Maxim Gorky

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Maxim Gorki (disambiguation) .

Maxim Gorki, around 1900

Maxim Gorky ( Russian Максим Горький , scientific transliteration Maksim Gorki or Gorky born March 16, ^jul. / 28. March  1868 ^greg. In Nizhny Novgorod ; †  18th June 1936 in Gorki-10, west of Moscow) was a Russian writer . His real name was Alexei Maximowitsch Peschkow (Russian Алексей Максимович Пешков , transliteration Aleksej Maksimovič Peškov ).

Life

Childhood and youth

Alexei Peschkow grew up in the poorest of circumstances at a time when the misery of the masses in Russia had become an important issue of literary and social debate. His grandfather was a Volga grain trader , his father a carpenter . After the early death of his father, the young Alexei and his mother were housed with their grandparents. Physical violence within the family was not uncommon. When he was ten, his mother died of tuberculosis and his grandfather took him out of school after only three years.

From now on Peschkow had to earn money himself, initially as a rag collector. Before he could live from his literary work, he worked as a runner, kitchen boy, bird dealer, salesman, icon painter, ship unloader, journeyman baker, bricklayer , night watchman , railroad worker and paralegal.

In the late 1880s he came into contact with the revolutionary movement for the first time in Kazan , where he tried unsuccessfully for admission to the university . He worked for a baker whose shop was also the library of a Marxist secret group.

Peschkow read a lot and acquired extensive, but unsystematic, knowledge as an autodidact. The insurmountable gap between him and the student youth bothered him and was possibly the reason for an attempted suicide in 1887 in which he shot himself in the chest. However, the death of his grandparents this year and an unrequited love are also suspected as causes.

Writer and political activist

Maxim Gorky and Fyodor Chaliapin

In 1889 the tsarist police first became aware of Peschkow because of his rebellious contacts. In the same year he presented a poem to the writer Vladimir Korolenko and received relentless criticism. For the time being he turned away from literature and walked through Russia, Ukraine and across the Caucasus to Tbilisi . There he came into contact with revolutionaries and students who encouraged him to record his experiences in literature. Alexei Peschkow signed his first story Makar Tschudra , which appeared in the provincial newspaper Kawkas on September 12, 1892 , with the pseudonym Maxim Gorki , translated: the bitter. From then on he used this pseudonym.

Gorky moved to Samara , where, through Korolenko's mediation, he got a job as a journalist for a provincial newspaper, whose corrector he married Ekaterina Pavlovna Wolschina in 1896. In 1897 their son Maxim Peschkow (1897–1934) and in 1898 their daughter Katja were born, who died of meningitis at the age of five . After their daughter's death, the couple separated in 1903.

In 1894 he achieved his breakthrough as a writer with the story Tschelkasch . The sketches and stories published in 1898 were also a great success. In 1901 he wrote the song of the petrel after a student demonstration in Saint Petersburg , which ended in a massacre due to the brutal intervention of the police . The storm, which this bird heralded with "the power of anger, the flame of passion and the certainty of victory", was understood in revolutionary circles as the revolution and the poem was performed at relevant gatherings.

After the success of his plays Die Kleinbürger (1901) and Nachtasyl (1902), Gorky was so popular that the various attempts by the regime to take action against him repeatedly triggered storms of protest. For example, Gorky was banned from sleeping, which meant that he was not allowed to stay overnight in cities. During a trip to the Crimea , where he was referred for signing a treatise against the official presentation of the aforementioned demonstration, his friends and admirers - among them Fyodor Chalyapin and Ivan Bunin - gave him a triumphant reception in Podolsk . Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko protested against the decision of Tsar Nicholas II to revoke Gorky's appointment as honorary member of the Academy of Sciences . After his protest against the slaughter of unarmed civilians on January 9th ^jul. / January 22, 1905 ^greg. , the so-called Petersburg Bloody Sunday , he was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress , but was released again after protests by the foreign press. His drama Children of the Sun (1905) was written while in prison .

