Foma Gordyeff (The Man Who Was Afraid) by Maxim Gorky

Born into the bourgeoisie

Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) is one of the all-time greats in Russian and Soviet literary history, though American readers these days are unlikely to be familiar with his work. He is considered the founder of socialist realism, that Soviet genre of literature that advocates socialist and communist ideals. While we often hear about Russian writers or artists who were persecuted by the Soviet government, Gorky was embraced by the Soviets as a national hero. That’s not to say he was a sell-out to the regime in power, however. Gorky really believed in socialism and wrote realist works with proletarian themes. His fiction gained a wide readership in Western Europe and America in the early 20th century, back when readers in those nations were more sympathetic to labor and more open to socialist ideas. As the world became disgusted with Joseph Stalin and his authoritarian regime, however, Gorky’s brand of literature fell out of favor with readers outside the Soviet Union.

Gorky’s novel Foma Gordyeff was published in 1899. The title of the book is the name of its main character. The original title in Russian is Фома Гордеев. The 1901 translation by Herman Bernstein, available in the public domain, bears the spelling I’ve used in the title of this review. Within that edition, however, the name is spelled at least three different ways: Gordyeff, Gordyeef, and Gordyeeff. Alternate English spellings include Gordeyev and Gordjejew. The Man Who Was Afraid was tacked onto an English translation and doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense in relation to the book itself.

Foma Gordyeff is the son of a rich father who owns a successful shipping business that moves agricultural and industrial goods up and down the Volga River. From a young age, Foma is groomed to take over the family business, even though, as Gorky bluntly states, he’s not very smart. As a young man, Foma has a love affair that ends disappointingly and instills in him a bitterness toward the hypocrisy of polite society. When his father dies, Foma is taken under the care of his godfather, also his father’s right-hand-man, Yakov Mayakin, who continues to train Foma in the shipping business while trying to control every other aspect of the young man’s life. As Foma learns that Mayakin and capitalists like him are greedy exploiters of labor, he loses interest in the family business and starts leading a dissipated life of drinking and partying. He can find no satisfaction in life and longs to be free of Mayakin and his father’s legacy.

Foma Gordyeff is an anti-capitalist novel, but it stops short of being a pro-socialist novel. The hero is a wealthy bourgeoisie, and the word “proletariat” isn’t even mentioned until three-quarters of the way through the book. For the most part, this novel is simply about a rich guy continually bitching about how life is meaningless and sucky, and that goes on way too long. Gorky never gets you to like Foma before he turns him into a bitter, insufferable grouch. Gorky tried to cap the story off with a shocking ending, but it just feels week and anticlimactic. This novel is much less radical than the works of some American writers of the time, like Jack London (The Iron Heel) and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle). A few years after the publication of Foma Gordyeff, Gorky himself would crank the red rhetoric higher in works like The Mother.

London, a proclaimed socialist himself, loved this novel and even wrote an introduction to one of its English-language editions. That’s not surprising, since London, although born poor, was practically an American incarnation of Foma. London not only shared Gorky’s political beliefs but shared Foma’s depressing outlook on life and disgust at the pointless shallowness of much of modern capitalist society. By the time you’ve read through this protracted and dreary exercise in pessimism, you might find their depressing outlook to be contagious.

Mother by Maxim Gorky

Madonna of the Revolution

Following the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union, socialist realism became the prevailing, government-approved mode of artistic expression in the USSR. In the literary realm, Maxim Gorky is the epitome of this school of writing. None other than Joseph Stalin called Gorky “the founder of socialist realism.” Gorky didn’t merely write in this style in order to toe the party line; he helped draw the party line. In the early years of the 20th century, Gorky, a colleague of Vladimir Lenin, was active in the formation of the Bolshevik Party and an outspoken voice for Revolution. His novel Mother, published in 1906, is Gorky’s best-known work from this early period in his career. After the defeat of the First Russian Revolution of 1905, Gorky wrote Mother to inspire and motivate socialist revolutionaries in the struggle against the Tsar. Because the Tsarist regime banned the novel, it was first published in English in the pages of Appleton’s Magazine.

Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova, a Russian wife and mother, lives in an unnamed factory town with her husband and son. The husband, an alcoholic who repeatedly beats her, dies unexpectedly, leaving Vlasova to raise her young son Pavel by herself. When Pavel grows into manhood and becomes a factory laborer himself, he gets involved with the underground proletarian movement to incite a socialist revolution against the oppressive monarchical government of Tsar Nicholas II. Soon, Pavel is inviting groups of bohemian types to his home to read from forbidden literature and engage in discussions on political topics. At first the mother is frightened of this movement, but, like a good parent who loves her son, she accepts his guests with politeness. As she gets to know these young people, her fears diminish and she develops a genuine affection for them. As Vlasova listens to the socialist rhetoric of her son and his friends, she gradually becomes a believer in the movement. Eventually, she actively participates in the group’s activities, carrying out missions for this cell of revolutionaries.

Although Gorky may be the posterchild for Soviet socialist realism, his work does have merit above and beyond its propaganda value. In fact, American writers like Jack London and Upton Sinclair published some novels that are just as blatantly propagandistic than this one. London’s The Iron Heel and Sinclair’s The Jungle, however, are also clearly better written than Mother. For starters, Mother is unnecessarily long. Russian authors seem to have a propensity for monumentality in their works, but while authors like Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Sholokhov manage to maintain the reader’s interest over the course of their long works, Gorky’s Mother is too monotonous and repetitive. There are too many scenes of the mother sitting around someone’s kitchen with a few revolutionaries talking about how to distribute political pamphlets. The distribution of socialist literature is really the only revolutionary activity that the reader gets to see this underground network perform, which seems unrealistically kind and gentle for a cadre of insurrectionists. Also hard to believe, the goal of Pavel and his friends seems to be to get themselves arrested and exiled to Siberia. It is a source of pride with them, but hardly seems fruitful to their cause. Beyond a few main players, it is difficult to distinguish the supporting characters, who are mostly nondescript mouthpieces for Gorky’s socialist rhetoric.

Even Gorky admitted that this novel has its faults. That doesn’t detract, however, from the fact that the book does contain a few very powerful scenes of oppression and resistance. The possibility that Mother may be one of the most influential novels of the 20th century is due more to its political content than to its literary merits. Nevertheless, the book would not have had such an impact if Gorky hadn’t the ability to inspire pathos and passion in his readers, as he occasionally does here in Mother.
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