Pathway to Japanese Literature

June 18, 1936.
Maxim Gorky’s rich and varied life came to an end.
It was just about a week after the Soviet Union had published its new constitution draft.
Gorky ended his life having witnessed both the joy within the Soviet Union and the world’s significant reaction to it, brought about by the publication of this new constitution draft.

Before that, I had read in the newspaper that Gorky was seriously ill, and every morning when I opened the paper, I was concerned about subsequent reports.
When the publication of the new constitution draft was reported, within the emotions stirred in me by this event, I connected the thought that Gorky had encountered this glorious day at the end of his life: I wanted to keep Gorky alive as long as possible; yet even if he were to die, he would be buried within a festival of history—what could this be if not a conclusion to a life filled with beautiful joy?
Thinking this, I would then conjure up Gorky’s familiar, heavy-bearded face and broad shoulders.

Gorky after 1932—the Gorky who emerged after Socialist Realism in art became a focus—exerted a unique influence on world culture. The achievement of the Five-Year Plan and the consequent transformation of Soviet social reality acted as a powerful driving force that was observed to have fused all Maxim Gorky had accumulated over sixty-odd years—his human experiences, his training as a writer, his insights into historical development and convictions—bringing their full value to bear and propelling him to work in defense of the world's progressive culture. It had been nearly forty years since he wrote The Lower Depths, and in terms of being translated and read worldwide from that time onward, Gorky had been a writer of global stature since his youth. However, I believe that Gorky's status as a global figure in recent years had acquired a more profound significance than before. He who had been globally renowned for attracting widespread interest had in his later years become a presence loved and respected by all who believed in cultural progress—an indispensable pillar required for humanity's cultural development in today's world.

It was in 1928 that I met Gorky.
This occurred when he returned to the Soviet Union from Italy after five years; at that time, Gorky himself seemed not to have firmly decided whether he would permanently reside in the Soviet Union either. While being deeply moved by the unexpectedly grand and heartfelt welcome he received—far surpassing his expectations—it can be perceived that his emotions were filled with a complex indecision, expectation, and jubilation akin to how the pre-dawn sky becomes tinted with dawn’s variegated hues when considered from today’s perspective.

In the direction overlooking the quiet morning of October Boulevard, a large window stood open.
A reddish, not-so-new carpet was spread out.
Gorky sat near the door leading to the adjacent room.
Both his shirt and jacket were a pale, soft gray that harmonized with his deeply lined forehead, his grayish eyes revealing both strength and keen sensitivity, and his distinctive beard.
He sat in a low, ordinary hotel armchair, his large clean hands naturally clasped together.
Diagonally across stood a round table bearing a plate with a completely cold slice of toast.
I wore a thin red-striped dress as I faced that table, occasionally asking my friend—who stood leaning over me—about spellings while inscribing clumsy Russian characters on the book's title page.
I had brought a copy of my novel to give to Gorky.
On its title page I wrote: "In commemoration of an unexpected encounter.
To Maxim Gorky" in Japanese characters. When I showed this to him, he expressed regret at being unable to read Japanese and asked me to write the meaning in Russian beside it.
I was writing that inscription.
Having finished, I showed it while laughing that my writing looked worse than a child's.
Gorky then replied in a serious yet intimate tone without smiling: "Nonsense—it's perfectly legible."
The cadence of his voice remains etched in my memory.

When I thought that Gorky was no longer here and that my book from back then might also be somewhere among his numerous collection of books, an indescribable emotion filled me. For before my memory lay the thick book designed by Mr. Kazumasa Nakagawa and Gorky’s voice uttering those words so characteristic of him—“Not at all—it’s quite readable”—both remaining vividly etched together, and this recollection continued to exert an astonishingly subtle influence in making me comprehend the course of life belonging to that great writer called Gorky.

In the literary history of the Soviet Union, Maxim Gorky exists like a page from a large book densely filled to the very last line, with a period placed decisively at its end.
We have barely written a few lines of our own pages.
From Gorky’s way of life and writerly experiences, it is thought that there are indeed many lessons for the younger generation to draw upon.
In addition to the complete works of Gorky that have been published to date and essay collections on recent cultural and literary movements, it is likely that meticulously compiled collections of letters, diaries, and other materials will also be published in the future, providing increasingly more people with materials and interest for Gorky studies.

