MAXIM GORKI.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIII, Issue 23, 8 December 1909, Page 2

MAXIM GORKI.

RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY AND AUTHOR

HAD HE DISREPUTABLE HABITS ?

Special to “ The Weekly Graphic.”

I* 1 J CABLE last week, received on f I the Ist inst., states that / ' X Maxim Gorki, the famous Russian peasant author and revolutionary, whose writings on behalf of his downtrodden countrymen have aroused widespread sympathy in England and America, has been expelled from his party owing to an alleged luxurious mode of life at Capri. The “New’ Zealand Herald” was responsible for the statement that “M. Pieshkoff is the real name of Maxim Gorki, the famous Russian novelist, who was not so long ago turned out of several New York hotels because of his disreputable habits.” It is hardly creditable that a metropolitan newspaper should not be better informed. Gorki was the victim of a yellow journal campaign in New. York, which manufactured the most outrageous lies about him solely in the interests of scare-mongering and sensational journalism. Mr. H. G. Wells, in “The Future in America,” gives a very eloquent picture of what Gorki underwent. We. abridge his ac-. count as follows: — Then I assisted at the ’ coming of Maxim Gorki, and witnessed many intimate details of .what. Professor Giddings, that courageous publicist, has called his “lynching.” Here again is a case I fail altogether to understand. The surface values' of that affair have a touch of the preposterous. I set them - down in infinite perplexity. > - ■ , . My. first week in New' York was in the period of Gorki’s . advent. . Expect, tation was at a high pitch, and. one might have foretold’a stupendous, a his-' tory-making campaign. - The American nation; seemed . .. concentrated K upon one great and ennobling idea, the freedom of Russia, and upon Gorki as the embodiment of that idea. A protest was to be made against cruelty and violence and massacre. That great fig-' ure of Liberty with the torch was to make it flare visibly halfway round the world, reproving tyranny. Gorki arrived, and the eclat was immense. We dined him. we lunched him, we were photographed in his company by flashlight. I very gladly shared that honour, for Gorki is not only a great master of the art I practise, but a splendid personality. lie is One of those people to whom the camera does no justice, whose work as I know it in an English . translation, forceful as it is, fails very largely to convey his peculiar quality. His is a big, quiet figure; there is a curious power of appeal in his face, a large simplicity in his voice and gesture. He was dressed, when I met him. in peasant clothing, in a belted blue shirt, trousers of some shiny black material, and boots, and 1 , save for a few Common groutings, he has no other language than Russian. So it was necessary that he should bring with him someone lie could trust to interpret him tA the world. Atid Saving.' too. much of the practical helplessness of his type of genius, he Could not come without his right hand, that brave and honourable lady, Madame- Andreieva, who has been now for years, in everything but the severest legpl. sense, his wife,Russia has ; -;np Dakota, and although his legal wife has long since found another companion, the Orthodbxs Chiirch in Rtfssi’a liaA ho divorce facilities for men in the revolutionary eitnip. So Madame Andreieva stands to him " as George Eliot ‘ stood tb George >’ and I.jSuppqse.'.jthe two of them had almost forgotten the technical illegality. of their tie, until it burst upon them and the American public in a monstrous storm, of exposure, It was like a,, summer thunderstorm. At one moment Gorki was in an im-

