalry in
England), or received a government appointment, which, however, was rarely that of a
minister of the crown. Their influence could not be compared to that of the peerage in
England since they had no hereditary right to membership of a legislature, and whatever
influence they did possess was exercised by them as individuals rather than as a group.
There was, of course, no hard and fast line of social demarcation between the topmost
layers of the nobility and the old, but less illustrious or less fashionable and, on the whole,
poorer dvoryanstvo, the true gentry in the British sense, who were more frequently found
living on their estates and were active landowners if they were not civil servants, writers,
musicians, or professional men. The transition was gradual from the glittering aristocracy
of St. Petersburg, through what Tolstoy called the “middle-upper class” (in which he
included himself ) to the middle gentry, with many ties of blood, marriage, school, regiment, interests, friendship, and manners between them.
Before the Revolution: A View of Russia under the Last Czar
extravagance and entertaining
The popular picture of a vastly rich Russian aristocracy squandering its millions in sumptuous living of oriental splendor has little foundation in fact, if only because the millions
were not there to spend. Great private fortunes on a scale typical of industrial societies,
whether European or American, were beyond the reach of such a predominantly agricultural country as Russia. It is doubtful if even the richest half-dozen aristocratic families of
Russia, including the imperial family, could compete with the Rockefellers or the Astors
or the Vanderbilts or the Rothschilds, and few if any of them could boast of fortunes comparable to those of their social peers in the United Kingdom, such as, for instance, the
ducal families of Sutherland or Bedford or Devonshire. . . .
The fact is that Russians’ behavior and entertainments struck foreign observers as
extravagant and costly not because they really were more so than in the West, but because
they were different—to conform to Russian tastes and customs. Russians like jewelry, are
fond of good food, and are very hospitable. And so foreigners often remarked on the
33
impressive show of jewels Russians liked to display, on the gargantuan meals with
innumerable courses and the constant stream of guests at all meals and all times of the day,
often turning up unexpectedly and unannounced for lunch, tea, or dinner, and on the
hordes of servants whose numbers seemed to exceed any real need for them, and who
treated their masters as their masters treated them—with a familiarity, a sans gêne which
foreigners often found embarrassing.
In the country, the enormous distances and bad roads imposed hospitality very different from what was usual in western Europe. Guests came to stay for days, sometimes for
weeks, and when they did were entertained as lavishly as the host could afford. A favorite
pastime was shooting and hunting. Not fox hunting as practiced in England. Russians
thought it too formal and artificial and preferred bigger game, such as bear or elk or wolves
when these were natural to the region. The wolf hunt was probably the most exciting, but
it was becoming an increasingly rare entertainment.
Before the Revolution: A View of Russia under the Last Czar
education
34
Education has such a different tradition and, therefore, meaning in Russia and England
that one hesitates to use the same word for both. In England the original aim of education
was to develop the individual; the idea that the school could also have a civic purpose came
much later, though it is now being increasingly stressed. In Russia education has been from
the very beginning, and particularly since Peter the Great, imposed by the state for its own
ends (universities were regarded in the 19th century as merely training colleges for the civil
service). That the real purpose of education was to develop the human personality for its
own sake was regarded as a daring and original theory when it was first voiced at the end
of the 19th century. But once voiced, it became the basis of all efforts by educational
reformers (though not by all ministers of education) throughout the last reign.
Indeed, nothing was more typical of the Russian educational system in the beginning
of the 20th century than the feeling of urgency to reform it, the experimentation that went
on with this end in view and the tension which pervaded it. . . .
The tension, the urgency, and the need for experimentation and for “a phenomenal
expansion of educational opportunity” can be readily understood when it is remembered
that at the time of Nicholas ii’s accession to the throne Russia was, to all intents and purposes, a nation of illiterates: not much more than a quarter of its inhabitants of the age of
ten and over could either read or write. The precise figure given by the 1897 census is
27.8 percent, an abysmally low proportion, even though the comparison with western
Europe, so inevitably made, is not entirely valid since the Russian statistics include the
colonial and semicolonial minorities in the Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia.