Gorky stood as a prime example of a great writer who attained global significance within an entirely new historical context.
In a sense fundamentally different from the conventional understanding that viewed Goethe as a typical genius, he represented a remarkable example of the social realization of great talent brought forth by human history at its present stage.
One of the distinctive features in the path taken by Maxim Gorky—who emerged from the lower class—to reach that point now stimulated my curiosity.
That was the ebb and flow of the mutual relationship between Gorky—vividly recorded against the social backgrounds of each era in Russia—and the intelligentsia of his time.

After Maxim Gorky lost his father at five years old and was taken in to be raised in his grandfather’s household, life there—marked by ignorance, barbarity, and patriarchal tyranny—was terribly harsh.
Though serf emancipation had been implemented, at the core of daily existence for Nizhny Novgorod’s lower-class townspeople during that period, beating children with birch branches remained commonplace, while drunken adults regularly engaged in blood-soaked brawls over property disputes.
Young Gorky’s heart felt as though its very skin were being flayed by such darkness, cruelty, and ceaseless streams of abuse; yet amid that poverty and clamor, he became acquainted with an eccentric man.
Adjacent to the kitchen in his grandfather’s house stood a long room with two windows.
There lived a thin, stooped lodger with kind-looking eyes behind glasses.
Whenever his grandmother spoke to him, the man would reply “That’s quite all right,” earning him the nickname “Mr. Kekkou.”
Young Gorky burned with intense curiosity about this lodger’s way of life.
He would clamber onto the storage shed’s roof and observe through the courtyard window the lodger’s activities within.
There sat an alcohol lamp.
Flasks holding liquids of varied hues lay about alongside copper scraps, iron fragments, and lead rods.
Amidst this clutter, Mr. Kekkou spent his days from dawn till dusk melting lead, measuring substances on a small balance scale, burning his fingertips while groaning “unh-unh,” then retrieving a worn notebook to scribble furiously.

Gorky, unable to contain his curiosity, asked grandmother.

“What is that person doing?”

Then grandmother said in a stern voice,

“It’s none of your business. Keep quiet.”

Not only did grandmother remain wary, but the entire household uniformly disliked this peculiar lodger.
Everyone snickered at Mr. Kekkou behind his back, calling him a counterfeiter, a sorcerer, a traitor, and the like.
Amidst this roster of lodgers—a cart driver, a Tatar orderly, a soldier and his cheerful wife who loved chatting while parading about with her jam pot—what a strange, conspicuous presence Mr. Kekkou was.

Gorky gradually became friends with this Mr. Kekkou.
One evening, while listening to his grandmother—a renowned storyteller—this "Mr. Kekkou" suddenly began shedding violent tears. After speaking at length in agitation, he abruptly left the room in apparent embarrassment.
People forced bitter smiles while exchanging awkward glances.
"The gentlemen are all like that," said the cart driver.
He snapped venomously and unpleasantly.
The next day, Gorky heard this "Mr. Kekkou" press close to his grandmother and say with astonishing simplicity, "I am terrifyingly alone."
Those words pierced Gorky's young heart.
In the entire household, the only one who listened attentively to young Gorky's words was this Mr. Kekkou.
Grandfather yelled at Gorky.

“Don’t chatter uselessly!”
“You devil’s grindstone!”

But Mr. Kekkou not only listened attentively to Gorky's stories but would often say to him with a smile,
"Hmm, no, Brother—that's not it. You came up with that yourself."
Or deliver two gentle taps while saying, "Don't lie, Brother!"
And he would excise all unnecessary fabrications woven into Gorky's tales.
Moreover, this Mr. Kekkou spoke in utterly ordinary phrases that nevertheless nurtured the intellectual awakening of young Gorky living within that barbaric environment.
For instance, he would say:

“You must be able to take everything—do you understand?
It’s an extremely difficult thing—this ability to take…”

To Gorky—still a boy who didn’t even know how to write—none of it made sense.
Yet those words remained lodged in his heart, recalled repeatedly with peculiar intensity.
For within Mr. Kekkou’s simple phrases lay an unforgettable secret.
If it merely meant taking stones, bread crusts, bowls or pots, there could be no particular profundity in what Mr. Kekkou found so difficult to express.

