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1、【英文文学】Tales from GorkyBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.We should not give very much for the chances of a poor friendless lad of feeble constitution, vagrant disposition, and an overpowering taste for excitement, who should be turned adrift to shift for himself at an age when most young lads are still safe at sch
2、ool. The fortunes of such a one, if adequately recorded, might, and no doubt would, be infinitely more engrossing, if less edifying, than the humdrum chronicle of the steady clerk or patient mechanic; but a prison, or workhouse infirmary, might safely be predicted as the ultimate and inevitable rece
3、ptacle of such a piece of human flotsam.But now let us supposea handy supposition, I admitthat our imaginary little nomad were endowed with that illuminating spark we call genius; let us suppose, too, that in late boyhood, or early manhood, he learnt to love letters, and deliberately set about descr
4、ibing his extraordinary experiences, as well as the strange bedfellows whom misery from time to time threw in his waywhat piquant, what grotesque pen-and-ink sketches we might expect from such an inspired ragamuffin! It would be Oliver Twist or Humphrey Clinker telling his own tale without the softe
5、ning intervention of Mr. Charles Dickens or Mr. Tobias Smollett.Let us further suppose not England but Russia to be the theatre of our heros miseries and adventures, and the interest of the story will at once be infinitely enhanced. The odds would now be a thousand to one against our heros attaining
6、 to manhood at all, and a hundred thousand to one against his ever attaining to authorship. His risks would be out of all proportion to his chances. From first to last starvation would constantly dog his footsteps, and Siberian exile would be the least terrible of a score of those administrative mea
7、sures by means of which the servants of the Tsar wage unintermittent warfare against the vagrant population of their masters immense Empire. The career, then, of a professional tramp in Russia must needs be of tragic intensity, and it was my good fortune, some eighteen months ago, in the pages of Th
8、e Pilot, to be the first to call the attention of English readers to the strange history of a Russian tramp of genius, who is, moreover, his own chronicler. Maksim GorkyMaximus the Bitteris the pseudonym deliberately chosen, at the outset of his career, by the young Muscovite author who is at the pr
9、esent moment (and I do not even except the revered name of Tolstoi) by far the most popular story-teller in the Russian Empire. The following brief biographical sketch of this remarkable man is the best introduction I can affix to this selection from Gorkys unique Razskazui, in all of which the auth
10、or has, more or less, embodied his grim experiences of life beneath the transparent veil of fiction.Aleksyei Maksimovich Pyeshkov was born on March 14th, 1869, at Nijni-Novgorod. His mother Barbara was the daughter of a house painter and decorator, Vasily Kacherin; his father was Maksim Savvatiev Py
11、eshkov, an upholsterer of Perm. Aleksyeis parents seem to have been worthy, colourless people, and fairly well educated for their station; but they dwindle into insignificance before their respective fathers. Young Pyeshkovs two grandfathers were undeniably men of character, self-made men of brutal
12、energy, who terrorized their respective families, and were as hard and cold as the money they worshipped. So severe, indeed, was the regimen of Aleksyeis paternal grandfather, that his own son ran away from him five times in the course of seven years. On the fifth occasion he did not return, but wal
13、ked all the way (he was only seventeen) from Tobolsk in Siberia, where the family then lived, to Nijni-Novgorod, where he settled down as an apprentice to a clothier. Five years later we find him occupying a responsible position in the office of a steamship company at Astrakhan. Gorkys maternal gran
14、dfather may well have been the prototype of Ignat Gordyeev, the most impressive character in Gorkys romance, Thoma Gordyeev. Beginning life as a raftsman on the Volga, in the course of a short time he became a man of substance, started a dyeing factory at his native place, Nijni-Novgorod, was electe
15、d Starshina, or Chief of the Traders Guild there, and was generally looked up to by everyone but his wretched daughter, whom he made more wretched still when she threw herself awayor so he accounted iton such a poor non-descript as Maksim Pyeshkov.The earlier years of Aleksyei Pyeshkov were as uneve
16、ntful as are the years of most children. In 1873, however, when he was only four years old, he met with his first misfortune: his rolling stone of a father died of cholera at Astrakhan. His mother re-married shortly afterwards, and transferred him to the care of his grandfather, who seems to have be