However, hardly less impressive than the extent of illiteracy at the beginning of the
reign was the success of the fight against illiteracy at the end of it: in 20 years the proportion of the population able to read and write jumped from just over a quarter to nearly half.
In other words, taking the population expansion into account, about twice as many persons were literate in 1917 as there had been two decades previously. The authorities could
look forward with a fair measure of confidence to wiping out illiteracy altogether or, at
least, reducing it to negligible proportions, except among the very old, by the middle or
end of the 1920s.
the bourgeoisie of nizhny novgorod
Nizhny Novgorod was a city of merchants. “Its houses are of stone—and its men of iron,”
said one of the proverbs about this city.
The “normal” mode of life of these “men of iron” was well know to the people I “circulated” amongst, in the way a spinning top is whipped into “circulation.” I was egged on by
a driving and relentless urge to understand things that were then beyond my ken and
aroused a feeling of indignation in me. The coachmen, nurses, janitors, housemaids, and
other menials who served the “men of iron” spoke of them in two ways: when they
described the christening and name’s day parties, the weddings and the funeral banquets
arranged by their masters, it was with the same awe with which they would speak of high
celebrations conducted by the bishop at the cathedral; but when it came to the day-by-day
life of the “men of iron,” these underlings spoke with fear and resentment, with perplexity
and despondency, and sometimes with repressed malice.
In their mental make-up, these servants were very much like “normal” folk, but, being
“a youth versed in the writings,” I was able to make out certain undercurrents in their
stories.
I could realize the nightmare that made up their masters’ lives, which centered on the
drama of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit. The flesh was fed on heavy food—
shchi (cabbage soup), geese and pies of every description, all this washed down with oceans
of tea, kvass, and vodka, and worn down by ample exercise connected with the
business of “continuing the family line,” subdued by fasting, and fettered by the calls of
trading activities. All this would keep the flesh in submission to the “spirit” for the space
of some ten or twenty years.
Well-guzzled on rich food, callous and ruthless towards others, the “iron” man lived in
pious humility, eschewing theaters and concerts, and finding entertainment in church-
35
going and listening to choirs and stentorian deacons, while at home he would find
diversion in the steaming bathhouse, cards, toping, and in addition in growing a magnificent beard.
To rephrase the proverb, there’s no sinner like a hoary sinner when the “spirit” yields to
the blandishments of the flesh. There came an evil day when this upright life would fall
apart like a house of soiled and greasy cards: for instance, it would become known that
some “man of iron” had committed the penal crime of seducing minors, though he was
married to a woman still comely, and his daughters were nearing the marrying age. To
protect the honor of these daughters, the good-natured and well-intentioned wife would
say to the sinner:
“What are we to do? We have marriageable daughters, but who will marry them if their
father has been sentenced to hard labor? Won’t you take a powder?”
The sinner would take a powder several days before the indictment had been drawn up,
and the affair would blow over “in view of the decease of the accused.”
“Talks on Craftsmanship,” by Maxim Gorky, translated by Julius Katzer (1930–31)
36
a timeline of russian history, 1855–1939
compiled by paul walsh
the reign of czar alexander ii
1855 Czar Alexander ii begins his reign.
1859 The Storm, by Alexander Ostrovsky, whose work is considered the foundation of
Russian realistic drama, debuts at the Maly Theatre in Moscow.
1860 The port city of Vladivostok is founded in eastern Russia as the railway boom begins.
1861 Blaming the country’s serf-based economy for Russia’s military and industrial inferiority following Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, Czar Alexander ii issues the Edict of
Emancipation, which frees the serfs and establishes government aid to assist them in buying land from their former lords. This system was badly organized and the economic situation of serfs in Russia deteriorated after 1861. By 1900 many peasants were worse off than
they had been in 1800.
1862 Ivan Turgenev publishes his novel Fathers and Sons.
1863 A system of zemstvos (county councils) is established to provide local self-government
to oversee social and economic services.
