"Everything went better then. Men lived peacefully in the fear of
God, the Lord took care of every one. War, smallpox, famine came and
cleaned out the populace; those that remained, after having got the
coffins ready, lived easier. God pitied us. Now there is no more
war; He leaves us to our own poor devices."
Speeches like this abound in the works of Veressayev. A dull
sadness, bordering on despair, breathes forth from the pages. It
seems, at times, as if the Russian peasant could never awake from
his torpor, because the author represents him as full of infinite
egoism, without any spirit of solidarity, sacrificing everything for
love of his sorry little house and his morsel of ground, which is
insufficient to nourish him. But we must remember that the Marxian
point of view, which the author takes, explains in part the horror
of such pictures.
According to Veressayev the poor peasants can better their position
only by getting rid of their land, in order to become free
proletarians. But if the peasant class is unfortunate, it is so, for
the most part, because it is the most exploited and the most
oppressed. It is not, then, the getting rid of their land that will
bring the peasants salvation; on the contrary, they must fight for
it against their oppressors. The peasants are beginning to
understand the necessity of this struggle, and their late uprisings
in several provinces have shown that they lack neither solidarity
nor organization.
In the story called, "The End of Andrey Ivanovich," which is about
the working class of Russia, we see the transformation of a peasant
into a "city man." In his new surroundings, it is true, the
wine-shop plays an important role, but schools are organized there
which inspire a taste for reading, and "thought" gradually awakens.
Andrey has not yet rid himself of his rustic unsociability; however,
he is beginning to become civilized, and is receiving city culture.
He tries to free himself from his misery, from his degradation. He
beats his wife when he is drunk, but, at the same time, he gets
angry at a friend when he beats his mistress.... According to his
own confession he reads many useless things, nevertheless he can
become interested in a serious work. If he drinks to excess, it is
to "drive away the thoughts" that torment him. He wants to analyze
every question and find out what is at the bottom of it. He is the
spiritual brother of Natasha, Chekanhov, and Tanya.
The sequel to this story is "The Straight Road." This time we are
transported into the world of factory workers, a world lamentable
for its misery, despair, and crime. Andrey Ivanovich's wife,
Alexandra Mikhailovna, being without resources after the death of
her husband, with a little daughter in arms, enters a book-binding
establishment, belonging to a man named Semidalov. But the foreman,
a vicious and evil-minded man, reigns as despot. It is he who gives
out the work. The young girls who listen to his advances are sure
of being shown partiality; the others are badly treated. As
Alexandra wants to live honestly, her work in the shop is made very
hard. Her best friend, Tanya, who inadvertently spilled oil on some
paper and could not pay for the damage, had to give herself to the
foreman. Finally Tanya despairs and ends by drowning herself.
Alexandra is saved, thanks to a "loveless" marriage with the
locksmith, Lestmann. She accepts this union so that she will not
have to starve and can remain "straight." Thus, the "straight road"
which Alexandra wanted to follow has forced her finally to sell
herself, to marry a man whom she does not love.
* * * * *
Each page of Veressayev's work exists merely to throw light on this
or that social question, considered from a well defined point of
view. The secret of his success rests mostly in the frank, sincere
manner in which he has approached certain problems. At the same
time, all of his work breathes forth a deep and tender love for
those who suffer. In reality, there is not a single book by
Veressayev which might not be a confession; all that he writes he
has already experienced himself, and his work vibrates with a
delicate and personal emotion. It is only necessary to read "The
Memoirs of a Physician," which is almost an autobiography, in order
to perceive the moral relationship that exists between Veressayev
and the heroes of his stories.
This book is the confession of a physician from the time of his
early studies. The young man is astonished at the number of maladies
that exist and by the unbelievable variety of keen suffering that
nature inflicts upon the human species, man. Soon he is obliged to
make a discovery that stuns him: that medicine is incapable of
curing many evils. It only gropes about, trying thousands of
remedies before it arrives at a sure result. The scruples and
anxiety of the student increase, especially after an autopsy on a
woman in the amphitheatre, when the professor announces that the
woman has succumbed because the surgeon, who was operating, swooned,
and ends by saying: "In such difficult operations the very best
surgeons are not safe from accidents of this kind." After this, the
professor shook hands with his colleague and every one left. At that
time, doubt entered the mind of the young man. And so, within a
period of ten years, he passes from extreme optimism to the same
degree of pessimism.