mense sunshine, a plenipotentiary from oppression to liberty, at the next he was being almost literally pelted through the streets. I do not know what motive actuated a certain section of the American Press to initiate this pelting of Maxim Gorki. A passion for moral purity may perhaps have prompted it, but certainly no passion for purity ever before begot so brazen and abundant a torrent of lies. It was precisely the sort of campaign that damned poor Mac Queen, but this time on an altogether imperial scale. The irregularity of Madame Andreieva’s position was a mere point of departure. The journalists went on to invent a deserted wife and children; they declared Madame Andreieva was an “actress,” and loaded her with al! the unpleasant implications of that unfortunate word; they spoke of her generally as “the woman Andreieva”; they called upon the Commissioner. of Immigration to. deport her as a “female of bad character,” quite influential people wrote to him to that effect; they published the name of the hotel that sheltered her, and organised a .boycott. Whoever dared , to countenance the victims was denounced. Professor Dewar, of Columbia, had given them' a reception; “Dewar must go,” said the headlines. Mark Twain, who had assisted in the great welcome, was invited to recant and contribute unfriendly comments. The, Gorkjs were pursued with insult from hotel to hotel. Hotel after hotel turned them out. They found themselves at last after midnight in the streets of New York city with every - dloor closed against them.' Infected persons could not have been treated more abominably in a town smitten with a panic of plague. This change happened in the course of; twenty-four hours. On one day Gorki was at the zenith, on the next he had been swept from the world. To me it was astounding—it was terrifying. I wanted to talk to Gorki about it, to find out the hidden springs of this amazing change. I spent a Sunday evening looking for him with an everdeepening respect for the power of the American Press. I had a quaint conversation with the clerk of the hotel in Fifth-avenue, from which he had been first driven. Europeans can scarcely hdpe to imagine the moral altitudes at which American hotels are conducted. ... I went thence to seek Mr. Abraham Caban in East Side, and thence to other people I knew, but in vain. Gorki was obliterated. I thought this affair was a whirlwind of foolish misunderstanding, such as may happen in any capital, and that presently his entirely tolerable relationship would be explained. But for all the rest of my time in New York this insensate campaign went on. There was no attempt of any importance to stem the tide, and to this day large sections of the American public must be under the impression that this great writer is a depraved man of pleasure accompanied by a favourite cocotte. The

writers of paragraphs racked their brains to invent new and smart ways of insulting Madame Andreieva. The chaste entertainers of the music-halls of the Tenderloin district introduced allusions. And amidst this riot of personalities Russia was forgotten. The’ massacres, the chaos of cruelty and blundering, the tyranny, the women outraged, the children tortured and slain;' all that was forgotten. In Boston, in ■Chicago, it was the same. At the bare suggestion of Gorki’s coming, the same outbreak occurred, the same display of imbecile, gross lying, the same absolute disregard of the tragic cause he had come to plead. line gleam of comedy in this remarkable outbreak I recall. Someone in ineffectual protest had asked what Americans would have said if Benjamin Hranklin had encountered such ignominies on his similar mission of appeal to Paris before the War of Independence. “Benjamin Franklin,” retorted one bright young Chicago journalist, “was a man of very different moral character from Gorki” —and proceeded to explain "how Chicago was prepared to defend the purity of her homes against the invader. Benjamin Franklin, it is true, was a person of very different morals from Gorki —but I don’t think that bright young man in Chicago had a very sound idea of where the difference lay. I spent my last evening on American soil in the hospitable home in Staten Island that sheltered Gorki and Madame Andreieva. After dinner we sat together in the deepening twilight upon a broad verandah that looks out upon one of the most beautiful views in the world, upon serene large spaces of land and sea, upon slopes of pleasant win-dow-lit, tree-set wooden houses, upon the glittering clusters of lights and the black and luminous shipping that comes and goes about the Narrows and the Upper Bay. Half-masked by a hill contour to the left was the light of the torch of Liberty. . . . Gorki’s big form fell into shadow, Madame Andreieva sat at his feet, translating methodically, sentence by sentence, into dear French, whatever he said translating our speeches into Russian. He told us stories—of the soul of the Russian, of Russian religions sects', of kindnesses and cruelties, of his great despair. " Ever anil again, in the pauses, my eyes would go to where-New York, far away, glittered like , a brighter and more numerous Pleiades. I gauged something of the real magnitude of this one man’s disappoint, ment, the immense expectation of his arrival, the impossible dream of his mission. He had come, the Russian peasant in person, out of a terrific confusion of bloodshed, squalor, injustice—to tell America, the land of light and achieved freedom, of all these evil things. ISlie would receive him, help him, understand truly what he meant with his “Rossie..’' I eould imagine how he had felt as he came in the big steamer to her, up that large converging display of space and teeming energy. There she glowed to-night across the water, a queen among cities, as if indeed she was the light of the world. Nothing, I think, can ever rob that splendid harbour approach of its invincible quality of promise. . . . And to him she had shown herself no more than the luminous hive of multitudei' bf base and busy; greedy and childish little men. . ■