1864 Local government reforms are joined by reforms in education and the judiciary. The
migration of recently emancipated serfs to Siberia and central Asia shifts the focus of
Russian expansion to the conquest of Central Asia.
1865 Press censorship reforms are introduced.
1866 The “school of true Russian music,” the Moscow Conservatory, is founded. Pyotr
Tchaikovsky is among its professors. Fyodor Dostoyevsky completes Crime and Punishment.
1867 Russia sells Alaska to the United States.
1868 Dostoyevsky writes The Idiot. Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (later known as Maxim
Gorky) is born in Nizhny Novgorod (later known as Gorky).
1869 After six years of writing, Leo Tolstoy completes War and Peace. Russian chemist
Dmitri Mendeleyev develops the periodic table of elements.
1870 Municipal reforms continue the move toward local self-government. Vladimir I.
Lenin is born.
37
1872 Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country (written in 1850 and long refused publication
and production because of its negative depiction of marriage) is produced for the first time.
Karl Marx’s Kapital is translated into Russian.
1873 In the midst of depression and industrial crisis, the populist “To the People” movement begins its call for liberal political reforms.
1874 The Universal Military Training Act of 1874 establishes all-class conscription and calls
for reorganization and technological improvement of the military and the establishment of
new military schools. Muslim Tartars revolt.
1877 Tolstoy writes Anna Karenina. Tchaikovsky composes Swan Lake.
1878 The Russo-Turkish War ends and Great Britain and Austria-Hungary force a victorious Russia to sign the Treaty of Berlin, which restricts the military and political gains she
acquired in the war. Strikes paralyze St. Petersburg.
1879 Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky are born.
1880 Dostoyevsky completes The Brothers Karamazov.
the reign of czar alexander iii
1881 Czar Alexander ii is assassinated by a member of the People’s Will Party. The new
czar, Alexander iii, reverses recent reforms and reaffirms czarist autocracy in the
Reinforced Safeguard Decree of 1881, placing enormous power in the hands of the newly
established okhrona (secret police). Press censorship is expanded and other repressive measures are promulgated, making the police bureaucracy the new wielder of political power in
Russia.
38
1885 American journalist George Kennan publishes Siberia and the Exile System, an exposé
of the inhumanity and inefficiency of Siberian penal colonies. Smuggled copies of the
banned publication circulate throughout Russia.
1888 Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composes Scheherazade.
1891 Tchaikovsky composes The Nutcracker ballet. Construction begins on the TransSiberian Railway, which will be completed in 1905. Anti-Jewish legislation is enforced.
1892 Famine and cholera devastate peasant populations throughout central and southeastern
Russia. Minister of Finance Sergei Witte launches an ambitious program of industrialization. Alexei Maximovich Peshkov adopts the pen name Maxim Gorky (“Maxim the Bitter”)
when he publishes his first story, “Makar Chudra,” in the Tiflis newspaper The Caucasus.
the reign of czar nicholas ii
1894 Alexander iii dies and his son Nicholas ii becomes the last Russian czar. Fearing
aggression by Austria-Hungary or Italy and Germany, respectively, Russia and France sign
a secret treaty that requires each power to provide the other with troops in case of attack.
The Franco-Russian alliance is one of the basic pre–World War I alignments.
1896 Russia and China sign the Manchuria Convention, enabling Russia to complete the
Trans-Siberian Railway across Manchuria to the Russian city of Vladivostok. Chekhov’s
The Seagull premieres at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, where it fails miserably. Chekhov vows never to write for the theater again, but the next year publishes his play
Uncle Vanya, which is produced in the provinces.
1897 Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko found the Moscow
Art Theatre, which produces Chekhov’s The Seagull the follow year to critical and popular
acclaim. The first all-Russian census counts 128,907,692 people.
1898 Revolutionary groups unite in the Social Democratic Labor Party. Unlike the populists, the Social Democrats believe that a bourgeois society based on an urban proletariat
is a necessary prerequisite for socialism.
