The book begins with a corpse on a floor, described by a small boy who does not yet know what he is looking at.
On the floor beneath the window of a small, dusky room lay my father, remarkably long and all dressed in white; the toes of his bare feet were strangely widespread, and the fingers of his gentle hands, now quietly crossed on his breast, were likewise distorted. The dark discs of copper coins closed his laughing eyes, his kind face had become livid, and I was terrified by the glint of his set teeth.
His mother kneels beside the body in a red skirt and little else, combing back the dead man's hair "with the black comb I had used as a saw to cut through the rind of watermelons". His grandmother holds his hand and weeps "in a peculiar way that formed a pleasant accompaniment to my mother". And the child, who has never seen adults cry, hangs back behind her skirts, "afraid and uncomfortable", while he is told to go and take leave of his daddy.
The comb is the detail that tells you what kind of writer this is. A boy of four does not register a death; he registers that the object being used on his father is the one he used on watermelons. Nothing in the paragraph is explained and nothing is softened, and the whole of Gorky's method is already in it.
Childhood was published in 1913 and 1914, at the end of Maxim Gorky's long stay on Capri, and it is the first volume of the autobiographical trilogy completed by In the World and My Universities. This Foreign Languages Publishing House printing is from 1960, in the Library of Selected Soviet Literature, translated by Margaret Wettlin and designed by Y. Kogan. It carries a dedication — "To my son" — and, apart from a page of forthcoming FLPH titles at the back, nothing else at all: no foreword, no afterword, no note on the author.
That silence is itself the problem this introduction has to address, because of who Gorky was by 1960.
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, who wrote as Maxim Gorky, is not one Soviet writer among others. He presided over the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, at which socialist realism was proclaimed as the method binding on every writer in the country. His name was attached to that doctrine for the next half-century; it was given to a city, to the Literary Institute, to streets in every republic. He is the founding authority.
And Childhood obeys none of it.
It was written twenty years before the doctrine existed, and it has no positive hero, no Party, no class-conscious worker, no forward-looking resolution and no lesson. It is about a violent, pious, money-grubbing petty-bourgeois household in Nizhni Novgorod in the 1870s, observed by a child who does not judge it because he does not yet know there is anything else. It ends with a boy being told to leave.
A reader who comes to Childhood expecting the founding text of Soviet literature will find instead the least doctrinal book imaginable, published without comment by the state's own house, in the year Gorky's authority was at its height.
Margaret Wettlin's English deserves attention, and so does Margaret Wettlin.
She was born Margaret Butterworth Wettlin in 1907, an American, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1932 she went to the Soviet Union for what was meant to be a year. She married the stage director Andrei Efremoff, and stayed for nearly fifty years — through the purges, through the war, through everything — before returning to the United States and publishing a memoir, Fifty Russian Winters.
Readers of this series will have met her counterpart already: Ivy Litvinov, English-born wife of Stalin's foreign minister, who translated the Ordeal trilogy for the same house in the same decade. It is a striking fact about Progress and FLPH that so much of their English was made by Anglophone women who had married into the Soviet Union and stayed. It shows. Wettlin's prose here has the unforced rhythm of someone thinking in English about Russian rather than converting one to the other; the grandmother's speech in particular — its repetitions, its endearments, its sudden drops into vulgarity — survives into English with its music on.
What happens in Childhood is that a widowed mother brings her son to her father's house, and the house destroys nearly everyone in it.
Grandfather Kashirin is a dyer, a former Volga barge-hauler, small, red-haired, violent and devout, and he beats the children with birch rods until they lose consciousness. The uncles, Mikhail and Yakov, fight each other over the division of the property with a persistence that is closer to weather than to malice. Money is the household's only subject. Gorky names the grandfather three hundred and thirty-eight times and the grandmother three hundred and one, and the book is the argument between them.
Against all this is set Tsiganok — Gypsy — a foundling apprentice of nineteen, and the best-loved person in the book. Here is what he does when the grandfather flogs the boy:
He continued to protect me with his arm whenever my grandfather flogged me, and would show me his swollen fingers the next day with the complaint: "No point in it. Don't help you any, and look what I get! That's the last time — hereafter you take what's coming to you!"
And then, in one of the finest sentences in Russian literature:
But the next time he would take the unearned punishment all over again. "You said you wouldn't do it any more." "Saying and doing are two different things — don't know myself how it happened."
Saying and doing are two different things. Tsiganok is not a hero, does not intend to be one, and cannot explain himself. He simply puts his hand under the rod again. There is no socialist-realist account of virtue that can accommodate that, which is one reason to be grateful the book was written before there was one.
He is killed carrying a cross.
Uncle Yakov has vowed an oak cross for his dead wife's grave and insists on shouldering it himself; Tsiganok takes the heavy end. On the way he stumbles, the uncles let go, and it comes down on his back. They bring him home and lay him on the kitchen floor.
"He fell, and it crushed him — struck him in the back. It'd have smashed us too if we hadn't let go in time." "Then it was you that smashed him," said Grigori hoarsely. "Well, what do you think we...." "You!"
While they argue, Gorky keeps his eye on the floor:
The blood kept flowing; near the door it had already formed a pool which darkened and seemed to be rising. Tsiganok lay there making noises as though in his sleep, while the pink froth kept coming out of his mouth and his body kept melting away, growing flatter and flatter, levelling down to the floor as though merging with it.
And then Uncle Yakov, whispering, arrives at the thought that matters to him:
"A good thing I didn't carry the pedestal myself, or look where I'd be now...."