17、en kind to the little ladcruel fathers are very often indulgent grandfathersand taught him to read with the aid of the Psalter and other liturgical books, by way of preparing him for school, whither he was presently sent But his regular schooling lasted no longer than five months, for about this tim
18、e his mother died of consumption, and almost simultaneously his last natural prop gave way, his grandfather suddenly ruining himself utterly by over-speculation. Little Aleksyei, therefore, was obliged to exchange his schoolroom for the shop of a cobbler to whom he was apprenticed; but after serving
19、 his master for two months, he burnt one hand so severely with boiling pitch that he was pronounced useless to the trade, and sent about his business.On recovering from the effects of this accident he was apprenticed by his kinsfolk to a draughtsman, who treated him so harshly that he ran away, beco
20、ming first an assistant to an ikon-maker, and then a turnspit on a steamer on the Volga. Here he met with an unexpected piece of good luck. His new master, the cook on board the steamer, Smurny by name, happened to be a lettered man of superior ability, and he proved to be one of the best friends yo
21、ung Pyeshkov ever had. But for him, indeed, modern Russian Literature in all probability would now have been minus of one of its chief ornaments. Smurny awakened within the lad a love of literature, and placed at his disposal his own little library, a miscellaneous collection enough, in which fantas
22、tic lives of the Greek Orthodox Saints and interminable treatises on Freemasonry lay cheek by jowl; it was, however, an inestimable boon to Aleksyei, and it included, at any rate, the works of one indisputable European classicGogolbesides some of the novels of Alexandre Dumas. Pyeshkov himself, in h
23、is fragmentary autobiography, insinuates that his chance encounter with the cultured cook was a turning-point in his career. Till the advent of the cook, says he, I could not endure books, or, indeed, any sort of printed paperpassports included. Why he quitted Smurny we are not told; but we do know
24、that when he left the steamer to become a gardeners assistant, he pursued his studies whenever and wherever he had the chance. At the age of fifteen, indeed, his thirst for learning induced him to present himself at the gates of the University of Kazan, the great Volgan seminary, where Tolstoi had b
25、een educated forty years earlier, in the na?ve belief that instruction of all sorts was to be had there by anyone for the simple asking. I was mistaken, it appeared, he observes with pathetic sarcasm, so I entered a biscuit factory at three roubles (6s.) a month. He has related his experiences of th
26、is grinding slavery in a subterranean stone cage in that powerful story, Twenty-Six of Us and one Other.1It was a grievous evil life we lived within those thick walls. We rose at five oclock in the morning without having had our sleep out, andstupid and indifferentat six oclock we were sitting at th
27、e table to make biscuits from dough already prepared for us by our comrades while we were still sleeping. Our master called us niggers, and gave us rotten entrails for dinner instead of butchers meat. No wonder he calls this drudgery the hardest work I ever experienced.And here there is a blank in o
28、ur biographical recorda blank, however, which may, partially, be filled up from conjecture. To this period belongs, I opine, the first of Pyeshkovs gipsy-like wanderings through Russia. The most casual reader of his tales is struck at once by his delight for the free, careless life of a vagabond. Th
29、e justification, the philosophy of that life, so to speak, he has put into the mouth of that prince of vagabonds, Promtov2, evidently a real person, whose antitype Pyeshkov must have met with on his rambles, and who is one of his best creations It was now, too, that he must have made the acquaintanc
30、e of the so-called Buivshie Lyudi,3or Have-beens, whom he has immortalized in so many of his tales, that numerous and unhappy class who have fallen, beyond recovery, from positions of trust or emolument. These, too, were the days when, as he tells us, I sawed wood, dragged loads, and, in fact, did a
31、ll sorts of ill-paid, menial labour. On the other hand, he made the acquaintance of numerous students at Kazan, was admitted into their clubs, and his unquenchable ardour for learning revived. We do not know what he read during these years, but he must have read a very great deal. None can take up h
32、is works without being impressed by the richness and variety of his vocabulary, and it is not too much to say that no other Russian writer ever uses, or has used, so many foreign terms (English and French especially), or has coined so many new words from extraneous western sources. It is also plain
33、from internal evidence that he has studied history, philosophy, and science with enthusiasm, and I agree with those Russian critics who complain that he has assimilated more Nietzschianism than is good for him, although, on the other hand, I consider that his obligations to Nietzsche are far less co