1898–99 Three volumes of writings by Gorky are collected and published under the title
Sketches and Stories, establishing his reputation as a writer of directness and passion. Gorky,
known as “the tramp of the Volga” and “the voice of the people,” is arrested and imprisoned for political outspokenness. He spends the next ten years under constant police
surveillance. Gorky publishes his first novel, Foma Gordeyev, about the greed of merchants
and industrialists in Nizhny Novgorod.
1900 Russia occupies Manchuria.
1901 Chekhov’s The Three Sisters is produced at the Moscow Art Theatre to poor reviews.
1902 Maxim Gorky’s The Petty Bourgeois is produced with limited success by the Moscow
Art Theatre. This production is followed later that year by the wildly successful Moscow
Art Theatre production of Gorky’s The Lower Depths. Gorky is elected to the Academy of
Sciences but his appointment is nullified by the czar. In protest, Chekhov and other prominent cultural figures resign from the Academy.
1903 At its second party congress in Brussels, the Social Democratic Labor Party, unable
to agree on party membership requirements, splits, forming the moderate Mensheviks (led
by Julius Martov) and the radical Bolsheviks (led by Lenin). The former want to foster
cooperation between the classes to build the capitalist society they believe is a necessary
39
first step to socialism. The latter favors the exclusion of the masses, and will seize control
of the Russian government in 1917.
1904 Japan attacks Russia over rival ambitions in Korea and Manchuria, initiating the
Russo-Japanese War. Japan destroys the Russian fleet in the Battle of the Tsushima Straits.
Eventually Russia loses Sakhalin and Korea to Japan. Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is
produced by the Moscow Art Theatre just before the author’s death from tuberculosis.
democratic reforms
1905 In January Cossacks fire on a peaceful demonstration of workers in St. Petersburg,
killing several hundred people. The event, known as “Bloody Sunday,” provides a rallying
cry for demonstrations and protests against czarist autocracy and repression. Protests lead
to a general strike in October that sweeps Russia. Sailors on the battleship Potemkin
mutiny, joining the strikers. Eventually the czar promises democratic reforms (set forth in
the October Manifesto). The consultative parliament, the Duma, is established but dissolved the following year when it advocates positions with which the czar disagrees. An
insurrection in Moscow is ruthlessly suppressed by government troops. While emprisoned
for his participation in the 1905 Revolution, Gorky writes the play The Children of the Sun.
When he is released from prison he goes into exile, traveling to Germany, France, and the
United States and eventually settling on the island of Capri. While in the United States
he writes the plays Barbarians and Enemies and the greater part of his revolutionary novel
of agitation, Mother.
1907–13 While in self-imposed exile on Capri, Gorky writes My Childhood, the first volume of his three-volume autobiography (1913–14), the plays The Last Ones (1908), Queer
People (1910), and the first version of Vassa Zheleznova (1910), and the novels The Life of a
Useless Man (1907), The Confession (1908), Summer (1909), The Meeting (1910), and The Life
of Matvei Kozhemyakin (1910–11).
40
1909 The Ballets Russes is founded by Serge Diaghilev, iniating the era of modern ballet.
Igor Stravinsky composes his ballet Firebird the following year for Diaghilev’s company.
1912 Lenin establishes the newspaper Pravda (Truth) while in exile.
1913 On the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, Czar Nicholas ii
grants partial amnesty to exiled Russian writers guilty of sedition. Gorky takes this opportunity to return to Russia, where the first part of his acclaimed autobiographical trilogy,
My Childhood, is published, followed by In the World (1916), and My Universities (1922).
Designers and painters Kasmir Malevich (founder of suprematism) and Vladimir Tatlin
(founder of constructivism) introduce modern design concepts into the Russian art world.
