Gorky's Tolstoy, Gorky's Chekhov - He was wonderfully sympathetic at that moment.

Gorky’s Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences (2008) is translator and editor Donald Fanger’s replacement for an older collection titled Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev.  The Tolstoy section dates from 1919 and made it into English in 1920.  Gorky was a celebrity author.

Is something wrong with the old translations?  Fanger says no, but the old texts were incomplete.  These are the first English translation of the complete texts.  Fanger added some additional biographical portraits of writers and other oddballs Gorky knew, as well as four portraits of Gorky, by Khodasevich and Zamiatin and so on, plus plenty of commentary and notes.  The whole thing is still under three hundred pages.

This is a useful book.

It is easy to find the “Lev Tolstoy” section described as “like a novel.”  I don’t know what novels these folks were reading.  The “Leonid Andreyev” portrait is much more like a novel.  The long night where a drunken Andreyev wants to pick up girls while Gorky tries to get him sobered up, that scene appears in a lot of novels.

The Tolstoy memoir is all anecdote and talk from about six months in 1901 and 1902.  The old literary celebrity enjoying the company of the young one.

Suddenly a hare started under our feet.  L. N. jumped up in excitement, his face flushed, and whooped like some ancient animal-hunter.  Then he looked at me with an indescribable smile and laughed a wise, very human little laugh.  He was wonderfully sympathetic at that moment.  (69)

That is not always the case.  “The subjects he talks about most often are God, the peasant, and woman” – just the subjects to drive Gorky crazy.  “About literature he speaks seldom and grudgingly, as if literature were something alien to him” (35).  Still:

One evening, at dusk, squinting, his eyebrows twitching, he read us a version of the scene in “Father Sergius” where the woman goes to seduce the hermit.  He read it clear through, raised his head, closed his eyes, and said with great clarity:

“The old man really could write!”

He said it with amazing simplicity – his delight at the beauty of what he’d written was so sincere – that I will always remember the thrill I felt then, a joy I could find no words for, and one that cost me an enormous effort to control.  (64)

“Lev Tolstoy” is immensely humanizing, remembering that humans are strange beasts.  The subject of “Anton Chekhov,” by contrast, is a saint, a member of a higher species.  In his presence, people’s falseness, posturing, and vulgarity drop away.

He had fine eyes.  When he smiled they became warm and caressing, like a woman’s.  And his laughter, almost soundless, was somehow particularly fine.  Laughing, he was enjoying the laughter, rejoicing.  I don’t know anyone else who could laugh so – if one could put it that way – “spiritually.”  (103)

When Tolstoy praises Chekhov’s story “The Darling” – “with real emotion. There were tears in his eyes” – Chekhov responds with:

For a long time he said nothing.  Finally, with a sigh, he murmured in embarrassment:

“It’s got misprints in it…”  (105)

The portraits are also self-portraits, by contrast, Gorky’s differences from and exasperations with Tolstoy, Andreyev, and Blok revealing his own character.  But he was mostly interested in other people more than himself.  This was true in his own childhood memoir, and even more so here.

What an enjoyable book.

’But it really is interesting, you know!’ - Leonid Andreyev's "Darkness" and "The Seven Who Were Hanged"

When I last wrote about Leonid Andreyev, I had not read the last two stories or novellas in Visions: Stories and Photographs of Leonid Andreyev, edited by his granddaughter Olga Carlisle.  Now I have read them.  “Darkness” (1907, tr. Henry and Olga Carlisle) is a melodrama about a man on the run from the law who takes up with a prostitute for a night; “The Seven Who Were Hanged” (1908, tr. Nicolas Luker) is a set of depictions of people facing execution and their varied reactions.

