A people's tragedy

Gorky’s decision to emigrate from Russia was preceded by mounting conflict with the Bolsheviks. The mindless terror of the past four years, the destruction of the intelligentsia, the persecution of the Mensheviks and SRs, the crushing of the Kronstadt rebels, and the Bolsheviks’ callousness towards the famine crisis — all these had turned Gorky into a bitter enemy of the new regime. Much of Gorky’s enmity focused on Zinoviev, the party boss in his own Petrograd. Zinoviev disliked Gorky, he saw his house as a ‘nest of counter-revolution’, and placed him under constant surveillance: Gorky’s mail was opened; his house was constantly searched; and his close friends were threatened with arrest. Gorky’s most angry letters of denunciation during the Red Terror were all addressed to Zinoviev. In one he claimed that his constant arrests had made ‘people hate not only Soviet Power but — in particular — you in person’. Yet it soon became clear that behind Zinoviev stood Lenin himself. The Bolshevik leader was scathing about Gorky’s denunciations. In a menacing letter of July 1919 he claimed that the writer’s whole ‘state of mind’ had been made ‘quite sick’ by the ‘embittered bourgeois intellectuals’ who ‘surrounded’ him in Petrograd. ‘I don’t want to thrust my advice on you,’ Lenin threatened, ‘but I cannot help saying: change your circumstances radically, your environment, your abode, your occupation — otherwise life may disgust you for good.’16

Gorky’s disillusionment with Lenin deepened during 1920. The Bolshevik leader was opposed to the editorial independence of Gorky’s publishing house, World Literature, and threatened to cease supporting it financially. Gorky complained bitterly to Lunacharsky. He rightly suspected that Lenin was trying to bring all publishing under state control — something he found anathema — and claimed (or threatened) that the only way to keep the project going was to run it from abroad. But with the stern Lenin breathing down his neck there was little the commissar could do. In his play Don Quixote (1922) Lunacharsky reenacted the strained triangular relationship between himself (in the part of Don Balthazar), Gorky (Don Quixote) and Lenin (Don Rodrigo). Here are Don Balthazar’s parting words to Don Quixote. They summarize the clash between Gorky and Lenin — between the ideals of the revolution and its grim ‘necessities’:

If we had not broken the plots in the rear, we would have led our army to ruin. Ah, Don Quixote! I do not wish to aggravate your guilt, but here you played your fatal role. I will not hide the fact that it came into stern Rodrigo’s head to bring down the threatening hand of the law on you, as a lesson to all the soft-hearted people who thrust themselves and their philanthropy into life, which is stern and complicated and full of responsibility.17