34、nsiderable than is commonly supposed. And at the same time he was consorting freely with ruffians of every description,4 sleeping round camp fires with murderers and thieves, for the sake of a crust of bread, and once would actually have starved to death but for the charity of a kind-hearted prostit
35、ute5 Naturally courageous, and with the buoyancy of youth to hold him up, he seems to have endured these hardships cheerfully enough, and a fine sunset, or a majestic seascape, or even a glimpse of the monotonous grandeur of the endless steppe, would, as a rule, be compensation enough for the fatigu
36、es of a hard day at its close. But he, too, had his dark moments, and in 1888 (when only nineteen) he tried to commit suicide from sheer wretchedness. Fortunately the bullet struck no vital part, and he was nursed into convalescence at a hospital in Kazan. Having sufficiently recovered, says Gorky,
37、sarcastically summing up his position at this period, I survived in order to devote myself to the apple-selling trade.On quitting Kazan, Pyeshkov appeared at Tsaritsuin, where, for a time, he was a railway porter. He was summoned from thence to his native place, Nijni-Novgorod, to serve as a recruit
38、. But Aleksyei was not of the stuff of which soldiers are made. They dont take rubbish like me, he explains, so he eked out a living by selling lager-beer in the streets till he attracted the attention of the benevolent advocate, A. J. Lanin, who made young Pyeshkov his secretary.According to Gorkys
39、 own admission, Lanin had a considerable influence on his future development. But Gorky, who always felt himself out of place among intellectual folk, and has an undisguised contempt for mere book-learning, now quitted his patron and returned to Tsaritsuin, whence he rambled through Southern Russia,
40、 the Ukraine, and Bessarabia, finally working his way through the Crimea and the Kuban District to the Caucasus. The tour was rich in new experiences, and may be said to have matured his genius, and taught him more than whole libraries of books could have done, but he suffered terrible privations by
41、 the way. He made a particular study during this period of the cities of Southern Russia, their commercial activity and their shifting, nondescript population, and that noble story, Chelkash, which contains his finest descriptions of nature, was the ultimate result of his experiences.At Tiflis he wo
42、rked as a navvy for a time, and in 1892 his first printed story, Makar Chudra, appeared in the columns of the Tiflis journal, Kavkaz. I have described elsewhere6 his dramatic introduction to the astonished but appreciative editor on that occasion. Returning to Nijni-Novgorod, Gorky got several subse
43、quent stories inserted in the principal newspapers of the various Volgan cities; but he wrote but little at this period, and that little did not win general favour.In 1893 he made the acquaintance of the eminent Russian writer, Korolenko, to whose encouragement he always attributed his ultimate succ
44、ess. Korolenko urged him to have done with trifles, aim high, and, above all things, cultivate his style. Shortly afterwards, Gorky published his first indisputable masterpiece, Chelkash, No. 8 of the present collection, which opened the big reviews to the young author, and made him famous. Chelkash
45、 was speedily followed by a whole series of vivid stories. In 1900 appeared his first romance, Thoma Gordyeev, a disappointing performance on the whole, though not without superlative merits. The descriptions of Volgan scenery are magnificent, and the characterization is masterly. But it is far too
46、long, and, the narrative is swamped by floods of second-rate philosophy. A collection of all Gorkys works, under the title of Razskazui (Tales), is still in progress. At present Gorky is, without doubt, by far the most popular author in Russia, and the authorities there have already paid him the com
47、pliment of branding his writings as even more dangerous than those of his veteran contemporary, Count Leo Tolstoi. He is also, I fancy, likely to give them much more trouble in future than the Count, as his temperament and genius are distinctly of the volcanic order.R. NISBET BAIN.1 No. 2 of the pre
48、sent collection.2 In A Rolling Stone.3 Lit., those who have been.4 See In the Steppe.5 See One Autumn Night.6 In the Monthly Review for December. In the same number of the same periodical appeared the first English translation of one of Gorkys tales, curiously enough, the first tale he wrote.I.IN TH
49、E STEPPE.We quitted Perekop in the vilest spiritshungry as wolves and at war with all the world. In the course of a whole twelve hours we had unsuccessfully employed all our talents and capabilities to earn or steal something, and when we became convinced, at last, that success was impossible either way, we resolved to go further on. Whither? Simplyfurther on.This resolution was un