We follow him in the hospitals, where he is scandalized by the
brutality of the teaching, which makes use of the unwilling bodies
of sick people. "Not being able to pay for their treatment in
money, they have to pay with their bodies." Finally, the student
becomes a doctor himself. Full of faith and knowledge, he starts
practice in a small market-town of central Russia. But his work soon
cools him down; in the clinic he had studied mostly exceptional
cases; now he is disconcerted by simple and every-day sicknesses.
His ignorance leads to the following tragic case:
One day, a poor and widowed washerwoman brings him her sick child,
whom she does not want to take to the hospital because her two
oldest children died there. The child is a weak boy of eight years
who has caught scarlet-fever. At first, the inside of the throat
begins to swell, and, to prevent an abscess, the doctor orders
rubbings with a mercurial ointment. The next day, he finds the boy
all aquiver and covered with pimples. "There is no mistake," he
says, "the rubbing has spread the infection into the neighboring
organs and a general poisoning of the blood has taken place. The
little boy is lost.... All that day and night I wandered about the
streets. I could think of nothing, and I felt crushed by the horror
of the thing. Only at times this thought came into my mind: 'I have
killed a human being!'" The child lived ten days more. The night
before his death Veressayev comes to see him. The poor mother is
sobbing in a corner of the miserable room. She pulls herself
together, however, and taking three rubles out of her pocket, offers
them to the trembling doctor, who refuses them. Then this woman
falls down on her knees and thanks him for having pitied her son.
"I'll leave everything, I'll give up everything," sobs the
doctor.... "I have decided to leave for St. Petersburg to-morrow in
order to study some more even if I die of hunger!"
Once the resolution was made to pursue his studies in a more
practical manner, he becomes the house-surgeon of a hospital. But
even there a mass of problems disturb him. He sees how dangerous the
simplest operations are; he is frightened by the unrestraint of the
doctors, who try new methods on the sick, methods the effects of
which are not known, methods that result in the patient's being
inoculated with more sickness. Medicine cannot progress without
direct experimentation, and experience is gained at the expense of
the more unfortunate. Nevertheless, Veressayev does not argue
against this way of working; he shows the facts, and leaves it to
the reader to decide. On the other hand, he does not hide his fear
of the common ignorance of all doctors. Every individual differs
from his neighbor. How distinguish their idiosyncrasies? Once the
scope of a sickness is known, what remedy shall be used? Some say
this, others, that. How shall one choose? Veressayev has felt all of
this; he has tried to harden himself against the unreasonable
ingratitude of some, the scepticism of others; he realizes that
patience, resignation, and heroism are needed in order to struggle
against and support the mortifications in the career of a doctor.
How much easier it would be not to consider medicine as infallible;
to study it as an art rather than as a science. But people prefer to
believe that doctors know everything. They do not want to see the
reality, and this is the reason why sad, and at times tragic
conflicts arise between patient and physician.
Finally, what could the most perfect medical science and the
cleverest doctor do against the enormous mass of sickness and
suffering that are the inevitable result of the social evils, of
which poverty is the most conspicuous? How can one tell a man that
his trade is running him down and that he does not get enough
nourishment? How can one order a man to eat better food, to get more
sleep and more pure air? First, and most important, is the necessity
of curing the social organism.
It is easy to see why this book made many enemies for its author.
There is too much frankness and conscientiousness in these studies
not to anger those who have their greatest interest in concealing
the truth! The upright man who sees primarily in medicine a means to
relieve human suffering, cannot realize without sadness the many
abuses hidden under the name of this science.
