Among the “classic” Russian pre-revolutionary authors, Maxim Gorky alone enjoyed unequivocal adoration in Soviet literary culture. Shortly after the much-publicized “return” of Gorky to the Soviet Union under Stalin in 1928, Soviet authorities and intellectuals began to fortify his reputation as a Soviet hero and icon. Transcending his role as a mere author and littérateur, Gorky became a “Soviet proletarian” cultural symbol. Despite his often strained private relationships with Soviet officials, including Stalin himself, Gorky’s post-1928 writings evinced an unwavering commitment to Soviet ideals and policies as well as a desire to theorize and establish a genuinely new revolutionary cultural frontier.
The term “cult of Gorky” describes the propagandistic promotion and public adulation of Maxim Gorky by the Soviet state and public, first at home and then abroad. Upon his death in 1936, Gorky received full Soviet burial honors, with Stalin himself leading the funeral procession. A march through Red Square concluded with the placing of the writer’s ashes in a niche in the Kremlin wall behind the Lenin Mausoleum, cementing Maxim Gorky as a Stalinist institution. Following his passing, Gorky’s myth grew through embellishment in print and film, remaining synonymous with Soviet culture for decades to come. Gorky became the Soviet “man of culture” par excellence. The complete and open alignment of such an eminent figure offered the Soviet Union an unmissable opportunity to bolster its global image. Sympathetic onlookers from the European Left, too, seized on Gorky’s alignment as a validation of their own struggles and politico-cultural ideals, propagating the “cult of Gorky” in parallel with developments in their “model country.” How one engaged with Gorky came to represent one’s fidelity to the entire Soviet cultural mission.
This pattern held in Greece, too. Even before the Russian Revolution, Gorky enjoyed an outsize reputation in its leftist intellectual circles. Reflecting on his young adulthood before the war, famous communist poet Kostas Varnalis claimed that “Gorky touched us more than anyone… overwhelm[ing] us with his work and dramatic life.” Speaking to the hearts of the impoverished “masses,” those struck by “poverty” and dejection, Gorky seemed able to “answer the liveliest problems” and “realize the deepest inclinations of [his] time” more than “any other” writer, Russian or Greek (“Pos Gnorisa ton Gkorki,” 55). While such reminiscences surely bear the stamp of later developments, they speak to a preexisting Greek openness to Gorky’s subsequent Soviet exaltation.
Drawing on Gorky’s new status in the communist motherland, the interwar period solidified, adapted, and expanded the Greek left’s reverence for the author. Its leading cultural magazine of this era, Neoi Protoporoi [New Avant-Gardists] (hereafter NP) served as the central conduit for this importation during its brief but influential run from 1931 to 1936. With close ties to the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), NP made the Soviet literati’s cult of Gorky into a Greek phenomenon. Though the great popularity of Gorky among Greek readers of the first half of the twentieth century is no secret, the efforts of influential cultural mediums such as Neoi Proporoi to develop his mythology in the local context, building on Gorky’s pre-existing reputation as the champion of the social destitute, have not received the attention they deserve.
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In the early Greek interwar period, the social destitute became a leading literary character, and it was through this pan-political movement of the letters that Gorky’s cult began its rapid expansion (Dounia, Logotechnia kai Politiki, 46). Personified in the tramp, the lowlife, the outlaw, or otherwise, the figure of the social destitute amalgamated anarchist political beliefs with ideological despair. Gorky’s characters shaped the imagination of the leftist wing of this literary movement, guiding authors like Tefkros Anthias, Petros Pikros, and Dimosthenis Voutiras. As a 1932 NP article recognized, his heroes were “the humble and revolutionary, the abased and proud… the victims of social totality” (Nazos, “Ta Sarantachrona tou… Gkorki,” 207–209). Where other authors prized aesthetics, Gorky prioritized honesty, morality, and politics, seeking to represent those at society’s margins. Consciously transcending literary matters, Gorky’s approach became the heart of Greek intellectual life’s more revolutionary elements (Dounia, 35).
Articles about Gorky appeared consistently throughout NP’s run, far exceeding those connected to any other Russian author. Issues 6 and 11 from 1932 were largely dedicated to him. Most Gorky-related pieces in the NP fell into common categories: brief hagiographies of his many “achievements” in the struggle towards communism (Nazos, 206–209), equally mythologized accounts of his relationship with Soviet leaders, descriptions of his justified adulation in his home country (“I ESSD timaei ton Gkorki,” 391–392), and explications of his ideas about philosophy, culture and geopolitics (Rolland, “O Romain Rollan sto Gkorki,” 108–110). His own writings did not feature prominently in the magazine. Those that the NP did translate and publish covered his opinions on political developments in Europe (“Militaristiki Ideologia,” 393–396), his overall cultural Weltanschauung (“Oi Dio Politismoi,” 210–216), and his defense of the USSR against its critics (“O Sosialismos Enantia ston Kapitalismo,” 223). This publication pattern indicates that, in parallel with Soviet authorities and intellectuals, the editorial board and writers of NP perceived Gorky as much more than an author of great fiction, seeing him instead as the Soviet Union’s chief cultural representative and a penetrating intellect whose ideas on any matter should be studied and heeded.