In a corner of the grandfather’s courtyard lay a hole overgrown with bitter mugwort, forsaken by all.
Young Gorky was sitting side by side with Mr. Kekkou in that hole.
Gorky asked Mr. Kekkou.

“Why don’t any of those people love you?”

Mr. Kekkou pulled Gorky into his warm flank and answered with a meaningful look.

“Because I’m a stranger—do you understand?
“In other words, that’s why.”
“Because I’m not one of those people.”

As someone fundamentally different—a "stranger"—Mr. Kekkou emerged as the first member of the intelligentsia within young Gorky's tumultuous childhood world where malice clashed relentlessly.
Yet the time inevitably arrived when Mr. Kekkou was expelled from his grandfather's household.
It resembled how livestock herds harass then drive out any creature of alien breed that strays among them.
An inexplicable hatred hounded Mr. Kekkou away.
Gorky would later record in Childhood with profound grief:
"My bond with that first among better souls—countless strangers dwelling in my homeland—met its end thus."

This story remained unforgettable for Gorky while continuing to strike our hearts with no small measure as today's readers.

That the heavy darkness permeating the people's lives from the late 1860s to early 1870s saw those like Mr. Kekkou—intellectuals who had accidentally strayed into this gloom as fragments of light—end up becoming a kind of defeated remnant lamenting, "Oh, one cannot live by another's conscience!" Moreover, even while wallowing in the same poverty and filth from morning till night, the people still instinctively detected in Mr. Kekkou both the 'master' and the 'stranger,' treating him as an outcast. It is these elements, as part of the life process through which young Gorky’s intellect was being awakened, that strike at our hearts.

Furthermore, regarding this matter with Mr. Kekkou, a truly fascinating episode that unexpectedly hints at the entire direction of Gorky’s life is recounted in Childhood.

One day in Mr. Kekkou’s room, Mr. Kekkou was fiddling with a smoking liquid that filled the entire space with an acrid odor.
Gorky sat perched on a battered storage box.
And the two conversed.

“Grandfather says you might be forging counterfeit money.”

“Grandfather? …Hmm, that’s right.
“That’s just him talking nonsense!”
“Money and such, Brother—they’re trivial things.”

“Then why do you pay for bread?”

“Hmm, that’s right—you do have to pay for bread.”
“Absolutely…”

“Right?
“Beef money’s the same way.”

“So even beef money…”

He laughed quietly—so adorably it was astonishing—and tickling my ear as one would a cat, said:

“I simply can’t argue with you—you overwhelm me, Brother.”
“Anyway, let’s just be quiet...”

When we reach this part in our reading, we instinctively shift in our seats, drawn into pleasant laughter—Ah, Gorky!
—we can’t help but feel this way.
This brief yet robust exchange about life’s small but sturdy matters reminds us of a certain remark Chekhov would make years later.
To Gorky, who had emerged into the world as a romantic writer at twenty-four, Chekhov said: “Do you know?
“You’re not a romanticist—you’re a realist!”
“Do you know?” he said.
It makes one recall that remark.
Moreover, it makes one realize both Gorky himself—who later wrote *The Harm of Philosophy*—and the beauty of Maxim Gorky’s final act in his twilight years, where through his understanding of realism from a new humanistic perspective, he poured forth the full value of his sixty-eight years of accumulated wisdom to become the people’s joy.

From this exchange between Mr. Kekkou and the young Gorky, who disliked crying, there emerged through Gorky a sharp opposition between the essence of the people's perspective and a characteristic of the old-era intelligentsia.
This notable opposition of characteristics was deepened and developed into increasingly complex substance within its social and historical dimensions as Gorky turned fifteen years old, went to Kazan City, and began interacting with radical students of that era.

Even at fifteen, Gorky was already so filled with heavy, varied impressions from life that he felt himself an old man.

The only education that could be called schooling throughout Maxim Gorky’s entire life was five months of elementary school.
His grandfather rapidly fell into ruin, and the seven-year-old he also had to earn “money.”
He collected scraps.
He stole planks and firewood from the lumberyard on the Oka riverbank.
“The act of theft was never considered a crime in the shantytowns.”
“It was a custom and, for the half-starved townspeople, nearly the sole means of survival.”

