Volume 12, Number 6 · March 27, 1969
Gorky from Chaliapin to Lenin
By Helen Muchnic
Chaliapin: An Autobiography compiled, and edited by
by Maxim Gorky, with supplementary correspondence and notes, translated, Nina Froud, by James Hanley
Stein and Day, 320 pp., $10.00
Untimely Thoughts
by Maxim Gorky, translated by Herman Ermolaev
Paul S. Eriksson, 302 pp., $6.95
The Bridge and the Abyss
by Bertram D. Wolfe
Praeger, 180 pp., $5.95
Gorky wrote Chaliapin's autobiography. This is how it happened. Having heard in the fall of 1909, in his home in Capri. that Chaliapin was planning to let someone publish the story of his life, Gorky dispatched an anxious, exclamatory epistle: 'I hasten, my friend, to tell you the following: You're undertaking a serious business, an important and widely significant matter, that is, something interesting not only to us Russians but to the whole world of culture and especially of art! Do you understand this?' It would be a great pity if his tale fell into the hands of some fellow incapable of appreciating all it meant: 'A symbolic life, which attests indisputably to the great strength and power of our land…. Watch out, Feodor, don't toss your soul into the hands of word peddlers!… Devil take you! I am terribly afraid you won't understand the national, the Russian significance of your autobiography! Listen, my dear, shut your eyes and think a minute! Look closely—you'll see on a gray, desert plain, the mighty figure of a peasant genius!'
Review, 2598 words
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