Volume 4, Number 8 · May 20, 1965
Maxim Gorki
By V.S. Pritchett
Stormy Petrel
by Dan Levin
Appleton-Century, 332 pp., $7.95
From 1898—when he was thirty—until his mysterious death in Stalin's Russia, Gorki was the most famous, the most embattled of the Russian novelists, both in Russia and in the outside world. He was a symbol of the Russian turmoil, and like all symbols had the strength of being open to many interpretations. It has often been said that in the dreadful revolutionary period between 1917 and 1921, he was in person the only alternative government in the Soviet Union. Lenin saw his importance with the Russian masses and with foreign opinion and gave him pretty well a free hand in rescuing writers and artists of all kinds, works of art, and the historic monuments of the country from the terrible savagery of the mob and the factions: one of Gorki's devices was to adopt the people he rescued by announcing they were his blood relations—sons, sisters, brothers, and so on—and one can almost say that he became surviving Russia itself.
Review, 1526 words
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