Both stories feature protagonists who are terrorists, anarchists using assassinations and bombings to overthrow the Czar.  The hero of “Darkness” will end up in a prison waiting for his death, just like the members of the terrorist cell in “The Seven Who Were Hanged.”  I found the melodrama of the former to be a real weakness.  Why is this setup imitated so often?  Because it is too easy to squeeze phony depth out of it.  But the psychology of the anarchist is of high interest, especially his strange conversion experience under the influence of stress, exhaustion, booze, and a capricious woman:

Like a dye that washes off in water, the bookish wisdom of others was fading, and in its place appeared something peculiar, somber, and wild, like the voice of the dark earth itself.  This ultimate dark wisdom of his spoke of untamed distances, boundless, impassable woods, endless fields.  In it one could hear the frenzied ringing of bells, the bloody reflection of fires, the clanging of iron shackles, and the frantic praying and the satanic laughter of a thousand gigantic throats – the black cupola of the sky above his uncovered head.  (224)

The story is a preview of the better one to come, “The One Who Will Be Hanged.”

“The Seven Who Were Hanged” was written as a protest against capital punishment, and was widely circulated, including in an early American translation, as such, but its artistic effectiveness – perhaps also political – is in its distance.  This is the most Chekhov-like story in this collection, especially in a pair of ingenious expansions of the underlying concept.  The terrorist group has only five members.  The other two who will be hanged are more ordinary criminals, joined with the terrorists in a gesture towards bureaucratic efficiency.  Each of the seven characters gets a chapter alone to work on their death.  One goes mad, another feels content in her martyrdom, yet another becomes, I don’t know, a bodhisattva?

The more ordinary characters, though.  Well, Mishka the Gypsy, “alias the Tartar,” is hardly ordinary.  He is a career criminal whose bad deeds have caught up with him.  In one especially fine moment, he volunteers to demonstrate, in court, his “real, wild, robber’s whistle that deafens horses, makes them twitch their ears and rear, and turns men pale despite themselves” (266).  As one of the judges says, “’But it really is interesting, you know!’”

Even better is Chapter III, the story of Yanson the peasant, an idiot and an Estonian who somehow ends up in Russia, never really understanding where he is or what is going on around him.

Once he received a letter in Estonian, but as he was illiterate and those around him knew no Estonian, the letter remained unread.  With wild, fanatical indifference, as if he did not understand that it contained news from home, he flung it on the manure heap.  (255)

Yanson never understands his crime, and never understands his impending execution.  Somewhere in here is the great Chekhovian touch, where I sympathize not with Yanson’s deeds, of course, or even his situation, but with his incomprehension.

“You mean real madmen?” - metaphorical Andreyev

Leonid Andreyev is about the doomiest pre-Soviet Russian writer I have ever encountered.  Titles in this one collection (Visions: Stories and Photographs) include “The Abyss,” “Darkness,” and “The Seven Who Were Hanged.”  Madness, murder, rape, and war.  An apocalyptic vision.  The title of “The Red Laugh” is a metaphor for massive head trauma, like the head being blown off by an artillery shell.  Ha ha ha!  “He's one of the few truly pessimistic writers” writes valued commenter obooki, just a few minutes ago, as I was wondering what to write next.

The oddest aspect of “The Red Laugh” is that it seems like it should be about World War I, but since it was published in 1904 it is rather a response to the Russo-Japanese War.  The confusion, and the prophetic quality, comes from the complete absence of identifying detail about the participants in the war.  No one has a name, and no country-specific detail is included.  The narrator’s army fights “the enemy,” when not firing at its own side in the shocking “Sixth Fragment.”  I don’t see why the narrator could not be Japanese.  The timing is narrow, since trains, artillery, barbed wire, and the Red Cross are mentioned, and airplanes are not.

“The Red Laugh” at first seems like it is meant to represent the war’s violence realistically, but gradually a symbolic premise becomes clear:

“Are there many wounded?” I asked.

He waved his hand dismissively.

“There’re more madmen than wounded.”

“You mean real madmen?”

“What other kind is there?”  (Fifth Fragment, p. 95)

The madness of war is like a pestilence in the story, infecting all of the soldiers and spreading to everyone.  The story ends with the nightmarish return of the dead, overwhelming the earth – “wherever there had been an empty space near a body another would appear – the earth was expelling them” (Final Fragment, 142).