Before the revolution

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky around 1900

In the brief period of political loosening after the 1905 revolution , Gorky worked tirelessly for the revolution through publications and meetings. At the newspaper Novaya Schisn (New Life), which he had co-founded, he met Lenin , who worked there as editor-in-chief.

When the political climate became more severe again, he went abroad. In France he agitated against a loan from the western states to Russia, which had been weakened after the Russo-Japanese War . When the loan was granted, he wrote the pamphlet The beautiful France . In the United States , he was supposed to collect party donations, but remained relatively unsuccessful after his opponents played off the fact that he was not married to his companion Marija Andrejewa .

In a country house in the Adirondacks Mountains, Gorki et al. a. the novel The Mother , which Lenin later repeatedly held up to him as a positive example of his literature and which became a classic in the Soviet Union.

After his open agitation against the loan, Gorky could not return to Russia. He spent the years 1907 to 1913 on the island of Capri , where he dealt exclusively with Russian and revolutionary topics. With Lenin's support he founded a school for revolutionaries and propagandists, received numerous visitors (e.g. the Russian writer Novikov-Priboj ) who made a pilgrimage to him, and answered countless letters from citizens of Russia who expressed their worries and hopes turned him.

Maxim Gorky around 1906

It was during this time that Gorky's first argument took place with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , the then chairman of the Russian Communist Party . Gorky, for whom religion has always played an important role, joined the theories of the god-builders around Alexander Bogdanov , who condemned Lenin's theses as “deviating from Marxism ”. The conflict arose above all over Gorki's work "Eine Beichte" (A Confession), in which he tried to reconcile Christianity and Marxism, and flared up again in 1913 when Gorky pleaded against the "corrosive spirit of Dostoyevsky " in favor of "the search for God temporarily aside allow".

An amnesty on the occasion of the tricentenary of the Romanov family in 1913 enabled Gorky to return to Russia.

Gorky's skepticism towards the October Revolution of 1917 was the reason for his second major confrontation with Lenin. Gorky was basically in favor of a social revolution, but said that the Russian people were not yet ready for it; the masses would first have to develop the necessary awareness to rise from their misery. He later spoke of his “fear at the time that the dictatorship of the proletariat might lead to the dissolution and destruction of the only truly revolutionary force we possessed at the time: the Bolshevik, politically trained workers. This annihilation would have compromised the very idea of ​​social revolution for a long time ”.

Opposition and emigration

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Immediately after the revolution, Gorky founded various associations to counteract the decline in science and culture he feared. The committee for the improvement of the living conditions of scholars, for example, was supposed to support members of the intelligentsia who suffered particularly from hunger, cold and political arbitrariness after the revolution. In 1918 the newspaper Novaya Shizn (New Life) - now Gorky's platform in which he polemicized against Lenin's Pravda and branded lynching and the poison of power - was banned. In 1920 his second wife, Marija Feodorovna Andreyeva , a former actress, was appointed Commissioner for All Russian Theater and Minister for All Theater and Art, while Gorky took the opportunity to buy works of art from starving citizens. When some intellectuals, including Gorky, set up an aid committee for the hungry, many were arrested because Lenin suspected a conspiracy. Lenin advised Gorky to have his re-active pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) treated in a foreign sanatorium.

From December 1921 to April 1922 Gorky was treated in the St. Blasien lung sanatorium in the Black Forest, then he stayed in Berlin, then in Heringsdorf on the Baltic Sea, now with his new partner Marija Budberg and his son Maxim and daughter-in-law Alexejewa Peschkowa from Berlin. In the Villa Irmgard there (which opened in 1948 as the Maxim Gorki Museum) he worked on the third part of his autobiography My Universities . On September 25, 1922, he traveled on to Bad Saarow . From June to November 1923 Gorki lived with M. Budberg, son Maxim and daughter-in-law Timoscha in Günterstal near Freiburg , first in the Hotel Kyburg , then in a rented property on Dorfstrasse; This was followed by stays in Marienbad and Prague , before he settled in Sorrento in the spring of 1924 after the fascist government of Italy had given him permission to do so after some hesitation.

