Maxim Gorky's Reminiscences of Lenin

Gorky and Lenin in conversation, sketch USSR 1947

An English translation released in the Soviet Press, 1947:

I EXPECTED Lenin to be different. To me something seemed to be lacking in him. He blurred his r's and, thumbs stuck under his armpits, stood with arms akimbo. And, all in all, he was somehow too plain; you felt nothing of the "leader" in him. I am a literary man. My profession obliges me to observe petty details and this duty has become a habit, sometimes even a tiresome one.

When I was "presented" to G. V. Plekhanov, he stood with his arms folded on his breast and looked at me sternly, in a somewhat bored fashion, as a teacher wearied by his duties looks at one more new pupil. He uttered a quite ordinary phrase; "I am an admirer of your talent." Outside of that he said nothing that my memory could fasten upon. And during the whole time of the Congress, neither he nor I was seized by the desire to "open our souls " to each other in talk.

But this bald, burring man, thick-set and strong, with one hand rubbing his Socratic brow and the other pumping mine vigorously, his wonderfully lively eyes shining tenderly, immediately entered into conversation about the short comings of my book, Mother; it appeared that he had read the manuscript, borrowed from I. P. Ladyzhnikov.

I said that I had hurried with the writing of the book, but did not have a chance to explain why I had hurried; Lenin, with an affirmative nod of the head, himself gave the explanation. It was very good that I had made haste, the book was needed, many workers were taking part in the revolutionary movement without understanding its class nature, caught up by its elemental force, and now they would read Mother with much benefit to themselves.

"A very timely book." This was his only compliment, but I prized it extremely. Then he inquired in a business-like way whether Mother was being translated into other languages, how much the book had been marred by the Russian and American censorship; and when he learned of the decision to bring its author to trial, he at first frowned, but then, head thrown back and eyes closed, broke out into an extraordinary kind of laugh. His laughter attracted the workers; Foma Uralsky came up, I think, and three more people...

He began to speak of the anarchy of production under the capitalist system, of the tremendous proportion of raw material expended fruitlessly, and ended by regretting that up to that time no one had hit upon the idea of writing a book on this theme . For me there was some thing unclear in this idea, but I did not succeed in questioning Vladimir Ilyich; he was already talking interestingly of "eccentricism " as a special form of theatrical art.

"Here we have a kind of satirical or skeptical attitude to what is generally accepted, a striving to turn it inside out, twist it a bit, show the illogicality of what is usual. Sophisticated, but interesting."

Once when I came to him I saw a volume of War and Peace lying on the table.

"Yes, Tolstoy! I wanted to read the scene of the hunt, and then, you see, I remembered that I must write to a comrade. As for reading, there's no time at all. It was only last night that I read your book on Tolstoy."

Smiling, his eyes narrowing, he stretched luxuriously in his armchair and, lowering his voice, went on swiftly:

"What a massive chunk, eh? What a tremendous chap! There, old fellow, is an artist for you... And do you know what else is amazing? Before this Count there was no real muzhik in literature."

Then, looking at me with his eyes a-squint, he asked: "Who in Europe can rank with him?" And answered his own question: "Nobody." Rubbing his hands, he laughed with satisfaction.

I quite often noticed in him the trait of pride in Russian art. Sometimes this trait seemed to me to be strangely alien to Lenin and even naive, but later I learned to hear in it the echo of a deeply hidden, joyful love for the working people.

On Capri, watching how cautiously the fishermen unsnarled their nets, torn and tangled by a shark, he remarked: "Our fellows work with more spirit."

And when I expressed doubt on this score, he said, somewhat vexed: " Hm, hm, and aren't you forgetting Russia, living here on this knob?"

V. A. Desnitsky-Stroyev told me that once he was riding in a railway car with Lenin through Sweden and looking over a German monograph on Dürer.

The Germans who were their neighbors in the compartment asked what the book was. Later it became clear that they had never heard anything about their great artist. This gave Lenin what almost amounted to delight and twice, proudly , he said to Desnitsky:

"They don't know their own people, but wed do."

One evening in Moscow, in the apartment of Y. P. Peshkova, listening to Isai Dobrovein play Beethoven sonatas, Lenin said: "I don't know of anything better than the Appassionata. I am ready to listen to it every day. Marvelous, superhuman music. I always think with perhaps naive pride: see what miracles men can do!"

And, squinting, ironical, he added without gayety: "But I can't listen to music often, it affects the nerves, makes you want to utter endearing follies and pat the heads of people who, living in a dirty hell, are able to create such beauty. But today you cannot pat anybody on the head -they would bite off your hand, and you have to beat them over the head, beat without mercy, although our ideals direct us against any violence to the people - Hm, hm, a hellishly hard duty!"

His attitude to me was that of a strict teacher and a good, "solicitous friend."

"You are an enigmatic person," he told me jokingly, "—in literature, it would seem, a good realist, but in relation to people, a romantic. According to you, all are victims of history. We know history and we say to the victims: overthrow the sacrificial altars, break up the temples, down with the gods! But you want to convince me that the militant party of the working class is obliged first of all to make things comfortable for the intellectuals."

Perhaps I am mistaken, but it seemed to me that Vladimir Ilyich took pleasure in his conversations with me. He almost always urged: "When you come to town, telephone and we'll see each other."

And once he said: "Talking with you is always interesting, the range of your impressions is more varied and wider."

He made inquiries about the mood of the intelligentsia, paying special attention to scientists - at that time I was working in the Commission for Improving the Living Conditions of Scientists. He interested himself in proletarian literature. "What do you expect from it?" he asked me.

I said that I expected much, but considered it absolutely necessary to establish a literary university with chairs of philology, foreign languages of the Occident and Orient, folklore, history of world literature, and, separately, Russian literature.

"Hm, hm, "he said, squinting and chuckling. "Sweeping and stunning! I'm not against its being sweeping, but it will be stunning, now won't it? We have no professors of our own in this field, and the bourgeois ones will teach history in such a way...No we can't attempt this yet. We must wait three years, five years."

And he complained: "There's absolutely no time to read...”