Source: M. J. Olgin: Leader and Teacher
Published: Workers Library Publishers, New York, December 1939.
Transcription/HTML Markup: Brian Reid
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2006. You can freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive as your source.
BARELY five years ago I heard Gorky addressing the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. He was dean of Soviet letters in more than one sense. He had written numerous novels, stories, sketches and plays that occupied first place in world literature as works of art. He had inaugurated and helped develop the literature of the workers, proletarian literature springing from the factories and shops. He had guided the talent of numerous young writers who found in him a teacher, a counsellor, an inspirer. He had written great, eloquent tracts against world reaction and fascism that made a profound impression not only in the Soviet Union, but in many other countries. He had initiated and encouraged the publication of collective works springing from the very depth of the working people, among them the now famous History of the Factories and Plants in which the workers themselves became historians of a past so close to their heart. He had been the editor of almanacs and series of novels and other publications. He had written scores and scores of letters of advice to collective farms and youth organizations, to Red Army units and labor unions, to writers’ groups and village teachers. He had led a colorful and fruitful and profound life - as broad as the Revolution which changed as by magic one-sixth of the surface of the earth.
There he stood, a man rich with achievement beyond anything a writer could wish for himself. Yet he looked neither aged in spite of his sixty-six years, nor conscious of his greatness. He was just a man who had to carry through a piece of work. He was the chairman of that gathering of the best there was in the writing community of the U.S.S.R. He had to put that Congress on the level it deserved as the greatest convention of those whom Stalin called “the engineers of the human soul,” whose work is of a nature that it molds the minds of scores of millions in a country where socialism is the order of the day.
He looked neither old nor tired in spite of a sickness that plagued him for the better part of forty years, nor “dictatorial,” as some foreign enemies described him in their malice. He was a man of creative intelligence, a man of ideas, a man shot through with the passion of thinking that was called to change the face of life.
There was another side to that Congress, and to Gorky, which made the occasion particularly thrilling to me as a Jewish writer. The man Gorky had aided the development of the literatures of national minorities in old Russia: the Ukrainians, the Georgians, the White Russians, the Jews. After the Revolution he had devoted a large part of his activities to encouraging the growth of literatures other than Russian in the U.S.S.R. Standing on that platform of the All-Union Congress, at which were gathered not only the Russian writers but the writers of all the other republics and regions and languages in the country, he said:
“I find it necessary to point out that the Soviet literature is not only the literature of the Russian language; this is an all-Union literature. The literatures of the brother republics, being different from us in language only, live and work in the light and under the beneficent influence of the same idea.”
Gorky had a great admiration for Jewish literature. In the magazine Screen for 1938, memoirs were printed about Gorky’s relation to Jewish writers.
“Alexei Maximovich,” says the author, “became extremely enthusiastic over Sholem Aleichem’s story Chanukah Gelt, the amazing humor of which was fully appreciated by Gorky. He very much liked the stories by Peretz. He once looked for a long while at a Peretz portrait brought to him, then he asked:
“‘Why shouldn’t he come here?”
“I answered that Peretz could not do that.
“Gorky was astonished:
“‘Why?’
“‘He has no right to live outside of the Jewish pale of settlement.’
“Alexei Maximovich kept quiet for a while, pressing his lips sternly, then he said slowly and emphatically: “‘Scoun-dr-els!’”
That was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gorky was then busy organizing the publication of a volume of translations into Russian from Jewish authors. The volume was ready, but in the meantime Gorky was arrested and exiled. The volume never appeared. But Gorky’s interest in Jewish literature never flagged.
In a letter to the Ukrainian writer Kotzyubinsky (1913), Gorky said: “A man is mortal, a people is immortal.”
“A man is mortal, a people is immortal.”
This great reverence for people, for the equality of people, for the culture of people, guided him till his very last.
He would have lived with us longer had he not been murdered by assassins, servants of fascism. Too dangerous was the man to his mortal enemy, fascism.