His stay in Germany was financed by the Soviet trade mission , which was also the German headquarters of the Cheka . Gorky's second ex-wife Marija Fjodorovna Andreyeva worked there and kept in touch with him. Here she introduced him to Pyotr Kryuchkov , who soon served as his secretary. His son Maxim Peschkow, who also lives in Berlin, and his wife received a grant from the trade mission. This is why Gorky was not entirely comfortable with the exile press. The magazine Besseda (entertainment), which he produced with Andrej Bely and Chodassewitsch for distribution in the Soviet Union, was not allowed to be introduced there and failed in 1925.

After Lenin's death in January 1924, Gorky did not return to the Soviet Union because he was skeptical of Lenin's successors and Maria Budberg was not ready either. Rather, he stayed in Italy until 1927 and wrote memoirs of Lenin in which he described Lenin as the person he had loved most. He also worked there on the extensive novels The Work of Artamanows and The Life of Klim Samgin .

Soviet writer

June 20, 1929: Maxim Gorki (fourth from right), framed by functionaries of the Soviet secret police OGPU , visits the "Solovetsky Camp for Special Use" ( SLON )

On October 22, 1927, the Communist Academy decided in a ceremony on the occasion of Gorky's 35th anniversary as a writer to recognize him as a proletarian writer. When Gorky returned to Soviet Russia soon afterwards, he received all sorts of honors: Gorky received the Order of Lenin and became a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU . His sixtieth birthday was celebrated in the whole country, numerous institutions, u. a. the Moscow Art Theater and the Moscow Literature Institute were named after him. His hometown of Nizhny Novgorod was renamed Gorky in 1932. In 1930 he founded the magazine Soviet Union .

In numerous literary works of the time, those elements of his work were emphasized that fit into the canon of Socialist Realism , others were kept secret. The mother , Gorki's only work in which the hero is a factory worker and thus a real proletarian, was to serve as a model for the new Soviet literature .

In the last years of his life, Gorky himself described his earlier skepticism towards the October Revolution as a mistake, whereupon the West called him " Stalin's model writer". While traveling through the Soviet Union, he marveled at the achievements of progress . He didn't seem to notice the downside. He was the editor of the book on the White Sea-Baltic Canal , in which a number of well-known writers praised the work of hundreds of thousands of slave laborers as a great achievement. After a visit to the Solovetsky Islands on June 20, 1929, although he obviously saw through the staging of a well-ordered re-education instead of the horror of the camp, he wrote an anthemic travelogue describing the living and working conditions of the inmates and their successful “reforging” useful Soviet citizens.

Gorky spent most of his time in a villa in Moscow, where he was monitored around the clock by GUGB ( KGB predecessor organization) staff. As before, he tried to educate the population and promote young writers. a. the well-known bibliographical series The Life of Notable Personalities and the journal Literary Teaching , which aims to teach young authors the literary craft.

Klaus Mann , who had attended a congress of Soviet writers in Moscow in 1934, reported an invitation to Gorki's house:

“The poet, who knew and portrayed extreme poverty, the darkest misery, resided in princely luxury; the ladies of his family received us in Parisian toilets; the meal at his table was of Asian opulence. [...] Then there was a lot of vodka and caviar. "

Gorky died on June 18, 1936; his urn was buried by the Kremlin wall in Moscow. Numerous rumors grew up around his cause of death; the writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński put the different versions together in 1954 in the essay The Seven Deaths of Maxim Gorki . In the third Moscow show trial in 1938, the disgraced former NKVD boss Genrich Jagoda was accused, among other things, of having caused the murder of Gorky and, before that, the murder of Gorky's son Maxim († 1934) through incorrect medical treatment. Gorky's secretary and two of his doctors were also convicted and shot for this. As late as the 1980s, literature encyclopedias found “murder by the Soviet State Security Service” as the likely cause of death. Today, however, a natural death is predominantly assumed as a result of Gorky's already compromised state of health.