A shoemaker’s apprentice.
A kitchen boy and apprentice to a draftsman.
Fleeing the suffocating atmosphere of those unbearable places, young Gorky became a dishwasher boy on a Volga River steamer.
Everywhere he went, he labored so intensely it left him dazed.
And his sensitive sensibilities—along with his disposition that compelled him to contemplate both his own life and others’—encountered ever more questions among the people.

For instance, as a dishwasher boy on a steamship, thirteen-year-old Gorky washed dishes from morning till night.
He washed bowls.
He had to polish knives and keep forks and spoons gleaming.
But on the other hand, there were people who would soil each washed dish one by one, use the bowls, and make the knives and spoons dirty again.
These people went about their business completely unperturbed, treating it all as perfectly natural—but why was this natural? In the heart of the boy Gorky, who worked from six in the morning until midnight, a question began to arise.
Why was it that on one side there were people who must do everything, while on the other side existed those who could exploit the results of making those people do everything?
In the life surrounding him, drunkenness, fights, and depravity ceaselessly circled in an endless round from day to night—but what purpose did all these things serve?

At that time, Gorky was taught to read by the ship's cook Smury.
At first, he sat on a macaroni box and was made to read aloud books like Homer's Didactic Collection and Poisonous Insects and Bedbugs: Their Extermination and Handling of Carriers.
But gradually he read Ivanhoe and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, growing accustomed to reading without realizing it—
For him, holding books became a pleasure.
The things narrated in the books were pleasantly distant from life.
And life itself grew increasingly harsh.
Smury loved Gorky, who was no ordinary child, and would sometimes roar as if enraged at his own life wasting away uselessly.

“That’s right—you’ve got smarts! Get out of this place and go live!”

But—where to?

The ever-deepening "why" question and his anguish over societal contradictions finally propelled Maxim Gorky from the old outskirts of Nizhny.
Gorky went to Kazan.
He had resolved to enter university in Kazan.
In Nizhny, a high school student four years his senior whom he had befriended there encouraged his plan while tossing his lustrous long hair.

“You were born to serve science—the university precisely needs young people like you.”

However, three days after arriving in Kazan, Gorky realized it would have been wiser to go to Persia than to come to a university.
His unique *My Universities* era began.
Gorky wrote about that period as follows:
“To avoid starvation, I set out for the Volga and the docks.
“It was easy to earn fifteen to twenty kopeks there.”

The lives of these dockworkers, vagrants, thieves, and fences captivated Gorky with their deeply etched vitality and raw intensity—utterly different from the cramped existence of petty merchants and low-ranking clerks whose small-minded townsperson mentality had exploited young Gorky until then. The fact that they, despite being utterly destitute, loved their unrestrained way of living amidst poverty and sorrow, and the blunt bitterness they harbored toward life itself—these aroused Gorky’s curiosity and sympathy. Gorky, amidst this crowd, was "filled daily with many sharp, burning impressions" and "found his hope awakened to plunge into their harsh environment and observe." However, the sound strength of his innate nature—which had not bound him permanently to a gang of thieves even when he was a scrap-collecting boy and a pilferer of planks—in this instance too manifested its function in the form of a new question. No matter when or what these people talked about, it always ended up being "such-and-such was," "It was like this." The fact that they spoke of everything solely in past-tense phrases—"it was like this," "it was like that"—drew Gorky’s observations and suspicions. The discovery of this significant characteristic of theirs gradually instilled a certain fear in Gorky’s heart. The more Gorky’s young spirit suffered under society’s defilement and contradictions, the more fiercely it sought the possibility of a better life. He fixed his gaze on the future, on what lay ahead—on that "something better" that might be. He could not avert his eyes from the coming tomorrow. Gorky was not one of those people who had ended up living like them. Gorky was a living being—moreover, one who strove to live with fervor. "This is what drove me away from them." Maxim Gorky vividly recounts those days in his autobiographical work My Universities. "I did not wait for external assistance, nor did I pin my hopes on fortunate opportunities. But within me, a willful obstinacy gradually developed, and the more difficult life’s conditions became, the more I felt myself growing steadfast and even wise. I had understood from a very early age that what shapes a human being is resistance to one’s surroundings," he wrote.

