Sixty years before the book opens, a bargeman named Ignat Gordeyev is hauling for a rich merchant on the Volga. By the second page he is on his way to a fortune, and Gorky stops to explain what kind of man makes one:
one of those people who are always successful — not because they are talented and hard-working, but because, endowed with enormous stocks of energy, they do not spurn — are, in fact, incapable of spurning — any means that leads to the achieving of their end, and recognize no law save their own desires.
And then, because Gorky is twenty-nine and cannot resist finishing the thought:
Sometimes these people speak with awe of their consciences, they may even endure real torture struggling with them. But only a weak man is unable to conquer his conscience; a strong one easily subdues it and makes it serve his purpose.
That is the Russian bourgeoisie in its heroic decade, drawn from life by a man who had worked for it as a docker, a baker's boy and a night watchman. Foma Gordeyev is Gorky's first novel, and it is about what happens to the son.
The novel was published in 1899, in the reign of Nicholas II, and dedicated to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. This is the Foreign Languages Publishing House printing of 1950, translated by Margaret Wettlin and illustrated by the Kukryniksy — the caricaturist trio of Kupriyanov, Krylov and Sokolov, the most celebrated graphic satirists the Soviet Union produced, who had spent the previous decade drawing Hitler and would shortly be drawing the Nuremberg defendants. It is a remarkable pairing and the drawings are worth the volume by themselves.
That pairing deserves a moment. The Kukryniksy signed as one artist, worked as one, and were by 1950 the closest thing the Soviet Union had to an official eye — the poster, the Pravda cartoon, the wartime window. Set that apparatus of caricature on a novel about merchants and something unexpected happens: it stops being caricature. Gorky's Volga traders are already drawn to the edge of the grotesque, and three men whose trade was exaggeration found they had nothing to add. The thirty-two plates in this edition are portraits — heavy faces over heavy collars, a room of beards, a man alone at a table — and the restraint is the point. They read as though the artists had recognised that the author got there first.
The series title is Library of Selected Soviet Literature.
There is no way round it: this is a Russian novel of 1899, written under the tsars, by a writer who would not be a Soviet citizen for another eighteen years, published in a series that calls it Soviet literature. Readers of this series will recognise the operation from the Russian Classics Series, where Gogol and Turgenev are annexed as ancestors of a method invented long after they died. Here the annexation is applied to a living writer's early work, retrospectively, by the state he had come to preside over.
We say this without much heat, because the alternative label was not available. What word should FLPH have used for Gorky in 1950? He had been dead fourteen years; his name was on the Literary Institute and on the city of Nizhni Novgorod, where this novel is set. "Soviet" had stopped meaning a date and started meaning an allegiance. But a reader should know that the book in their hands predates the revolution by eighteen years and contains no communists, and that the series title is a claim rather than a description.
This volume carries no foreword. What it carries instead, on its opening leaf, is a long quotation from Jack London — from Revolution and Other Essays, London, 1910, with the page numbers given:
"Foma Gordyéeff" is a big book — not only is the breadth of Russia in it, but the expanse of life.... One lays the book down sick at heart — sick for life with all its "lyings and its lusts." But it is a healthy book. So fearful is its portrayal of social disease, so ruthless its stripping of the painted charms from vice, that its tendency cannot but be strongly for good. It is a goad, to prick sleeping human consciences awake and drive them into the battle for humanity.
This is the same device the house used on the 1975 jacket of Alexei Tolstoy's Ordeal, where Romain Rolland and Theodore Dreiser perform the vouching. The foreign socialist writer, quoted at length, certifies the Russian to an English-speaking reader who might otherwise suspect he is being sold propaganda.
What makes this one different is that the endorsement is genuine, forty years old, and better criticism than a commissioned foreword would have produced. London had read the book as a novelist reads another novelist, and his sentence about laying it down sick at heart is exactly right. The house did not have to distort anything. It simply reached for a name its readers trusted, which is what publishers do, and in this case the name and the judgement both hold up.
Ignat makes the fortune. Foma inherits it, and cannot use it.
He is named a thousand and twenty times in this novel, and everything turns on his inability to become what he has been left. He is not an intellectual; he has no programme and no alternative. What he has is a physical revulsion from the people he is supposed to join — the merchants of the Volga town, their piety, their charity committees, their deals, their talk about building Russia — and no vocabulary in which to put it except abuse.
Against him Gorky sets his godfather, Yakov Tarasovich Mayakin, named two hundred and fifty-five times: a shopkeeper-philosopher, the sharpest mind in the book and its real antagonist. Mayakin has a complete theory of the merchant class as the true creator of Russia and of himself as its natural aristocrat, and he argues it with a coherence Foma cannot touch. The novel is largely the record of Foma losing that argument while being right.
That is a genuinely difficult structure for a political novelist and Gorky does not cheat it. Foma's revolt has no content. He drinks, he wrecks a party, he humiliates himself with women, he shouts at his godfather. He is not a revolutionary in embryo. He is a man with a functioning conscience and no instrument, which in 1899 is what a conscience mostly was.
Yakov Tarasovich Mayakin is the reason this novel survives its own pessimism, and any introduction that treats him as a villain has missed the book.
He is a small shopkeeper who has made himself rich, and he has thought harder about his class than anyone in it. He is also, on the page, extremely good company. Asked what he makes of merchants snatching each other's contracts, he does not pretend:
"What do you expect?" his godfather said on hearing his opinion. "Trade, like war, is a reckless business. They're fighting for profits, and profits are their Prophets."
And on the ethics:
"There are some things about it I don't like either — too much trickery. But you can't be open and above-board when it comes to trade; you've got to be a diplomat."