So horrible.  Andreyev has a grisly metaphorical imagination, whether at this symbolic level or sentence by sentence.  My just possibly slightly ridiculous favorite:

But the moaning had not died down.  It was still hanging over the earth – thin, hopeless, like a child crying or like the whimpering of a thousand abandoned, freezing puppies.  (Fifth Fragment, 100)

Another story from 1904, “The Thief,” is written quite differently.  It begins: “Fyodor Yurasov, a thief who had served three sentences, set out to visit his former mistress, a prostitute who lived about seventy miles out of Moscow.”  It stays at this level of specificity, accompanying the thief on his final, doomed railroad journey.  He is doomed because he cannot help himself, because a thief is what he is.

He is traveling incognito, or likes to imagine that he is, as “a respectable German, Heinrich Walter,” but becomes enraged not because people see through him but because they do not care.  There is a subtle idea about ego and identity here:

In the mirror he looked like other people, only perhaps better; it was not written on his face that he was the peasant Fyodor Yurasov, a thief who had served three sentences, and not a young German named Heinrich Walter.  As usual, this incomprehensible, treacherous something that was apparent to all except himself aroused in him dull despair and fear.  (155)

There is a lovely scene where the thief, out on the platform between cars, sings along with the train while watching the sunset.  His voice “spread over the earth.”  The “setting sun grew brighter and deeper, like a beautiful face turned toward someone beloved who is ever quietly disappearing” (158-9).  The thief is somehow done in by his refusal to accept that this is just metaphor.

I'll likely write a bit more on Andreyev when I finish this collection.

Leonid Andreyev updates Crime and Punishment - remember Raskolnikov, who perished so pitifully and so absurdly

I’ve been reading some horror stories lately, the fiction of Leonid Andreyev.  His story “The Thought” (1902) is a kind of parody of Crime and Punishment.  A doctor commits an elaborate murder of revenge.  His plan for escape is to fake insanity.  The result is that he goes insane, or I suppose reveals the insanity that was there all along.

I was not afraid of myself – that was more important than anything else.  For a murderer the most terrifying thing is not the police or the trial, but the criminal himself, his nerves, the powerful protest of his whole body, trained in familiar traditions.  Remember Raskolnikov, who perished so pitifully and so absurdly, and all those multitudes like him.  (39)

Right there me might have a little clue about the reliability of the narrator, since Raskolnikov is alive at the end of Crime and Punishment.  But the doctor is right that some of the grim comedy – and horror – of Dostoevksy’s novel comes from the difference between Raskolnikov’s initial belief that he is a Great Man of Reason and his instantaneous collapse into hysteria and mania once, or even before, he kills the pawnbroker.  Andreyev’s doctor, more of a psycho to begin with, is a cooler customer, allowing us to watch him, in his own words, slowly unravel:

Altogether it seemed to me that an exceptional actor was hidden within me, one capable of combining naturalness of performance, which at times led to a complete identification with the character portrayed, with a relentless, cold control of the mind.  Even when reading a book I would enter fully into the psyche of a character.  Would you believe it, even as an adult I wept bitter tears over Uncle Tom’s Cabin…  If man is destined to become God, his throne shall be a book.  (43)

You see why I am nervous about identifying with characters, right?  People who identify too much are likely sociopathic killers, as Andreyev understands.  That last Nietzschean line is the only kind of religious invocation the madman makes.  He ends his confession or testimony with a promise of apocalypse.  In a prophetic touch – Andreyev specializes in prophetic touches – the doctor vows to build a nuclear bomb.

I shall pretend to be well, I shall attain freedom, I shall devote the rest of my life to study, I shall surround myself with your books, I shall wrest from you the might of your knowledge, of which you are so proud, and I shall find the one thing that has long been needed.  It will be explosive matter.  So powerful that no one has ever seen anything like it; more powerful than dynamite, more powerful than nitroglycerine, more powerful than the very thought of it.  I have genius.  I have persistence, I shall find it.  And when I find it I will blow up your accursed earth, which has so many gods and no one, eternal God.  (77, italics in original)

The killer is, after decades of debate about the term, an authentic nihilist.  His “thought” is total destruction.  After all of this writing, his only word in court, his only defense, is “Nothing.”

Page numbers are from Visions: Stories and Photographs by Leonid Andreyev (1987).  The translation is by Henry and Olga Carlisle.  Olga Carlisle is Andreyev’s granddaughter.