For about a century and a half, Russians revered literature with the ardour of converts. Arriving late to European letters, they rushed to prove their worth. With reams of poetry and mountains of novels came torrents of reminiscence. A nation of Slavic Boswells recorded every aphorism and idiosyncrasy of prominent writers. Choice portions of these reminiscences helped form the legend of canonical writers, who came to seem more like monuments than human beings. But literary memoirs also give new depth to the personalities of long-familiar authors, while introducing us to a forgotten cast of secondary characters.
Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev (1923), now published in an elegant new translation by Bryan Karetnyk, unites three sketches penned by the most prominent and influential writer of the early Soviet Union. Gorky’s memories of Tolstoy were first published in English by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at their Hogarth Press; Leonard rightly celebrated them as a masterpiece of modern biography. These reminiscences were later reissued together with Gorky’s adoring memoir of Chekhov and his affectionate, forgiving recollection of the expressionist writer Leonid Andreyev. All three are vivid and compassionate, providing a record not only of the writers but of their historical moment. But it is the sketch of Tolstoy that stands out – not only for its fresh portrait of its subject, but because of what it tells us about Gorky’s own conflicted personality.
Born in 1868 – 40 years after Tolstoy – Maxim Gorky was a Marxist who used his realist writing to expose Russia’s injustices and the suffering and the resilience of its lower classes. He drew from his own experience: he was orphaned early and held a string of menial jobs before rising to fame. As a young man, he toyed with the idea of joining one of the agrarian communes promoted by Tolstoy, but when he went to the writer’s estate to ask for a land grant, only Tolstoy’s wife was home. Most of Gorky’s reminiscences stem from the winter of 1901-02 when both writers found themselves in Crimea – Tolstoy for his health, and Gorky in exile for his political activity.
In Gorky’s telling, Tolstoy is an oracle and a paradox. He is magnanimous and spiteful, generous and territorial, transcendent and petty, philanthropic and sadistic. As Tolstoy observes to Gorky, “So-called great men are always terribly contradictory.” We have hints of the aristocratic Tolstoy’s vestigial condescension towards Gorky, an artisan’s son: “His interest in me is ethnographic,” Gorky says of Tolstoy. “In his eyes, I am but a representative of some unknown race – nothing more.” In his writing, Tolstoy celebrated Russian peasants as closer to God – holy fools, even Christ-like figures – but in conversation with Gorky he speaks of them as foolish and cunning. Gorky has a clear-eyed view, too, of Tolstoy’s misogyny. “His attitude towards woman is,” he writes, “extravagantly hostile; he likes to punish her – unless, of course, she is a Kitty or a Natasha Rostova, which is to say a creature of rather limited character.” Like many misogynists, Tolstoy is obsessed with women; along with peasants and God, they are his favourite topic.
Gorky’s reminiscence opens with Tolstoy’s struggle with God – a theme that took on new relevance as the Soviets replaced the Christian god with secular saints from politics and culture. “The thought that plagues [Tolstoy],” Gorky writes, “is that of God. It seems at times not even to be a thought, but a violent resistance to something that he senses above him.” The idea of Tolstoy’s well-known preoccupation with God as a form of instinctive resistance is remarkable. It makes sense of the extremes he reached in his old age, when he began to dress like a peasant and denounced music, meat and sex, advocating what we would now call voluntary human extinction. For Gorky, Tolstoy’s religious devotion stems from pride: only God was a worthy rival to Russia’s greatest writer. The more Tolstoy pretended to be humble, the more he testified to his own superhuman ego. His obsession with God might be compared with Lucifer’s.
Tolstoy’s religiosity also had to do with his anger at himself for failing to control his own impulses, notably erotic ones. Gorky records him criticising an anarchist friend for satisfying his sexual urges where he pleases, “like a dog”, and thereby proving that “freedom is but a vast emptiness”. For Tolstoy, it was a web of mutual duties, not freedom or happiness, that gave meaning to life. Tolstoy concluded: “Freedom is when everything and everyone is in agreement with you; but then you do not exist, for it is only in collisions and contradictions that we all of us feel something.” Perhaps Tolstoy needed his struggles with God and with himself to sustain acute feeling deep into old age.