Gorky's works were burned in Germany in 1933 and removed from libraries until 1945, e. B. The beggars.

See also

• Zinovi Pechkoff , Gorky's adopted son

Works

Autobiographical writings

• My childhood (Детство) (1913/1914)
• Among Strangers (В людях) (1915/1916)
• My universities (Мои университеты) (1923)

Novels

• Foma Gordejew (Фома Гордеев) (1899)
• Three people (Трое) (1900/1901)
• The mother (Мать) (1907)
• A confession (Исповедь) (1908)
• One Summer (Лето) (1909)
• The town of Okurov (Городок Окуров) (1909)
• Matvej Koshemjakin (Жизнь Матвея Кожемякина) (1910)
• The work of Artamanov (Дело Артамоновых) (1925)
• The life of Klim Samgin (Жизнь Клима Самгина) (1925–1936)

Narratives (selection)

• Makar Tschudra (Макар Чудра) (1892)
• Tschelkasch (Челкаш) (1894)
• My companion (Мой спутник) (1894)
• The Song of the Falcon (Песня о Соколе) (1895)
• The old Isergil (Старуха Изергиль) (1895)
• The Exit (1895)
• The wood raftsmen (1895)
• A few days in the role of editor of a provincial newspaper (1895)
• How Semaga Was Captured (1895)
• The Chan and his son (1896)
• The Reader (1896)
• The chimney sweep (1896)
• Warenka Olessowa (1896)
• The couple Orlov (Супруги Орловы) (1897)
• Past People (Бывшие люди) (1897)
• Malwa (Мальва) (1897)
• The no-good (Озорник) (1897)
• Konovalov (Коновалов) (1897)
• Cain and Artyom (Каин и Артем) (1898)
• Twenty-six and one (Двадцать шесть и одна) (1899) ( digitized version )
• Song of the Petrel (Песня о буревестнике) (1901)
• January 9th (1907)
• The Spy (title of the editions in Russian: The Life of a Useless Man ) Novella, (1907)
• The Children of Parma (Дети Пармы) (1911)
• Gray Ghosts (Страсти-мордасти) (1913)

Dramas (selection)

• The petty bourgeoisie (Мещане) (1901), first performed in 1902 in St. Petersburg
• Nachtasyl (На дне) or Am Boden (1902), first performance in 1902 Moscow
• Summer Guests (Дачники) (1905), premiered in 1904 in St. Petersburg
• Barbarians (Варвары) (1905), first performance 1906 Kursk
• Die Feinde (Враги) (1906), premiered in 1906 Berlin
• The Last (Последние) (1908), world premiere 1910 Berlin (Deutsches Theater, director: Max Reinhardt)
• Counterfeit money (Фальшивая монета) (1913), first performance 1928 Rome
• Weirdos , first performed in 1910 in St. Petersburg
• Children of the Sun (Дети солнца) (1905) (cf. Leonid Andrejew ), first performed in 1905 in St. Petersburg
• Wassa Schelesnowa (Васса Железнова) (1910) Second version 1935, first performance 1911 Moscow
• The Sykov family , first performance 1918 Petrograd
• Somow and others (Сомов и другие) (1931), first performance 1954 Yaroslavl
• The Old One (Старик) (1915), premiered in 1919 Moscow
• Egor Bulytschow and others (Егор Булычов и другие) (1931), first performed in 1932 Moscow and Leningrad,
• Dostigajew and others (Достигаев и другие) (1932), first performed in 1933 Leningrad
• Jakow Bogomolow , first performance 1958 Novosibirsk