* * * * *
"In the War," recently published, is the story of Veressayev's
campaign in Manchuria. In this work, the author has painted
vividly the peregrinations of his moving hospital, and also the
terrible sufferings of the Russian army. By the thousands, the
starved children of the campaign, the Russian foot-soldiers,
stoics and fatalists, sacrificing their lives for a strange and
incomprehensible cause, pass before the eyes of the reader. And in
the background, detaching themselves from the crowd, in their gold
and silver embroidered uniforms, are "the heroes of the war, these
vultures of the advance and rear-guard, who enrich themselves at
the expense of the unfortunate soldiers." A number of these great
chiefs, whose infamy was evident at the end of the war, since they
had shown themselves incapable of dealing with the foreign enemy,
had distinguished themselves by the ferocity they exhibited in
quelling internal troubles. As to the military doctors, the
greater number of them went into the campaign only for commercial
gain. Among the nurses who accompanied them, aside from those who
were real heroines of goodness and devotion, there were many who
prostituted themselves shamefully.
Corruption, carelessness, disorder, and cowardice are shown on every
page of this story, as well as the terrible suffering endured by the
wounded in the hospitals. The wounded were the real martyrs of this
frightful campaign.
* * * * *
Veressayev, like all of his heroes and heroines, wants to help the
people, and for this reason he gets in touch with the revolutionists
who consecrate their work to political and social regeneration,
under the various titles, "narodnikis," Marxists, Socialists,
idealists and so on.... Which of these does he prefer? We do not
know. We find the influence of Marx in his ideas, but we cannot
affirm that he is an absolute Marxian. It seems as if Veressayev,
troubled by the innumerable divergencies of opinion, asks himself
secretly: "Will this war lead to the unity of opinion and program,
so necessary for victory, or by its quarrels will it only retard the
harmony so much sought after?"
It is not discussion that will finally lead to unity, but rather
life itself, with all its realities.
It would be most interesting to read a sequel to the three famous
novels of Veressayev--"Astray," "The Contagion," and "At the
Turning"--in which he would give us the psychology of his former
heroes under present conditions. To-day, the people are not
"astray"; the field is big enough for every one to find the place
that best suits his ideas, tastes, and temperament. Dr. Chekanhov,
if he were living now, instead of being maltreated by the people,
would certainly be their well beloved champion, and perhaps
represent them in the Duma; the timid Tokarev, in spite of his
aversion to the ideas of the revolutionists, could find a place in
the liberal party of the Reforming Democrats, or at least among the
Octobrists; the unfortunate Varenka would not be worn out by her
work as school-mistress, for she would be supported by the peasants.
The peasants themselves are not the miserable and resigned creatures
of Veressayev's earlier stories. Certainly, liberty is not yet a
legal thing in Russia, and the Duma is still an unstable
institution, but the end of absolutism is near, for a great event
has taken place in the empire of the Tsar, namely, this awakening of
the feeling of human dignity, and the spirit of revolt among the
lower strata of the Russian people, which in the past, by its
unconsciousness, formed the granite pedestal of autocracy. The
struggle is terrible, but confidence in final victory redoubles the
energy of the strugglers. A certain Russian was right when he said:
"Formerly, life was formidable, but now it is both formidable and
gay."
In reading the works of Veressayev, Tchekoff, and other painters of
modern Russian society, it is easy to note that not one of them
anticipated this sudden change of scenery on the Russian political
stage, a change which, however, was being prepared in the souls of
the peasants. But let us not reproach them! Russia will always
remain an enigma.
There is a very old story about the son of the peasant Ilya
Murometz. After remaining lazily resting in his "isba" for thirty
years, he suddenly arose, and began to walk with such fury that the
earth trembled. How could these writers conceive the time when this
lazy giant would make up his mind to walk? It is enough to have the
assurance that now, no matter what happens, since he _has_ arisen,
he will not lie down again.
V
MAXIM GORKY
Maxim Gorky is the most original and, after Tolstoy, the most
talented of modern Russian writers. He was born in 1868 or 1869--he
does not know exactly when himself--in a dyer's back shop at Nizhny
Novgorod. His mother, Barbara Kashirina, was the daughter of the
aforementioned dyer; and his father, Maxim Pyeshkov, was an
upholsterer. The child was christened Alexis. His real name, then,
is Alexis Pyeshkov, and Maxim Gorky[6] is only his pseudonym. When
he was four, he lost his father, and three years later, his mother.