With this mindset, Gorky lived in a room within Kazan's Marusovka slum alongside Pletnyov, a university student.
All his being harbored "a vague yet more meaningful longing for something beyond everything he had witnessed thus far."

Gorky and Pletnyov lived in a single room of *The Lower Depths* with just one bed.
Gorky slept there at night.
Pletnyov took his turn during the day.
This poor university student worked as a night proofreader at a Kazan newspaper office, earning eleven kopeks per night.
On days when Gorky had no earnings, it was not uncommon for these affectionate housemates, who pained his heart, to get by on just four pieces of bread, two kopeks' worth of tea, and three kopeks' worth of sugar.
Gorky frequently skipped dock work.
At Pletnyov's suggestion, he began engaging in scientific studies.
The suggestion was for him to take the elementary school teacher’s exam.

With the fresh, earnest efforts of a self-learner, one can imagine how fervently young Gorky threw himself into mastering this science.
And it is interesting that among these difficult tasks, what proved unmanageable for Gorky was grammar.
He wrote, somewhat awkwardly yet with a certain hidden pride.
"I simply couldn’t fit the living, difficult, free-spirited, and flexible Russian language into that framework."
This engagement with science came to an end surprisingly quickly.
It turned out that Gorky was still too young to take the elementary school teacher’s exam.

Now, on this morning, something changed in a corner of this "clamorous enclave of people past and future." A disabled veteran and a laborer who were residents there were taken away by the military police. When Pletnyov learned of this, he shouted excitedly to Gorky:

“Hey! Maxim, damn it! Run, Brother, quick!”

Gorky had been informed of the signal words—"Swift as a swallow"—and ran off to an outskirt town. The place turned out to be a small coppersmith’s workshop. There stood a curly-haired man with unnaturally blue eyes. With the penetrating gaze of one who had lived at society’s lowest depths, Gorky instantly discerned that this man was no true laborer.

From this starting point began Gorky's contact with Kazan's radical students and intelligentsia of that era.
Gorky attended their gatherings held amidst dense cemetery shrubbery.
There they rigorously interrogated this young dockworker about "what he had read," then
decided Gorky should participate in their study group.
At these meetings they analyzed Adam Smith's works annotated by Chernyshevsky.
The reading of Adam Smith failed to engage Gorky.

To those exhausting their entire being for the happiness and comfort of "other people's uncles," Gorky thought there had been no need to write such a large book in difficult words about what was in fact an obvious truth.
The economic propositions Smith presented were written on his very skin as something directly acquired from life.—
Nevertheless, Maxim Gorky endured the tedium, "continuing to sit with tremendous intensity, staring at the cellar wall where straw sandal bugs crawled." The countless "whys" throbbing within his heart made it nearly impossible for him to remain there.
Maxim gazed with irrepressible emotion at the portraits of Herzen, Darwin, Garibaldi, and others.
And sensing that these people who gathered in the stifling room to defend truth while stirring debates were dedicating themselves to bringing about a better human life, and that his unspoken thoughts resonated within their words, he faced these people with the ecstasy of a prisoner promised freedom.
At the same time, an odd sense of being out of place and uncomfortable moments he had never experienced before began to seep into Gorky’s life.
These students placed him before their eyes and gazed at Gorky with the look of a cabinetmaker appraising a piece of wood that could be crafted into something extraordinary.
“As if children were displaying some large copper coin found by the roadside—with pride—”
they introduced him around among themselves.
This was ill-suited to Gorky’s temperament.
Furthermore, they declared Gorky to be “a trueborn one!”
“He’s truly a child of the people!” they praised.
This, too, weighed heavily on Gorky’s mind and made him ponder deeply.
The students spoke of the people as embodiments of wisdom, spiritual beauty, and goodness, but under the realities of life where Gorky had been tossed about and struggled among them from childhood to that very day, he “had never known such people.”

The figures of radical students in 1880s Russia emerge vividly before us through Gorky's recollections, yet while treasuring him as a trueborn child of the people, they sought to mold Gorky through their own educational methods.
The teachers did not permit Gorky to select books freely.
They failed to appreciate critiques characteristic of Gorky regarding what he had read.
They would say.

“You just need to read the books we give you.”
“Into areas unsuitable for you—don’t stick your neck in.”

This harshness agitated Gorky.