Honors

Gorki House in Bad Saarow

• In 1932 the town of his birth was renamed Gorky. In 1990 it got its old name, Nizhny Novgorod , back.
• Maxim-Gorki-Theater in Berlin (located in the former place of activity of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin ; founded in 1952 in the Soviet sector of Berlin)
• There was also a Soviet cruise ship called " Maxim Gorkiy ".
• From 1936 to 1999 the University of Kharkiv was named after him AM Gorky Kharkov State University
• From 1932 to 1990 Moscow's Tverskaya Street was called Gorky Street .
• In the GDR , numerous streets were named after Gorky.
• On July 31, 1947, a Gorkistraße was dedicated in the French sector of Berlin, which still bears her name today.
• The Gorky Ridge in Antarctica also bears his name.

Quotes

"I believe that a time will come when Gorky's work will be forgotten, but it is doubtful whether Gorky will be forgotten in a thousand years."

- Anton Chekhov : Letters 1877–1904 , 1903

"Anyone who knows the work of Gorky knows the Russian people of today and in them the need and deprivation of all those who are depressed, he knows from a recognizing soul as much their last, rarest and most passionate feeling as their daily poor existence."

- Stefan Zweig : Harenberg actor leader

literature

• Maxim Gorki - Stefan Zweig Correspondence. Edited by Kurt Böttcher. Reclam, Leipzig 1980, ISBN 3-379-00134-1 .
• Boris Bjalik: Revolution and Art. Reflections on the relations between Lenin and Gorky. Translated by Brigitta Schröder. Structure, Berlin 1974, DNB 750179201 .
• Christa Ebert: Maxim Gorki in Saarow 1922/23. Frankfurt (Oder): Kleist Memorial and Research Center. 2003. (= Frankfurter Buntbücher; 33) ISBN 3-9807802-9-5 .
• Nina Gourfinkel: Maxim Gorki. With testimonials and photo documents. 5th edition. Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt. 1999. (= Rowohlt's monographs; 50000; rororo picture monographs) ISBN 3-499-50009-4 .
• Hans Günther: The socialist superman. M. Gor'kij and the Soviet hero myth. Stuttgart u. a .: Metzler. 1993. ISBN 3-476-00901-7 .
• Beatrice Haas: Drama Translation. Linguistic and dramaturgical aspects, illustrated using the example of the play "Summer Guests" by Maksim Gor'kij. Buske. Hamburg 1982 (= Hamburg contributions for Russian teachers, 25) ISBN 3-87118-501-9 .
• Harri Jünger: Maxim Gorkis Klim Samgin - a current masterpiece of world literature. (= Scientific journal of the Friedrich Schiller University 1966, issue 1).
• Nikolaus Katzer: Maksim Go´rkijs way into the Russian social democracy. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1990 (= publications of the Eastern European Institute Munich, History series, 58) ISBN 3-447-02962-5 .
• Geir Kjetsaa: Maxim Gorky. A biography. Claassen, Hildesheim 1996, ISBN 3-546-00109-5 .
• Armin Knigge: Maksim Gor'kij. The literary work. Wewel, Munich 1994 (= sources and studies on Russian intellectual history, 13) ISBN 3-87904-111-3 .
• Nadeshda Ludwig: Maxim Gorki, life and work. The European Book, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88436-126-0 .
• Wolfgang Pailer: M. Gor'kij's early dramas in their relationship to AP Cechov's dramatic work. Sagner, Munich 1978. (= Slavic contributions, 122) ISBN 3-87690-148-0 .
• Henning Rischbieter: Maxim Gorki. Friedrich, Velber 1973 (= Friedrich's playwright of the world theater, 69).
• Cecilia von Studnitz: “You don't put out the fire with tears.” Maxim Gorki and his life. Droste, Düsseldorf 1993, ISBN 3-7700-1004-3 .
• Henri Troyat : Gorky. Petrel of the Revolution. A biography. Piper, Munich (= Piper 978 series) ISBN 3-492-10978-0 .
• Thomas Urban : Russian writers in Berlin in the twenties. Nicolai, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89479-097-0 , pp. 60-99.