Laudatory articles in NP by other respected “men of culture” or up-and-coming writers—such as Romain Rolland (“O Romain Rolland ston Gkorki”), Fyodor Gladkov (“Sta sarantachrona tou Gkorki,” 389) and Vsevolod Ivanov (“Kalimera sas filoi mou!”, 390–391)—cemented Gorky’s status as an intellectual icon. Strikingly, Ivanov often referred to him as a “teacher.” As Alexandra Alafouzou put it, Gorky gave shape to true Soviet literature, the sine qua non of which was to serve as an “ode to [the proletariat’s] work” (“Merika Charaktiristika…,” 303). Articles emphasizing Gorky’s deep personal acquaintance with Lenin (Gorky, “O Gkorki gia ton Lenin,” 56) and the latter’s recognition of the former’s work also served to link Gorky inextricably to the Revolution. Nazos, for example, argued that Gorky’s “missteps” “never made Lenin doubt the deep and inseparable connections [he] had with the pioneering worker’s movement” (209). For Nazos, the fact that “Lenin himself awarded Maxim Gorky the title of proletarian author” placed the Russian author more or less beyond rebuke (209). Therefore, Greek leftists, like their political peers elsewhere, perceived a critique of Gorky’s work as an attack on Lenin and the Revolution. Tellingly, issue 11 of 1932, though largely dedicated to Gorky, commemorated the anniversary of the October revolution in parallel.
The Soviet state played a role in legitimizing Gorsky, but such patronage and promotion legitimized the Soviet state in turn. Writers and editors affiliated with NP understood the Soviet Union’s “consecration” of Gorky’s work and person as evidence of its role as a defender of culture and the arts. An anonymous article in NP with the straightforward title “The U.S.S.R. honors Gorky” made this point with gusto:
From ancient history till today, never has a race, nation, or people ever honored a cultural hero as the Soviet Union honors Maxim Gorky today! From Stalin to the longshoremen of Nizhni, from the Arctic to Tatarstan and beyond to revolutionary China, millions— the entirety of conscious humanity—rose one day, like a man with a unique miraculous passion, to celebrate the old hoodlum who today shines in the world of cultural pioneers…[T]he honors shown by the Bolsheviks to Gorky raise man’s stature beyond what we are used to, above what we… could have imagined. (“I E.S.S.D. Timaei ton Gkorki,” 391)
Gorky’s purported qualities as an author-activist were presented as a model for any aspiring intellectual of the Greek left. In his biographical study of Gorky, G. Nazos catalogued the different artistic and intellectual pitfalls that the writer had avoided: rejecting any and all “bourgeois Gods,” breaking free from the idleness and utopianism of primitive revolutionary groups, progressing from his “romantic phase” to a starker revolutionary realism—even though this earned him the adoration of the Tsarist bourgeoisie—and avoiding the ideological morasse of individualism or “Nietzschean” egocentrism (Nazos, 206–208). Concurring with G. Nazos, Alexandra Alafouzou’s eulogy for Gorky praised him for having refused “the inward look” that enticed authors like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Ivan Bunin to regard humanity in general as the eternal perpetrator of its own woes (Alafouzou, “Ezvise o Gkorki,” 262).
NP framed Gorky’s positive qualities as ideals for not only its writers, but also its leftist readership in general, whatever their cultural output. Instead of turning inward, an intellectual or artist should, like Gorky, seek to expose the systems of oppression at the root of human suffering, which revolutionary struggle alone could alleviate (Alafouzou, “Ezvise o Gkorki,” 262). They should constantly struggle against life and society’s calamities (Panferov, “O F. Panferof gia ton Gkorki,” 390), remaining deeply in touch with reality (Tsakiris, “Ki Ena Gramma,” 358–359) yet steadfastly optimistic (Rollad, 108). Like Gorky, they ought to show an absolute, unyielding faith to the USSR (Nazos, 209) and the people (Ivanov, “Kalimera Sas Filoi Mou,” 390–391). Formal membership in the Communist Party and not just a vague commitment to Marxism would be necessary (Gladkov, 389). Most crucially, perhaps, the action of truly proletarian authors would need to exceed mere authorship; like the great Gorky, an artist or intellectual should strive to overturn the existing order and establish socialism, “attack[ing]” all social issues and spheres of human knowledge (Alafouzou, “O Gkorki Ezvise,” 363).