1914 Germany declares war on Russia as World War i begins.
the bolshevik revolution
1917 Defecting soldiers join workers in widespread rioting across Russia, eventually
persuading Czar Nicholas ii to abdicate (February Revolution). The Duma establishes a
provisional liberal government headed by Alexander Kerensky. In October, a coalition of
workers and sailors captures the government buildings and the Winter Palace in
St. Petersburg. The Bolsheviks overthrow the Kerensky government and install Lenin as
leader of Russia (October Revolution). Civil war ensues between the Bolsheviks, or Reds,
and anti-Bolsheviks, or Whites.
1918 Russian symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok writes his long poem “The Twelve,” praising
the Bolshevik revolution. Germany invades Russia, which is all but defenseless since
virtually the entire army has deserted. The Bolsheviks accept the dictated peace of BrestLitovsk, according to which Russia cedes large tracts of land to Germany. Finland,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan proclaim their
independence from Russia.
1918–21 A policy of “war communism” is proclaimed, giving the state control of all aspects
of the economy. Factories are nationalized, farms are collectivized, and the church is outlawed. Millions of peasants in the Don region starve as the army confiscates grain for its
own needs and the needs of urban dwellers.
1919 White armies attack the Bolsheviks from all directions, but the Red army is finally
victorious. The last White army under Wrangel evacuates the Crimea the following year.
1921 The civil war ends with Lenin’s victory. Millions have died of starvation caused by
drought and political unrest. For example, the population of Petrograd has dropped from
2.5 million in 1917 to 0.6 million in 1920. The “New Economic Policy” gives peasants the
right to sell grain surpluses. Partial return to a market economy ushers in a period of relative economic growth and stability.
1922 The “Union Treaty” formally joins Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Transcaucasus (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) into the Soviet Union. Germany recognizes
the Soviet Union. In protest against the growing violence of the Bolsheviks, Gorky leaves
41
Russia for a second time, along with other artists and writers, including constructivist
sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner and painter Marc Chagall.
1923 The ministry of culture takes over all aspects of Russian art and literature, mandating
standards of socialist realism in the creative arts.
the reign of joseph stalin
1924 The Soviet Union adopts a constitution based on “the dictatorship of the proletariat”
and stipulating the public ownership of land and the means of production. Lenin dies and
is replaced by Stalin.
1925 Dmitri Shostakovich, the first musical child of revolution, composes his First
Symphony. Sergei Eisenstein releases his film Battleship Potemkin, winning international
acclaim for his innovative use of montage.
1928 Stalin enacts the first five-year plan for rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union.
The state sets goals and priorities for the whole economy.
1929 Stalin orders the persecution of kulaks (prosperous farmers). Fifteen million peasants
are deported to Siberia and their property confiscated. Six and a half million die.
1930 Gorky is persuaded by Stalin to return to his beloved Russia, where he is promoted
as the artistic voice of the Soviet people.
1932–33 One million people in Kazakhstan and five million people in the Ukraine die of
famine caused by forced collectivization. Creative unions are established across Russia,
ushering in a period of strict state control of the arts.
1933 The United States recognizes the Soviet Union.
1934 The Soviet Union is admitted to the League of Nations.
42
1936 Months before his death, Gorky returns to his play Vassa Zheleznova, rewriting it to
express the ideals of the new Soviet Russia. Gorky dies suddenly of pneumonia in his
country home near Moscow on June 18, 1936, and is buried in Red Square.
1936–38 Discovery of an alleged plot against Stalin’s regime ostensibly headed by Trotsky
ushers in a series of “great purges” in which 2.5 million Soviet citizens are arrested. Nearly
a million of these are executed.
1939 The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany conclude a nonaggression pact. Two weeks later
World War ii begins when Germany invades Poland.
on motherhood
compiled by carolyn joy lenske
Men are what their mothers made them. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent. (Bette Davis)
Mother: the most beautiful word on the lips of mankind. (Kahlil Gibran)
The love of a parent for a child is the love that should grow towards separation. (Kahlil
Gibran)
The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a
mother—which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.
(Sydney J. Harris)
Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth. (Peter Ustinov)
Whenever I’m with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding.
(Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife)
Life is nothing but a series of crosses for us mothers. (Colette)
The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant—and let
the air out of the tires. (Dorothy Parker)
43
No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-age children for signs of improvement.
(Florida Scott-Maxwell)
The most effective form of birth control I know is spending the day with my kids.
( Jill Bensley)
A mother loves her children even when they least deserve to be loved. (Kate Samperi)
The ideal mother, like the ideal marriage, is a fiction. (Milton R. Sapirstein)
Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it’s only when
you have children that you realize you’re not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish
bully. (Fay Weldon)
A mother takes 20 years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of
him in 20 minutes. (Robert Frost)
My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next. (Nora Ephron)
I thought [my mother would] offer me some sympathy. Instead, she said, “Don’t you ever
call me crying again! You wanted to be in this business, so you better toughen up!” And I
did. ( Jennifer Lopez)
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to
satisfy them. (Sigmund Freud)
44
The “Seven-Point Mind Training” is based on cultivation in seven steps:
1) Equanimity. 2) All sentient beings have been or, at least could have been, my mother, as
I have lived innumerable lives. 3) Remember the kindness of your mother in this life, all
she did for you, the problems she went through to take care of you. 4) Wouldn’t it be great
if I could repay her and all previous mothers’ kindness. 5) Generate great love: may all
mother sentient beings have happiness and the causes for happiness. 6) Generate great
compassion: may all mother sentient beings be free from suffering and the causes for
suffering. 7) I should give up all self-cherishing and egoism, and work to bring them happiness and release them from their suffering: therefore, may I become an omniscient
Buddha, as he is the perfect doctor to cure the suffering of all mother sentient beings.
(“A View on Buddhism: Methods to Generate Bodhicitta”)
Even Adolph Hitler had a mother. (Paul Walsh)
Compiled from www.corsinet.com/braincandy/qmother.html, www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_mothers.html, www.houseofquotes.com/category.cfm?s=11&cat=mother, and www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/ robertfros151814.html, buddhism.kalachakranet.org/compassion.html.
questions to consider
1. Does Vassa love her children, and do they love her or each other? How does each of the
characters in A Mother define and express love? Why are Vassa’s grown-up children still
living at home? How does Vassa exert control over the members of her household? How
and when do alliances form and shift among the characters throughout the play?
2. Why is money so important to Vassa? What significance does money hold for each of
the characters in A Mother? What is the relationship between money and love as portrayed
in the play? Why is Vassa so desperate to protect the business? Is it just about the money,
or is there something else at stake?
3. Describe the relationship between Vassa and her daughter, Anna. What draws them
together? What does each of them really think about the other? Do they trust each other?
Why or why not? How do you think Anna has changed since she left home, and why?
4. Describe the relationship between Semyon and Natalya. Do they love each other? How
do you think Semyon and Lipa feel about each other, considering their past affair and the
tragedy of their dead child?
5. Why is Vassa’s garden so important to her? Why is it important for her to share it with
Liudmila?
6. A Mother takes place at a very delicate time in Russian history: In 1910, the serfs had
been free for not quite 50 years; the revolution of 1905 was fresh in the collective memory;
the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the overthrow of the czar, and the imposition of the
Soviet regime were just around the corner. What do these events mean to each member of
the Zheleznov family? How do you see the impact of those events reflected in the play?
What do you think will happen to each member of the family in the coming upheaval?
7. Karl Marx wrote in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has
forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Director Carey Perloff has
described A Mother as a farce. How does the comedy of Congdon’s adaptation highlight
and focus for a 21st-century audience the political and social issues that shaped Gorky’s
original version of Vassa Zheleznova? How are the farcical elements of the play brought out
onstage? How do the costumes, set, lighting, and music highlight those elements? In a
farce, characters and events are usually greatly exaggerated to create comedy. Which char-
45
acters and/or scenes in A Mother do you find the funniest? Why do you think we laugh at
a family in such dire straits? Do you think the play could succeed as a serious drama?