Gorky presents his reminiscences as a simple compilation of notes jotted down on scrap paper. This is disingenuous. The Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky noted that Gorky had worked hard to achieve the correct effect and balance in his arrangement of the fragments. Though he eschewed the avant-garde, Gorky was practising one of its signature techniques: montage. The bits and pieces are artfully arranged to achieve a kind of cubist life-writing that deconstructs the literary icon and then puts him back together again, allowing us to see him in a new way.
The fragments are followed by a long letter that Gorky wrote in 1910, just after learning that the elderly writer had fled from home, renouncing for a final time women, the family and his aristocratic estate. Tolstoy would soon expire in a train station. While acknowledging Tolstoy’s genius, Gorky explains that he was repelled by the author’s “stubborn, despotic wish… to turn the life of Count Tolstoy into some kind of hagiographic Life of St Leo”. Tolstoy wanted to suffer in order to give legitimacy to his doctrine; in other words, he wanted to rival Christ, not worship him. And Gorky abhorred Tolstoy’s doctrine of non-resistance, of passivity on Earth. He was disturbed that at a moment when the Russian masses were so badly in need of liberation on Earth, Tolstoy offered them a saint’s life.
When he wrote his reminiscences, Gorky had long abandoned the Christian god. But he was not an atheist in the Leninist mould. A decade and a half earlier, he had helped formulate the idea of “God-building”. In his view, religion filled an essential need; its more rational form would be a worship of humankind and its potential. Literature was central to Gorky’s cosmology. For him, as for most of the Russians and non-Russians who have worshipped Tolstoy, the writer’s divinity stemmed not from his piety but from his literary talent. Gorky announces, “I treat religion on a par with literature, the lives of the Buddha, of Christ, and of Muhammad as fantastical works of fiction.” This could be read as a jibe against religion – or as the ultimate expression of faith in writing. Gorky loves Tolstoy for being more real and more Russian than Jehovah.
Perhaps Gorky was fascinated by Tolstoy’s contradictions because he himself embodied a strange blend of insight and willing blindness, sincerity and lies, honour and hypocrisy. Gorky devoted his early life to the struggle for the dignity and liberation of the lower classes. As the early Soviet Union’s most esteemed and well-paid writer, he championed and defended other authors in times of famine, penury and purges, but he also served as the lead writer on a stunningly dishonest book celebrating the construction of the White Sea Canal, a gulag project. For all his faults, Tolstoy was fiercely independent and free-thinking. His struggles with God led him to be excommunicated, while Gorky’s devotion (or submission) to the Bolsheviks forever tarnished his literary legacy.
In his own reminiscences of Gorky (recently published in a beautiful translation by Sarah Vitali) the poet Vladislav Khodasevich offers a remarkable analysis of Gorky’s “extremely complicated attitude toward truth and lies”. Having grown up in poverty and precarity, Gorky devoted his imagination to dreams of another, better world, populated by people superior to those he encountered in real life. This was evidenced in his fiction (Tolstoy criticised him for idealising peasants), but also in his treatment of living people, whom he could transform, in his mind, into far better versions of themselves. When the truth was unsatisfactory, he simply offered a happier story. This is a common trait of the kind of fabulist who is so loath to bear bad tidings that he invents better news, causing even greater problems in the process. But few compulsive liars have invented, as Gorky did, the official literary system of an entire country: socialist realism, made doctrine in 1934.
“I despise the truth in a most sincere and unshakeable manner,” Gorky wrote, in a letter, in 1929. He loved literature in equal measure. For him, dreams, literature and even lies redeemed the sordid, sad nature of everyday life, doing what Christ couldn’t. Finding Tolstoy sitting among the rocks on the Crimean seashore, Gorky imagined him rising, lifting his hand, and turning the sea to glass, making the rocks cry out, everything around coming to life, “clamouring, speaking in many voices about itself, about him, and against him”. At the end of his reminiscence, Gorky looks at Tolstoy and thinks, “How like unto God this man is!”
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev
Maxim Gorky, trs Bryan Karetnyk
Fitzcarraldo, 208pp, £14.99
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[Further reading: Kerry James Marshall’s nuanced vision of black lives]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate
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