A people's tragedy

The deaths of two of Russia’s greatest poets, Alexander Blok and Nikolai Gumilev, were the last straw for Gorky. Blok had been struck down in 1920 by rheumatic fever as a result of living through the civil war in unheated lodgings and in hunger. But Blok’s real affliction was despair and disillusionment with the outcome of the revolution. To begin with he had welcomed its destructive violence as a purgatory for the rotten old world of Europe out of which a new and purer world of Asiatics — the Scythians — would emerge. His epic poem ‘The Twelve’, written in 1918, had depicted twelve rough Red Guards marching ‘in step with the Revolution’ through a blinding snowstorm destroying the old world and making the new. At their head, bearing the Red Flag, wreathed in white roses, and walking lightly above the snow, was the figure of Jesus Christ. Blok later noted that while writing this sensational poem: ‘I kept hearing — I mean literally hearing with my ears — a great noise around me, a noise made up of many sounds (it was probably the noise of the old world crumbling).’ For a while Blok continued to believe in the messianic mission of the Bolsheviks. But by 1921 he had become disillusioned. For three years there was no poetry. Gorky, a close friend, compared him to a ‘lost child’. Blok plagued him with questions about death and said that he had given up all ‘faith in the wisdom of humanity’. Kornei Chukovsky recalled Blok’s appearance at a poetry reading in May 1921: ‘I was sitting backstage with him. On stage some “orator” or other … was cheerfully demonstrating to the crowd that as a poet Blok was already dead … Blok leaned over to me and said, “That’s true. He’s telling the truth, I’m dead.” ’ When Chukovsky asked him why he did not write poetry any more, Blok told him: ‘All sounds have stopped. Can’t you hear that there are no longer any sounds?’ That same month Blok took to his death-bed. His doctor insisted that he needed to be sent abroad to a special sanatorium. On 29 May Gorky wrote to Lunacharsky on his behalf. ‘Blok is Russia’s finest living poet. If you forbid him to go abroad, and he dies, you and your comrades will be guilty of his death.’ For several weeks Gorky continued to plead for a visa. Lunacharsky wrote in support to the Central Committee on 11 July. But nothing was done. Then, at last, on 10 August, a visa came. It was one day late: the night before the poet had died.18

If Blok had died through despair and neglect, the death of Gumilev, just two weeks later, was much more straightforward. He was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka, jailed for a few days, and then shot without trial. Gumilev was accused of being involved in a monarchist conspiracy — an allegation that was almost certainly false, although he was a monarchist by sentiment. A committee of intellectuals formed at Blok’s funeral had petitioned for his release. The Academy of Sciences had offered to guarantee his appearance in court. Gorky was asked to intervene and rushed to Moscow to see Lenin. But by the time he returned to Petrograd with an order for his release, Gumilev had already been shot. Gorky was so upset he coughed up blood. Zamyatin said he had never seen him ‘so angry as he was on the night when Gumilev was shot’.19

Gumilev was the first great Russian poet to be executed by the Bolsheviks. His and Blok’s deaths symbolized for Gorky, as for the intelligentsia as a whole, the death of the revolution. Hundreds of people — ‘all that remained of literary Petersburg’ in Zamyatin’s words — turned out for the funeral of Blok. Nina Berberova, then only a young girl, recalls how on seeing the announcement of Blok’s death she was ‘seized by a feeling, which I never again experienced, that I was suddenly and sharply orphaned … The end is coming. We are lost.’ Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev’s first wife, similarly mourned, not just for a poet but for the ideals of a generation, at Blok’s funeral:

In a silver coffin we bore him

Alexander, our pure swan,

Our sun extinguished in torment.20

Two months later, plagued by ill health himself, Gorky left Russia, seemingly for good.

ii The Unconquered Country

Fours years of revolution had not reunited the villagers of Andreevskoe. They remained divided between the two old rivals. On the one side stood Sergei Semenov, progressive farmer and reformer, who dreamt of bringing the trappings of the modern world to this poor and God-forsaken hole. On the other stood Grigorii Maliutin, the heavy-built and heavy-drinking peasant elder, an Old Believer and opponent of all change, who had now resisted Semenov’s reform efforts for the best part of thirty years.