When Gorky quit dock work and had to start working at a bakery factory, the situation grew even more complex for him.
The bakery factory’s basement enforced fourteen-hour workdays.
He could no longer meet with the students.
Though they had already become essential to Gorky’s vigorous young life—things he could neither live without meeting nor hearing—when he had to descend into the bakery factory’s basement, a “wall of oblivion” rose between him and those people.
The students appeared utterly incapable of perceiving the crucial fact that twenty-year-old Gorky—now working at the bakery factory out of necessity—was no longer the same man who had previously met with them, nor could they discern that enduring spiritual isolation amidst ignorance and shamelessness had become an entirely different form of torment for him compared to before.

A profoundly anguished era in his life began.
The state of young Gorky's internal struggle—he who had emerged in history as a powerful sprout of healthy humanity and great talent latent within the Russian people, yet found himself constrained by his era's circumstances—offers us today manifold insights that continue to resonate.
If one follows that period's customs which interpreted [the term] as signifying ignorance and subservience, Gorky had already ceased being among the blind masses.
Yet according to the radical intelligentsia's ideology at that time—they who positioned themselves as leaders making external contact with the people—Gorky could not be accepted as an intelligentsia in that sense.
So close at hand in Derenkov's bakery cellar where an essential archetype of their envisioned people was daily developing, even then the students failed to grasp this reality's astonishing richness.
Of course, Gorky himself could not have known.
Gorky remained caught in a wrenching spiritual vise.

Gorky’s basement comrades were generally so crushed by life that they could not sincerely accept the progressive worth held by the intelligentsia of that time.
For example, the bakers’ sole joy was going to brothels on payday.
Then, the "women for pleasure" there would direct malicious laments at them while drunk—complaints about students, officials, and "generally well-dressed folks."
Upon hearing this, Gorky’s bakery comrades—poisoned by “one-sided legends about educated people”—would have their mockery of the incomprehensible and hostility stimulated, their eyes flashing with venomous joy as they shouted:
"Grr... Those educated bastards are worse than us!"

“Grr...”
“Educated folks are worse than us!”

To these comrades, Maxim Gorky attempted to awaken the possible hope for a better life through his storytelling manner—inherited from his grandmother—that was filled with a charm capable of drawing in the listener’s heart.

From this era onward, Gorky's heart overflowed and began crystallizing into poetry.
That it was ponderous and crude was something even Gorky himself recognized.
Yet he felt that only through voicing his own words could he "express the deepest turmoil of his thoughts," and moreover, Gorky deliberately made his poetry crude in form as a protest against whatever vexed him.
How could his mathematics student teacher have comprehended this raw urgency in the young man's psyche?

The students accused him, saying:

“These aren’t words—they’re dead weights!”

Even as Gorky understood how right their intentions were and felt bound to them by an inexplicable force that defied understanding in that regard, he could not help sensing they maintained a “rather strict attitude” toward him.
From six in the evening until midnight he worked, slept during the day, and only during the intervals waiting for dough to ferment and bread to bake in the oven could Gorky read.
He couldn’t write.
He often thought during those intervals:
“What on earth will become of me now?”

During this heavy period, his grandmother—the source of brightness and love in his life—died.
But there was no one around him with whom he could share that sorrow or recount tender memories.
Police officers began circling Gorky like black kites.

Even when he attended student gatherings, the readings dragged on tediously long, and for Gorky—who by nature disliked arguments—he "found it difficult to follow the capricious leaps of excited thought," while the debaters’ self-regard never failed to irritate him.

When viewed through the lens of today’s history, this painful latter half of the 1880s for Gorky coincided precisely with a pivotal transition in Russia’s emancipation movement.
It was an era when the former "People’s Will" group had split and new organizations like the "Emancipation of Labor" emerged; works such as Plekhanov’s Our Differences were read and debated at student gatherings attended by Gorky.
However, these students—young even in historical terms—lacked the capacity to impress upon Gorky, whom they viewed as "raw material needing refinement," the crucial significance of their era.
When Gorky began speaking about matters that did not currently interest them, they advised him.

“Cut that out!”