In August 1934, during the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Gorky and others formally iterated these attributes and qualities as a new socialist-realist doctrine. Representing the newly founded Union of Soviet Writers as its president, Gorky delivered a prominent speech at the Congress that encapsulated these efforts. Just two months following the Congress, in the opening pages of NP’s November 1934 issue, an article by leading NP board member Dimitirs Glinos recognized the Congress as epochal:
For revolutionary and proletarian creators [technites], the lessons to be drawn from this congress are very rich and very fruitful. That is why [its speeches, discussion transcripts, and decisions] need to be studied with great attentiveness. (“To Synedrio Tis Moschas,” 445–446)
For NP, as well as all succeeding literary periodicals associated with the KKE, Gorky’s speech in particular became immeasurably influential.
One important section of Gorky’s Congress speech had emphasized the importance of folklore as a source for revolutionary authors. His call found a receptive audience on the Greek left, where an ambient anti-intellectualism and distrust of “bourgeois culture” prevailed. The composition of KKE officialdom during the 1930s reflected this disposition and participated in this turn, insofar as industrial and agricultural workers came to make up the great majority of the Party’s 28 highest-ranking officials, while intellectuals and white-collar workers largely disappeared (Marantzidis, Stin Skia tou Stalin, 165). The 1934 publication in NP of Gorky’s article “Art for the Masses” consolidated and clarified this stance. There, Gorky distinguished two elements in “urban literature,” one elitist and (consequently) incomprehensible and another reactionary but comprehensible. Thus, for Gorky, true “literature for the people” could find its rudiments not in urban publications, but rather in the oral literary traditions of common people. Following this article’s publication, NP and other leftist periodicals rapidly shifted their interest towards such folkloric and otherwise “rural” elements of Greece (Iatrelis, I Katastaltiki Antidrasi, 55–56). Poetry like that of Giannis Ritsos and articles such as N. Karvounis’s “The Folk Song” (“To Laiko Tragoudi,” 89–92), published by NP in 1935,would have been unimaginable without Gorky’s address and subsequent article.
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By introducing his myth and adapting it to the local context, NP played an instrumental role in the “sacralization” of Gorky for the Greek left, for which Gorky remained a literary saint and cultural touchstone long after NP’s discontinuation in 1936. That same year, at the time of Gorky’s death, author and literary critic Andreas Zevgas noted that Maxim Gorky was one of the most translated contemporary authors in the country, with twenty-three different translations of his works in circulation (Zevgas, “Maksimos Gorky”, 938–944). From the early to mid-1930s onwards, many prominent leftist poets and writers dedicated works to him (Ritsos, Anthias, etc.) and adopted the maternal motif from Gorky’s 1906 novel Mother, e.g. in Ritsos’s celebrated, breakthrough long-form poem Epitaph (1936) and Melpo Axioti’s novel The Twentieth Century (1946). The desire to fully comprehend Gorky’s work was so great as to help motivate many Greek leftists to learn the Russian language (Matthaiou & Polemi, I Ekdotiki Peripeteia, 81). Publications of his work continued even during the otherwise culturally repressive, far-right Metaxas Regime of 1936 to 1940, and translations and laudations of Gorky abounded in Greek publications well into the 1960s. A 1953 article in the most widely read leftist newspaper of the post-Civil War era (1949–1967), I Avgi [The Dawn], written to celebrate the Greek translation of Gorky’s “Fomas Gordeyev” (1899), perfectly distilled the way that the Russian author had been canonized as a literary untouchable for the left:
We will not hereby attempt a critique of this work of the patriarch of Russian literature, of the inventor of socialist realism, because international literary criticism has placed him in his age, at the very peak of the pyramid of great writers, whose work constitutes a hymn to man and his struggle for happiness. (Glafkos, “Ta Nea Vivlia,” 2)
The Greek pro-Soviet Left, with which NP and other Gorky-boosting publications were affiliated, had increased its political and cultural capital in Greece from the early 1930s onwards, reaching its apogee during the Resistance (1941–1945). As a consequence, serious and influential detractors to Soviet cultural imports like the “cult of Gorky” first appeared among the Greek left only once unambiguously anti-Soviet Eurocommunist voices gained traction in the mid-to-late 1960s.
Nikolaos Paraschis is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute (Department of History), nikolaos.paraschis@eui.eu. His areas of specialization are twentieth-century literary and intellectual history. Combining methodologies and theoretical frameworks acquired through his background in Eastern European History, Comparative Literature, and Russian Studies, his dissertation documents and discusses the permeation, influence, and political significations of Soviet and Russian literature in the Greek political left between 1931 and 1968.
Edited by Zac Endter
Featured image: Mosaic of Maxim Gorky at the entrance to the Park Kultury [Park of Culture] station on the Moscow Metro. Photograph by Brian Jeffery Beggerly, April 2007, CC BY 2.0.
