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The Symbolist Contamination of Gor'kii's “Realistic” Style
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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I am concerned in this paper with investigating the complex relationship of Maksim Gor'kii with the literature of his day, including the so-called realists, but particularly with the decadents, the symbolists, and other writers generally thought of as alien to Russian realism, whether critical or socialist. The stereotype of Gor'kii still dominant in some quarters presents him as walled off from “decadent” and “bourgeois” literary styles and from the carriers of such “contamination.” But Gor'kii was much more complex and more interesting than we have supposed, and he functioned during much of his career as part of a literary world in which “symbolism,” rather loosely denned, was the dominant literary tendency. I would like to adduce evidence of the effect on his writing of symbolist and other modern influences and of his close relationship, at the same time, to the popular culture of the day.
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References
1. Voronskii, Aleksand, “O Gor'kom,” in Izbrannye stat'i o literature (Moscow, 1982), p. 40.Google Scholar
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3. The Berlin collection of Gor'kii stories was Gor'kii, Maksim, Rasskazy 1922–1924 gg. (Berlin: Kniga, 1925 Google Scholar. Struve, Gleb, Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971, p. 62 Google Scholar.
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Gor'kii's reminiscence of Aleksandr Blok is “A. A. Blok” in Zametki iz dnevnika. Vospominaniia, vol. 17 of Khudozhestvennye proizvedeniia v dvadtsati piati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1973) 17: 221–229. This reminiscence is the definitive statement of his own faith in the efficacy of the human reason in controlling, perhaps making “sense” of, the chaotic givens of the real world.
Regarding the mental health of those Gor'kii heroes referred to by Voronskii, the psychiatrist Ivan Galant has offered an extended diagnosis of their possible ailments in his “Psikhozy v tvorchestve Maksima Gor'kogo,” published as volume 4 of Klinicheskii arkhiv genial'nosti i odarennosti (evropatologii), ed.G. V. Segalin (Leningrad, 1928). Galant makes the following general remark about Gor'kii as an observer and reporter of abnormal mental states: “To Maksim Gor'kii undoubtedly belong the laurels of a great realistic artist, one who has been able to describe with an unusual faith fulness to reality, and even with scientific precision, various psychopathic states and mental illnesses. Reading such works as “A Sky-Blue Life, “ “The Tempters,” “The Story of a Romance,” and others, the psychiatrist not only recognizes the descriptionof mental illnesses familiar to him from the text books of psychiatry, but also deepens his own knowledge because of the special illustrative power of the cases described… . And in addition the psychiatrist experiences great aesthetic satisfaction in the reading of Gor'kii's psychiatric stories” (p. 5). Gor'kii himself was not impressed by Galant's findings, which seemed to him to implicate the author of the stories himself in the sicknesses of his heroes. He wrote of Galant in a letter to Gruzdev “I think you should know that the psychiatrist Ivan Borisovich Galant has very amusingly exposed me as harboring a whole series of mental illnesses.For example: suicidal mania, … an obsession with wandering, pyromania, an obsession with fire, and atlast he's found a new sickness: Delirium febrile Gor'kii “; see Arkhiv Gor'kogo, Perepiska A. M. Gor'kogo s I. A. Gruzdevym (Moscow, 1966) 11: 67.
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18. For the correspondence of Gor'kii and Rozanov see Beseda, no. 5 (1923): 402–416; and Kontekst (1978): 297–342. The Shklovskii quotation is in Viktor Shklovskii, “Novyi Gor'kii,” Rossiia, no. 2 (1924), pp. 196–197. Very important also is Shklovskii's, Udachi i porazheniia Maksima Gor'kogo (Tiflis, 1926)Google Scholar