But for Gorky, the very pain of life he longed to speak of and unburden did not subside.
It did not diminish.
The deceitful lifestyles of the Tolstoyans—who proliferated at that time—stirred penetrating questions in Gorky's heart, questions characteristic of laborers even regarding matters like mercy and love.
He thought.
"If life is a ceaseless struggle for earthly happiness," he thought, "wouldn’t futile mercy and love merely hinder its success?"
There were far too many of these so-called gentle people.
Their cleverness in adapting to vulgar things.
The mind’s fickle whims, its pliability—observing their mosquito-like pains while...
Maxim Gorky, now twenty-one years old, felt himself "like a horse whose legs had been seized by a cloud of horseflies."

Just then, student disturbances began at Kazan University.
To Gorky, crammed into the bakery cellar, their significance remained unclear, and their causes were vague.
The bakery worker comrades were trying to storm the university to assault the students.

“Oh, we’ll beat them with weights!”

They said with malicious delight.
Unable to bear it any longer, Gorky began arguing with them.
But in the end, what power did he have to protect the students?

Grief gnawed at Gorky's entire heart.
At night, sitting on the bank of the Kaban River, throwing stones into the dark water while endlessly repeating three words, he sank into thought.

“What am I supposed to do?”

Out of grief，Gorky decided to take up violin lessons.
The teacher—a low-ranking violinist in the theater orchestra—was discovered by Gorky attempting to steal money from the bakery’s cash register and put it into his pocket.
He quivered his lips and spilled large tears like oil from colorless eyes as he pleaded with Gorky.

“Go on, hit me.”

On a certain December evening of this unbearable year, Maxim Gorky leaned against the snow-covered bluff of the Volga River, pressed a pistol to his chest, and fired.
The bullet struck a rib and veered off.
He lived.

The following spring, Gorky—who had instead regained his vigor for life through this incident—went with a Narodnik named Romash, whom he had met through student comrades and who had returned from Siberian exile, to a village in the lower Volga region.
There Romash worked to instill reason into people, with Gorky assisting him, but during their time in this village, rich peasants destroyed their shop and nearly killed them.
It was these tense experiences that enabled Gorky to grasp in an extremely realistic manner—differing from how Tolstoy had acknowledged God in Ivan the Fool—both how peasants, particularly rich peasants, "so obstinately detested those attempting to live rationally," and the complex antisocial nature inherent in rural areas as a faction within the liberation movement.

As the 1890s began, the situation in Nizhny had shifted.
The radical intelligentsia groups now read Marx’s works.
Among those who had become "materialists," vigorous debates still raged.
All of Russia was suffocated under the shrewd governance of Pobedonostsev—that figure renowned in history—and it was an era when Chekhov wrote in a letter to his friend: "Russia approaches ruin through despotism."
Many capable lives were being destroyed in prisons and Siberia.
Yet those who sat debating wielded historical necessity as a convenient excuse for their complacency.
During this period, though Gorky had drawn close to Korolenko and found in him a type of intelligentsia worthy of trust, the theoretical dalliances emerging as an unhealthy tendency of the time ultimately lured him into a wandering life.
His debut work Makar Chudra was indeed written in Tiflis (1892), where he settled at this wandering journey's end.

Chekhov’s unreserved revulsion toward a segment of the Russian intelligentsia of that time—born from his sensitivity and human conscience—and Gorky’s attempts to discern within the intelligentsia, through his innate nature as a laborer, what was useful from what was unnecessary—or rather harmful—each holds immense instructive value in its own right.
The greatest cause of Chekhov’s hatred toward a segment of the intelligentsia of that time was their intellectual laziness.
“They’re always complaining and vehemently denying everything about him as well.”
“For lazy minds, it’s easier to deny than to assert.”
“Moreover,” he continued in an unrestrained tone, precisely because he himself belonged to the intelligentsia, “this disgust and resentment toward their own lazy brethren...”
“When I read the chatter of those types, I feel overt disgust.”
“Feverish patients have no desire for food—they make vague requests for something sour.”
“I too want something sour, and this is no mere coincidence.”

It was likely this desire that compelled Chekhov to write The Cherry Orchard.
However, through the entirety of his sincere life, Chekhov could only manage to declare—albeit in vague terms—the "yearning for something sour" that the outstanding intellectuals of his time had been thirsting for toward the progress of history.