filming

• German: Das Werk der Artamanows , Russian Delo Artamonowych , Polish Artamonow i synowie. b / w., director: Grigori Roschal ; Screenplay Sergei Yermolinsky. Production Mosfilm 1941, German premiere. October 7, 1947, short review. The film illustrates Gorky . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1947 ( online ).
• 1967: Summer guests (Datschniki)
• 1973: Yegor Bulytschow and others (Yegor Bulytschow i drugije)
• 1976: summer guests
• 1983: Wassa (Wassa) to Wassa Schelesnowa

Web links

Commons : Maxim Gorky  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Commons : Maxim Gorki  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Maxim Gorki  - Sources and full texts

Wikiquote: Maxim Gorky  - Quotes

• Literature by and about Maxim Gorki in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Maxim Gorki  in the German Digital Library
• Newspaper article about Maxim Gorki in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Over 370 publications are listed in the RussGUS database (there under search - simple search: gor'kij, * OR gorki, *)
• Works by Maxim Gorki in the Gutenberg-DE project
• Selected texts by Maxim Gorki (English) ( German )
• Janca Imwolde: Maxim Gorki. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )
• The unknown Gorki blog by Prof. Armin Knigge
• Hanns-Martin Wietek: Maxim Gorki, the romantic and revolutionary
• Hanns-Martin Wietek: Gorky, revolutionary and pragmatist
• Maxim Gorky as a brother of the 24th degree. The two arms form a right angle. Painter: Boris Grigoryev, 1926

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Example for the spelling Maksim Gor'kij in the catalog of the German National Library
2. ↑ Example for the spelling Maksim Gorkij in the catalog of the German National Library
3. ↑ Other spellings, forms of names and names in the catalog of the German National Library
4. ↑ Not to be confused with Gorky Leninskiye south of Moscow, the place where Lenin died .
5. ↑ Maksim Gorky: selected letters / translated an edited by Andrew Barratt, Barry P. Scherr. Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-19-815175-6
6. ^ Klaus Hockenjos: Maxim Gorki in the Black Forest. In: Yearbook 2013 of the Breisgau-Geschichtsverein, Volume 132, Freiburg, Pages 107-123
7. ↑ Patrick Rotman : Gulag - The Soviet "head office of the camps". Arte , accessed March 31, 2020 .  Episode 1, minute 16:40
8. ↑ Applebaum: The Gulag , pp. 81–84. Karl Schlögel: Solowki - Laboratory of Extremes ( Memento from July 28, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ Klaus Mann : The turning point . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, p. 329 f.
10. ↑ ^{a b} Reinhard Lauer : History of Russian Literature, p. 675
11. ↑ Gero von Wilpert: Lexikon der Weltliteratur, Volume 1. Stuttgart 1988, p. 558: "[...] was probably murdered by the Soviet State Security Service."
12. ↑ Armin Knigge: A heavy debt - Gorky and Stalin . Website “The Unknown Gorky”, June 18, 2006, accessed June 18, 2016.
13. ↑ Werner Treß: Burned books 1933. With fire against the freedom of the spirit. Federal Agency for Civic Education BpB, Bonn 2009, ISBN 3-8389-0003-0 , pp. 128-137 (reprint of the story).
14. ↑ Gorkistraße. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
15. ^ Anton Chekhov: Letters 1877-1904 . Five volumes. 5th volume. Edited and translated from Russian by Peter Urban. Diogenes, Zurich 1979, ISBN 3-257-06190-0 .
16. ↑ Quoted from: Harenberg Schauspielführer . Harenberg, Dortmund 1997, ISBN 3-611-00541-X .
17. ↑ See also: Stefan Zweig: Letters to Writers in projekt-gutenberg.org