Richard Wright's long journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky - Maxim Gorky and Fyodor Dostoevsky

African American Review, Fall, 1994 by Dale E. Peterson

Each scene and each significant person thus represents a temptation to regress to the traditional morality and the ancient folkways of his people.... By far the greatest temptation, and the one which accompanies Alyosha to the very end, is that of finding refuge in his grandmother's peace of mind and becoming part of her calm conscience.... she obviously symbolizes the primitive trust of the people, their ability to survive and to persist, and yet also their weakness in enduring what will ultimately enslave them. (322-24)

Undeniably, readers of Gorky's remarkable memoir are made uncomfortably intimate with daily life among a mercurial clan suffering the insults and injuries of arbitrary patriarchal violence and indiscriminate maternal acceptance. The opening scene, with its rude life-and-death juxtaposition of a father's corpse and a mother in labor, as witnessed by a neglected four-year-old, captures vividly and with symbolic power the permanent frame through which Gorky's narrative patiently observes the Russian interior. As Helen Muchnic once pointed out, we too will come to stand like that astonished child "in a dark corner, gazing in tense and troubled incomprehension on the tragically sordid scene that unfolds"; but not all readers will be as consoled as Muchnic was by the grandmother's sudden replacement of the departed father with her soft, strong hand at the child's side offsetting "an infinitude of cruelty" (41) by teaching him tolerance and appreciation.(6)

At the beginning of the second chapter, Gorky makes clear the adult ambition that moves him to render so honestly the baffled responses and vacillating emotions of his childhood among vulgar Volga relatives: "Truth is grander than pity and I am not writing about myself but about that close, suffocating atmosphere of oppressive impressions in which lived, and lives to this very day, the ordinary Russian person" (Detstvo 17).(7) Much, then, hinges upon how the narrative cultivates the reader's sympathies and antipathies as Gorky reconstitutes his childhood traumas and affections. But the greatness of the book resides in its nuanced presentation both of a child's unresolved conflicts and of a conflicted adult voice. That is why the critical literature has reached no consensus about Gorky's authorized perspective on the folk subculture as a whole. It is clear that the careful sequence of episodes reinforces Erikson's masterplot of a proletarian's progress; that is, the child withdraws from and eventually rejects a range of traditional peasant behaviors that are in collusion with a culture which thrives on a punitive formal religion, outbursts of anarchistic rage, and a disabling resignation to suffering. The gradual emergence of a "Bolshevik" resistance to the mentality of traditional Russia is signaled by young Alyosha's sympathy for an ostracized local intellectual and inventor nicknamed "Good Deal." And the memoir even contains, in chapter 12, a precocious parable about perestroika. Gorky's young persona undertakes a voluntary project in social reconstruction. The alienated child uproots and overhauls a nasty backyard pit in which a foul-minded sadistic neighbor had committed suicide and transforms it into a "garden project" (postroiki v sadu) that is his "first independent deed" (142).