The kindest person in the book is killed by the family's carelessness with a religious object, and his death produces from one of the men who dropped it a moment of relief at his own escape. Gorky does not comment. He counts the blood, watches the body flatten, and lets Yakov speak.
This is what people mean when they call Gorky the founder of Soviet literature and then fail to notice that nothing in Soviet literature is like this. The scene has no villain — Yakov is a weak man, not a murderer — and no redemption, and the only judgement in it is delivered by an old workman in two words.
Now the thing that would have been impossible later.
Akulina Ivanovna, the grandmother, is one of the great characters, and Gorky's most sustained act of love. She is fat, dark, snuff-taking, endlessly kind, an inveterate teller of tales, and devout in a way that owes nothing to any church. And Gorky — the writer whose name would be attached to Soviet atheism as firmly as to socialist realism — writes her religion from the inside, without a flicker of condescension:
I was very fond of my grandmother's God, he seemed so near and dear to her.
The child asks her to tell him about God, and she has a technique:
She had a special manner for speaking about Him; she would always sit down and close her eyes and speak in a soft voice, strangely drawing out her words.... "There the Lord sits on a hill, surrounded by the meadows of paradise; sits on a sapphire throne under the silver lindens..."
He falls asleep listening. The grandfather's God, elsewhere in the book, is a bookkeeper of punishments. The grandmother's is a storyteller's God, sitting under lindens, and the boy loves him because he loves her.
That is not a concession to superstition. It is a materialist observation of the highest order: what a person's God is like tells you what that person is like, and popular religion in a brutal household may be the only place where tenderness is kept. Gorky understood that in 1913. The doctrine promulgated in his name in 1934 could not have said it, and the atheist propaganda published by this very house for the next thirty years did not.
The book's other axis is Varvara, and she is the hardest thing in it.
She arrives at the start as the widow kneeling in a red skirt. She leaves the boy with her parents, comes back, teaches him to read, marries a second time badly, is beaten by her husband, comes back again ill, and dies. Gorky gives her no arc and no lesson. What he gives her is the last scene between them, and it is almost unbearable because he refuses to make either of them better than they were.
She is sitting up in a clean lavender dress, her hair carefully combed, "as proud and haughty as she had formerly been". He asks, with what he calls unaccountable shyness, whether she is feeling better.
"Come here," she said, giving me a fearful look. "Where have you been gallivanting?" Before I had time to answer she seized me by the hair, grabbed a long flexible knife off the table and struck me with the flat blade until it fell out of her hands. "Pick it up! Give it here!" I picked up the knife and placed it on the table.
He sits on the edge of the stove and watches her. She lies down. Within a few pages she is dead, and he tells his grandfather so and is called a liar.
A dying woman beats her son with the flat of a knife, and he picks it up and hands it back to her. There is no scene in the literature of childhood that says more with less, and no writer schooled in a doctrine of positive heroes could have left it on the page without an explanation attached. Gorky attaches nothing. The boy obeys, and the chapter continues.
This volume tells its foreign reader nothing about any of the above.
It does not say when the book was written, or that its author died in 1936 in circumstances that were the subject of a show trial in 1938, at which his death was attributed to a medical murder. It does not say that Gorky spent the years after 1917 in a public quarrel with Lenin over the Bolsheviks' treatment of the intelligentsia, nor that he left Russia again in 1921 and spent most of the following decade in Italy. It does not say what socialist realism was, or that Gorky proclaimed it, or that this book is nothing like it.
We record all that without much indignation, because the alternative in 1960 would have been a foreword performing the usual operation, and Childhood is better off naked. But a reader should know that the absence of apparatus is not the absence of a position. Issuing Gorky's least ideological book with no framing at all, in the Library of Selected Soviet Literature, lets the author's enormous official authority do the framing by itself.
Almost everything.
Childhood is the finest book in this series and one of the best accounts of a bad childhood ever written, in any language. Its greatness is a matter of refusal: Gorky refuses to make the child wiser than he was, refuses to make the household a symbol, refuses to convert the grandmother's faith into false consciousness or the grandfather's cruelty into a class verdict. He gives you the dyeworks, the beatings, the icons, the fights over the inheritance, the songs, and Tsiganok's swollen fingers, and he lets them mean what they mean.
And he ends it in six words. The mother dies; the boy says "Mother is dead" and the grandfather answers "What you lying for?" with a glance at the bed. A few days after the funeral:
"Well, Alexei, can't exactly call you a medal hanging around my neck! No room for you here any more. Time you were getting out in the world...."
So I got out into the world.
No summary, no moral, no promise. A boy of eleven is turned out of a house, and the sentence that records it is flat as a plank. Everything that Gorky later became — the celebrity, the patron, the president of the Writers' Union, the name on the doctrine — is contained in the fact that he could still write that line and leave it alone.
One practical note. Childhood is the first volume of three. In the World takes the boy from the moment of that last line through his apprenticeships — the shoe shop, the draughtsman's, the icon workshop, the Volga steamers — and My Universities takes him to Kazan and to the politics. FLPH and Progress issued all three in English, and the second is the equal of the first. This series reissues Childhood and, in Gorky's own first novel, Foma Gordeyev, the book he wrote immediately before it in a quite different key. A reader who wants the whole shape should read them in that order and then find In the World.
It is worth ending on the fact this introduction started from. The man who would preside over the congress that bound every Soviet writer to a method wrote, before any of that, a book with no method in it at all — only a grandmother's God, a boy watching blood spread across a kitchen floor, and an instruction to get out into the world.