The history of mutual relationship with the intelligentsia that young Gorky experienced through profound anguish and joy differed fundamentally from Chekhov's situation.
It resembled how people at the dawn of a new world's creation—half-awakened yet half-enshrouded in darkness—were driven by desperate needs to zealously forage for sustenance while intuitively separating rotten elements from wholesome ones.
"There's something dissonant in that person's heart... When I notice such qualities in people, I begin feeling as if they were physically maimed."
This was a line spoken by a woman named Kareliya in Maxim Gorky's play *The Summer People*, which he wrote concerning the intelligentsia.
Gorky himself is considered to have absorbed developmental elements from established culture through this sensory approach—grounded in his innate keen observations of lived experience and contemplations.

In 1898, the year the Social Democratic Labour Party was founded, Maxim Gorky—who had already begun ascending toward the "peak of glory"—was arrested on charges of political activity.
*The Petty Bourgeois* was banned from being performed, and *The Lower Depths* had made Gorky's name known worldwide.
Thanks to this, after that Sunday in 1905, he who had been imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress prison was able to survive and live in Italy as a political emigrant.

The friendship with Lenin that would span nearly twenty-five years was formed in 1907.
What draws our attention is that Maxim Gorky—after writing Mother, though Enemies had been written several years earlier—underwent various ideological waverings between 1908 and 1934, founding a labor school on Capri with recallists and seeking compromise from Lenin as an advocate for the God-builders.
During this period, Gorky—due to being away from Russia—failed to fully grasp both the tempo and direction of the people's growth after 1905, while at the same time, when observed through contemporary eyes, it becomes understandable that he had fallen into an error typical of those who could confidently declare, “I know this,” in a certain sense.
It was only natural that Gorky believed he knew the Russian people best.
He did not realize that the failure of 1905 stemmed from the masses’ lack of sufficient organization, and as he came to recognize the deficiency of external forces, the people sought hope in their own unique power within themselves—that they could be liberated by God.
The God-builders exploited this naive and misguided distress of Gorky.
The intelligentsia-like theorizing and constructed facade of theirs temporarily ensnared Maxim Gorky, who was in a transitional period at the time.
Having reached forty and become Maxim Gorky, the world-renowned writer, he had by this time lost the single-minded earnestness of his twenties while still not having established a powerful worldview as a true man of the people capable of defeating enemies armed with knowledge.
The collection of letters in which Lenin meticulously expounds upon those errors to Gorky retains invaluable worth as a precious legacy today.

Throughout his life, Maxim Gorky experienced such intriguing and significant wavering more than once.
In 1916, the Russian Okhrana spent vast sums to publish an ostensibly revolutionary newspaper called *Russia's Will*, mobilizing writers including Andreyev, Bunin, Kuprin, and Sologub.
At that time, only a handful of writers refused participation, but Gorky—having properly assessed the significance of his literary work—resisted this tempting offer that would have published his writings for an exceptionally high manuscript fee for the era.

In this instance, Gorky’s assessment of writers’ value and the tasks of radical intelligentsia was commendable, yet those very convictions led him into renewed opposition with Lenin during the great turning point of 1917.

Gorky could only conclude that "the people’s comprehension would persist as a force requiring external guidance" even after October’s seismic upheaval.
For Gorky—who believed the October Revolution had been achieved precisely through the intelligentsia’s century-long preparations and their "instilling social heroism and education into workers’ hearts"—Lenin’s refusal to position intellectuals at the core of new societal leadership remained incomprehensible.
Was it not in 1928, when Gorky returned to the Soviet Union after five years’ absence, that he finally grasped with visceral certainty his own error in judgment?
In that late-life utterance delivered with conviction—"Throughout history, capable talents among laborers were indeed often made to serve the very forces that kept them suppressed"—I perceive an unflinching distillation of all Gorky’s epochal truths and missteps: those of a man who navigated history as one of the people while wielding extraordinary human and literary gifts.

Maxim Gorky was a writer who demonstrated through his own example that for an author, the most vital task lies in “finding oneself amidst history’s tangled events, aligning one’s will with the universal human will ceaselessly creating goodness, and opposing forces that obstruct great creation—the very creation containing life’s meaning.”
Maxim Gorky dedicated himself to literary work for history’s proper progression and, within its glorious achievements, forged his own being.
Thus he concluded his sixty-eight-year life, presenting a rare exemplar of the relationship between historicity and talent.

[August 1936]