He was then taken by his grandfather, who had been a soldier under
Nicholas I, a hard, authoritative, pitiless old man, before whom all
trembled. And it was under his rude tutelage that the child first
began to read. When he was nine, he was sent to work for a
shoemaker, an evil sort of man who maltreated him.
[6] In Russian, Gorky means bitterness.
"One day," Gorky tells us, "I was warming some water for him; the
bowl fell, and I burned my hands badly. That evening I ran away, my
grandfather having scolded me severely. I then became a painter's
apprentice."
He did not remain long in this position. From this time on, his
unsatisfied soul was seized with the "wanderlust." First apprenticed
to an engraver, and then as a gardener, he finally became a scullion
on one of the boats that plies up and down the Volga. Here he felt
more at ease.
On board, in the person of the master-cook, named Smoury, he
unexpectedly met a teacher. This cook, who had been a soldier, loved
to read, and he gave the child all the books that he had in an old
trunk. They consisted of the works of Gogol, Dumas' novels, the
"Lives of the Saints," a manual of geography, and some popular
novels. Surely, a queer collection!
Smoury inspired his scullion, then sixteen years of age, "with an
ardent curiosity for the printed word." A "furious" desire to learn
seized the young fellow; he went to Kazan, a university city, in the
hope of "learning gratuitously all sorts of beautiful things." Cruel
deception! They explained to him that "this was not according to the
established order." Discouraged, a few months later, he took a
position with a baker. He who dreamed of the sun and the open air
had to be imprisoned in a filthy and damp cellar. He remained there
for two years, earning two dollars a month, board and lodging
included; the food, however, was putrid, and his lodging consisted
of an attic which he shared with five other men.
"My life in that bakery," he has said, "left a bitter impression.
Those two years were the hardest of my whole life." He has thus
described his recollections in one of his stories:
"We lived in a wooden box, under a low and heavy ceiling, all
covered with cobwebs and permeated with fine soot. Night pressed us
between the two walls, spattered with spots of mud and all mouldy.
We got up at five in the morning and, stupid and indifferent, began
work at six o'clock. We made bread out of the dough which our
comrades had prepared while we slept. The whole day, from dawn till
ten at night, some of us sat at the table rolling out the dough,
and, to avoid becoming torpid, we would constantly rock ourselves to
and fro while the others kneaded in the flour. The enormous oven,
which resembled a fantastic beast, opened its large jaws, full of
dazzling flames, and breathed forth upon us its hot breath, while
its two black and enormous cavities watched our unending work....
"Thus, from one day to the next, in the floury dust, in the mud that
our feet brought in from the yard, in the suffocating and terrible
heat, we rolled out the dough and made cracknels, moistening them
with our sweat; we hated our work with an implacable hatred; we
never ate what we made, preferring black bread to these odorous
dainties."
* * * * *
At this period of his life, he had occasion to study at first hand
certain places where he received original information which he later
used in writing "Konovalov" and "The Ex-Men," which have thus
acquired an autobiographical value. In fact, he worked a long while
with these "ex-men;" like them, he sawed wood, and carried heavy
burdens. At the same time, he devoted all his spare time to reading
and thinking about problems, which became more and more "cursed" and
alarming. He had found an attentive listener and interlocutor in the
person of his comrade, the baker Konovalov. These two men, while
baking their bread, found time to read. And the walls of the cellar
heard the reading of the works of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Karamzine, and
others. Then they used to discuss the meaning of life. On holidays,
Gorky and Konovalov had for the moment an opportunity to come out of
the hole--this word does not exaggerate--in which they worked, to
breathe the fresh air, to live a bit in nature's bosom, and to see
their fellow men.
"On holidays," Gorky tells us, "we went with Konovalov down to the
river, into the fields; we took a little brandy and bread with us,
and, from morning till evening, we were in the open air."