He concedes everything Foma accuses him of and is not troubled by it, because he has a larger account in which the merchant class is the maker of Russia and its trickery is the cost of the making. Foma has nothing to set against that except the feeling that it is disgusting, and a feeling loses to a system every time.
But Gorky gives his hopeless hero one genuine insight, and it is worth more than all Mayakin's philosophy. Watching the men he is supposed to join, Foma arrives at this:
With every day he became more convinced that the men about him were worse than he was and lived lives that were even more meaningless. They were not the masters of life, but mere lackeys whom life ordered about as it chose, bending and twisting them at will.
Not the masters of life, but mere lackeys. A drunken merchant's son in a provincial Volga town works out, without any theory to help him, that the men who appear to command the process are in fact its servants — that capital has personifications rather than owners. Marx had put it in Capital thirty years earlier and Gorky had certainly not read it that way in 1899; he got there by watching. It is the single most valuable sentence in the novel, and it is given to the character least able to do anything with it.
Around that insight Gorky builds one of his best images. Foma goes on living "as if he were crossing a bog that threatened to suck him down at every step, while his godfather twisted up above him like a vine growing on firm dry ground and kept a sharp eye on him from a distance." The bog and the vine: one man sinking in ground that will not hold, the other climbing on ground that will.
The book's climax comes at the christening of a steamer, where Foma, in front of the assembled merchants of the town, tells them what they are. Gorky gives him his say, and then shows what a class does with such a moment.
They tie him up.
When Mayakin arrives, Foma is lying bound at his own celebration, begging to be released: "Tell them to untie me.... I won't say another word ... honest to God I won't. Untie me. It's shameful to lie here like this. I'm not drunk." They untie his feet and leave his hands. He stands, looks round at the faces, and says softly, "with a pathetic little smile":
"You win." "We always win," said his godfather with a harsh laugh.
Then the detail that makes the scene unbearable. Foma, hands tied behind him, twists his neck to force his collar under his chin and cannot manage it — and the old man comes over and sets the collar straight for him, smiling into his eyes:
"It's got to be suffered."
Mayakin pours him one glass of vodka, holds it to his lips, and refuses him a second. Then, softly enough that everyone hears:
"Don't expect us to forgive you," said Mayakin firmly and in a louder voice. "We'll never forgive you, even if we are Christians, and that's that."
And Foma, raising his head, produces the only line he has left, which is not defiance but a kind of apology:
"I forgot to mention you, godfather," he said thoughtfully. "I didn't say a single word about you."
Mayakin points at him and cries "Hear that?", and a low murmur of indignation goes round the room. Foma sighs. "But what of it?" he says. "What of it? Why did I bother at all? Nothing came of it." And he leans over the table again.
The last move belongs to the merchants, and it is the one a modern reader will find hardest. Foma insists he was sober — "I had only had two glasses of wine. I was perfectly sober" — and Bobrov draws the conclusion the room needs:
"That shows you're right, Yakov Tarasovich: he's mentally unbalanced."
A man tells the truth about his class in public; the class establishes that he is mad. Gorky wrote that in 1899, about merchants. We are not going to turn it into a prophecy — he was describing what propertied men did to an embarrassing son, and the machinery he had in mind was a private asylum and a family conference. But no reader in the tradition this series is written from can meet that sentence without a jolt, and it would be dishonest to pass it without saying so.
There is no recovery. Foma is taken to hospital, then sent to relatives in the Urals. Three years later he is back:
Ragged, unkempt, and nearly always drunk, he did indeed give the impression of being mentally unbalanced.... Lyuba Smolina let him live in a little out-house behind her house.
And the town has found a use for him:
Townsmen and merchants who remembered him were inclined to make fun of him. On seeing him come down the street, they would cry: "Hey, you prophet! Come here!" ... "Tell us something about the Judgement Day, will you? Ha-ha! A prophet indeed!"
Meanwhile a new firm has been registered: "Taras Mayakin and Afrikan Smolin." The business goes on, under the next generation's names, and the man who denounced it lives in a shed and is shouted at in the street.
That is how Gorky's first novel ends. No awakening, no collective, no dawn. The class wins, as Mayakin said it always does, and its critic becomes its entertainment.
The clarity, and the honesty of the defeat.
Foma Gordeyev is the best Russian novel about the bourgeoisie in its confident phase, and it was written by someone who had carried their cargo. Gorky knows how the money was made, what the piety was for, and why the charity committee met. Mayakin is a great creation precisely because he is given the best arguments and allowed to win them.
And the book is honest about what it does not have. There is no working class in it to speak of, no organisation, nothing to put against Mayakin except one man's disgust — and Gorky shows, with no self-deception at all, exactly how far one man's disgust gets him. That is a more useful book for our tradition than a triumphant one would be. The question Foma Gordeyev leaves on the table is the question the next twenty years of Gorky's life were an attempt to answer: what does a conscience need, besides itself, in order to be of any use?
One last observation, for readers who know what Gorky became. The novel is dedicated to Chekhov, and the dedication is not a courtesy. Chekhov is the writer Gorky was measuring himself against in 1899 — the one who could show a class dying without supplying a replacement — and Foma Gordeyev is a young man's attempt at a Chekhovian subject with a much louder voice. It does not entirely work. The shouting scenes are better than the quiet ones, and Gorky cannot leave a silence alone the way Chekhov could. But the ambition is legible on every page, and the dedication tells you he knew exactly whose permission he was asking.
Read it beside Childhood, also in this series and also translated by Wettlin. The novel came first, in 1899, and is a young writer's frontal assault on a class. The memoir came fourteen years later and does not assault anything at all. Between them is most of what there is to know about Gorky.