8. Which segment of pre-Soviet Russian society does each of the characters represent?
9. What part does religion play in the Zheleznov household? What is the significance of
the icons that hang on the walls of the family home? Is Natalya a “true believer”?
10. Describe each character’s attitude regarding work. How do these attitudes reflect
historical conditions in Gorky’s world, as well as Gorky’s own attitudes regarding work?
11. What does Constance Congdon’s adaptation say about mothers and daughters? Is A
Mother a feminist play? Do you think Vassa is a villain? Is she a hero? Why or why not?
What is a hero to you?
12. At the end of the play, Vassa believes she hears a scream in the garden. What do you
think the scream represents? Who do you think it might be? What does it tell us about
Vassa’s future?
13. Is there a “moral” to the story of A Mother? If so, what is it?
46
for further information . . .
Borras, f. m. Maxim Gorky the Writer: An Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1967.
Clyman, Toby W. and Judith Vowles, eds. Russia through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from
Tsarist Russia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Corrigan, Robert W. The Modern Theatre. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964.
Figes, Orlando. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2002.
Gassner, John. Masters of the Drama. Dover Publications, 1954.
Gorki, Maxim. Fragments from My Diary. London: Philip Allan & Co., 1924.
Gorky, Maxim. Autobiography of Maxim Gorky: My Childhood; In the World; My Universities.
Translated by Isidor Schneider. Secaucus, nj: The Citadel Press, 1949.
____. Children of the Sun. Translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine. London: Nick
Mern Books, 2000.
____. Culture and the People. Translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine. University
Press of the Pacific, 2001.
____. The Lower Depths and Other Plays. Translated by Alexander Bakshy. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1945.
____. On Literature. Translated by Julius Katzer and Ivy Litvinov. Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1973.
____. Reminiscences. Introduced by Mark Van Doren. New York: Dover Publications, 1946.
____. Selected Short Stories. Introduced by Stefan Zweig. New York: Frederick Ungar
Publishing Co., 1959.
____. Seven Plays. Translated by Alexander Bakshy. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1945.
____. Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918.
Translated and introduced by Herman Ermolaev. New York: Paul S. Erikson, 1968.
____. Vassa Zheleznova. Translated by Tania Alexander and Tim Suter. Oxford: Amber
Lane Press Ltd., 1988.
47
Kaun, Alexander. Maxim Gorky and His Russia. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison
Smith, 1931.
Perris, g. h. Russia in Revolution. New York: Brentano’s, 1905.
Roskin, Alexander. From the Banks of the Volga: The Life of Maxim Gorky. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1946.
Scherr, Barry P. Maxim Gorky. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.
Stanislavsky, Constantin. My Life in Art. Translated by j. j. Robbins. Boston: Little, Brown,
and Company, 1924.
Troyat, Henry. Gorky: A Biography. Translated by Lowell Bair. New York: Crown
Publishers, 1989.
web sites of interest
Books and Writers: Maksim Gorky. www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gorki.htm.
Discovering Books: Maxim Gorky. www.discoveringbooks.com/maximgorky/.
Marxists.org Internet Archive: Maxim Gorky. www.marxists.org/archive/gorky-maxim/
index.htm.
Moonstruck Drama Bookstore: Maxim Gorky. www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/
clsc73.html.
Spartacus Educational: Maxim Gorky. www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/rusgorky.htm.
SBC Yahoo Directory: Maxim Gorky. dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/Literature/Authors/
Literary_Fiction/Gorky__Maxim__1868_1936_/.
48
“Boredom,” by Maxim Gorky. history.amusement-parks.com/gorky.htm. (An essay by Gorky
about Coney Island, which originally appeared in The Independent August 8, 1907.)
Short Stories: Maxim Gorky. www.bibliomania.com/0/5/197/frameset.html
The Face of Russia. www.pbs.org/weta/faceofrussia/intro.html.
Russian History. www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/history.html.
Russian Empire in Photographs. all-photo.ru/empire/index.en.html.