They often went to an old, abandoned house which served as a refuge
for a whole tribe of miserable and wandering people, who loved to
tell of their wandering lives. Gorky and his companion were always
well received on account of the provisions which they distributed so
generously.
"Each story spread out before our eyes like a piece of lace in which
the black threads predominated--they represented the truth--and
where there were threads of light color--they were the lies. These
people loved us in their way, and were attentive listeners, because
I often read a great deal to them."
Often, these expeditions were not without their risks. One day, two
of the baker's workmen happened to drown in a bog; another time,
they were taken in a police raid and passed the night in the station
house.
It was also at this time that Gorky frequented the company of
several students, not care-free and happy ones, but miserable young
fellows like those whom Turgenev described as "nourished by physical
privations and moral sufferings."
On leaving the bakery, where his health, very much weakened by the
lack of air and by bad food, did not permit him to remain any
longer, he joined those vagabonds, those wanderers, whose
melancholy companion he had been, and whose painter and poet he was
to be. In their company, he traveled through Russia in every sense
of the word, now as a longshoreman, now as a wood-chopper. Whenever
he had a copeck in his pocket he bought books and newspapers and
spent the night reading them. He suffered hunger and cold; he slept
in the open air in summer, and, in winter, in some refuge or cellar.
The feverish activity of so keen an intellect in an organism so
crushed had, as its consequence, one of the attempts at suicide
which are so frequent among the younger generation of the Russians.
In 1889, at the age of twenty-one, Gorky shot himself in the chest,
but he did not succeed in killing himself. Soon afterwards, he
became gate-keeper for the winter at Tzaratzine; but the summer had
hardly come before he began his vagabondage again, in the course of
which he undertook a thousand little jobs in order to keep himself
alive. On the road, he noticed those pariahs whom society does not
want or who do not want society. And of these, in his short stories,
he has created immortal types.
Life was still very hard for him at this time. He has given us a
moving sketch of it in his story entitled: "Once in Autumn." The
hero, who is none other than the author himself, passes the night
under an old, upturned boat, in the company of a prostitute who is
just as poor and just as abandoned as himself. They have broken into
a booth in order to steal enough bread to keep them from starving.
Gorky is sad; he wants to weep; but the poor girl, miserable as she
is, consoles him and covers him with kisses.
"Those were the first kisses any woman ever gave me, and they were
the best, for those that I received later always cost me a lot and
never gave me any joy.... At this time, I was already preparing
myself to be an active and powerful force in society; it seemed to
me at times that I had in part accomplished my purpose.... I dreamed
of political resolutions, of social reorganization; I used to read
such deep and impenetrable authors that their thoughts did not seem
to be a part of them--and now a prostitute warmed me with her body,
and I was in debt to a miserable, shameful creature, banished by a
society that did not want to accord her a place. The wind blew and
groaned, the rain beat down upon the boat, the waves broke around
us, and both of us, closely entwined, trembled from cold and hunger.
And Natasha consoled me; she spoke to me in a sweet, caressing
voice, as only a woman can. In listening to her tender and naive
words, I wept, and those tears washed away from my heart many
impurities, much bitterness, sadness and hatred, all of which had
accumulated there before this night."
At daybreak, they say good-bye to each other, and never see one
another again.
"For more than six months, I looked in all the dives and dens in the
hope of seeing that dear little Natasha once more, but it was in
vain...."
* * * * *
We find him again at Nizhny Novgorod at the time of the call for
military recruits. Gorky was reformed, for, he says, "They do not
accept those who are fallen." Meanwhile, he became a kvass merchant
and exercised this trade for several months. Finally, he became the
secretary of a lawyer, named Lanine. The latter, who had a very good
reputation, took a deep interest in the poor boy whom life had
treated so ill. He became interested in his intellectual development
and, according to Gorky himself, had a great influence on him. At
Nizhny Novgorod, as at Kazan, Gorky felt himself attracted by the
circle of young people who discussed the "cursed" questions, and he
soon was noticed by his comrades. They spoke of him as "a live and
energetic soul."