maxim gorki in new york

Maxim Gorki in New YorkAuthor(s): Ernest PooleSource: Slavonic and East European Review. American Series, Vol. 3, No. 1 (May, 1944), pp. 77-83Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3020225 .

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MAXIM GORKI IN NEW YORK By ERNEST POOLE

SOME ten years after Alexei Peshkov had won fame as a writer under the name of Maxim Gorki (Maxim the Bitter), he came to New York in the spring of 1906 to raise funds for the Bolshevik movement in Russia. During the disaster that followed, I was in close contact with him and I shall set down my memories here. But before I do, it may be worth while to sketch briefly my own Russian adventures up to that time, for they throw light on the widespread interest here in the early movements to set Russia free.

In Princeton I had hungrily read in translation Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoyevski, Gogol, Gorki and other great Slav realists, and also American George Kennan's books on the early Russian revolutionists, books widely read all over our land. Then, living for two years or more on the lower East Side in New York, I became a friend and admirer of Abraham Cahan and his Yiddish socialist daily, Die Forwaerts, and through him I met many Russian Social Democrats and Social Revolutionists. When old Katharine Breshkovskaya, known and loved as "Babushka" (little grandmother), after twenty- eight years in Siberia, came to New York on a speaking campaign, Cahan gave me the first long interview. My story appeared in The Outlook, a magazine widely read at the time, and she sold over 20,000 reprints at her meetings in cities clear out to the Coast. Everywhere she found warm welcome and raised immense sums for her Social Revolutionist cause. I met Social Democrat leaders, too, and some Russian liberals uptown. When the tragedy of Red Sunday occurred at St. Petersburg in January, 1905, and the Czar's Cossacks and police killed hundreds of unarmed workmen, led by the priest Gapon and marching with wives and children to the Winter Palace to ask their Little Father for aid, I hungrily read the news reports and Gorki's long dramatic cable to the Hearst papers here describing the massacre and declaring: "The Russian Revolution has begun!"

Only twenty-four at the time and crazy to get over there, I signed a contract with The Outlook and sailed that same week, taking with me to Russia a score of letters and several thousand roubles for the cause. In Paris I saw the liberal exile, Peter Struve, and from him took five thousand roubles more. All this money I delivered in St. Petersburg to- Harold Williams, correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, and through him and my letters I gained access to secret meetings of liberal, labor and socialist groups. There, too, I met S. S. McClure, who had come over for his big American magazine,

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78 Ernest Poole

and he told me: "If I had the money and the time I would start an American magazine called Russia In Revolution and would plan to run it for ten years; for this job will take fully that long and the interest in our country will keep increasing all the time."

That was in 1905, so his timing was not far from right! At St. Petersburg, working day and night, in six weeks I learned

enough Russian to help a bit in interviews; and later, with a Russian friend, I went to Moscow and later down through the Ukraine, making many stops in the villages. Then from the Crimea by boat I traveled to Batum, and from there up through the mountains with my friend, the agent for a group of English liberals who planned to help the revolutionists by smuggling a few thousand rifles into the Caucasus from the coast. Arrested, we managed to clear ourselves, and with eight relays of horses drove up northward over the famous military road and so down to the Russian steppes. From there I came to London and so home. Meanwhile The Outlook was printing my long series of articles.

In New York, during the next year I helped to organize the A Club, a small group of writers, in an old house at 3 Fifth Avenue, with Walter Weyl, Howard Brubaker, Leroy and Miriam Scott, Charlotte Teller, Robert and Martha Bruere, and several more liberals and radicals, and such visitors as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, David Graham Phillips, S. S. McClure and old Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, who lived just around the corner and often came in to drawl out stories before our hearth through the smoke of his cigar. We had several Russian visitors, too, brought by Abraham Cahan or sent by our friends Arthur Bullard and William English Walling-, who were in Russia at the time. The best known of these was the old Social Democrat, Chaikovski. Another, Ivan Narodny, lived at the Club for some months, and I helped launch his publicity by writing his dramatic story in the Saturday Evening Post.

Through him and other Russians, including Gorki's adopted son, Peshkov, then in New York, we learned in advance of Gorki's coming over here. For the powerful Bolshevik faction of the Social Demo- crats, we heard, he was to make all over this country a big money raising campaign; and with him as manager and treasurer would come Nicholas Burenin of the Bolsheviks. Asked to do what we could for the advance publicity, we appealed to men we knew, and so helped to organize an American committee, including Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, Jane Addams, Arthur Brisbane of Hearst's Evening Journal, S. S. McClure, Robert Collier, owner of Collier's, Finley Peter Dunn (Mr. Dooley), David Graham Phillips,



Maxim Gorki in New York 79

Robert Hunter, and others, and we persuaded old Mark Twain to take the chairmanship. To launch the movement we planned a stag dinner of fifteen or twenty at our Club for April 11, the night after the day of Gorki's landing. During the same week another dinner was to be given by Gaylord Wilshire, owner and editor of the socialist Wilshire's Magazine, with such guests as H. G. Wells, Edwin Mark- ham, Charles Beard, Franklin Giddings and John Spargo. Other receptions and mass meetings were being planned in New York and other cities by liberal, socialist and labor groups and organizations for, in the ten years since his first success, Gorki's novels, short stories, and plays had sold well in translations all over our land, and to millions of Americans his name had become a symbol of the cause of Russian freedom then so popular over here. We learned how the Russian Embassy had failed in attempts to have him shut out by our government as a dangerous alien; and when a rumor reached us that he might be invited to the White House, we jubilantly began to dream of a million-dollar whirlwind campaign.

Then, from a Russian banker friend in Washington, Narodny learned that Gorki was bringing with him the actress Maria Andrey- eva, with whom he had lived for about three years since separating from his wife, and that the Russian Embassy here, in a last effort to dynamite his American tour, was to supply the New York press with photographs of his "mistress" and of his "deserted" wife and child. At once we sensed the danger. We knew about Andreyeva. Born in an old Russian family, she had been forced at sixteen, we heard, into marriage with an old Russian prince and, since his death, had become a star in the world famous Moscow Art Theater, where she had helped in Gorki's first plays. A highly gifted charming woman, speaking fluent German and French, she was devoted to Gorki, looked after him when he was ill, and was considered by all their friends as his wife - which of course she proved to be for the remainder of his long life. As for his first wife, Katharine Pavlovna Volzhina, they had parted by mutual consent, and she had found a new mate and a good home for herself and their child, whom Gorki supported, and she was friendly to him still.

Indignant at the perversion of the real situation in the press story now planned, we yet saw at once what a blunder it was to bring Andreyeva here. America then was not what it is now. Puritanism was still going so strong that our dream of a million dollar campaign might all come to nothing if the story should be played up in the way the Russian Embassy hoped. In order to help hold it back, when Gorki landed on May 10, Leroy Scott and Narodny went out with



80 Ernest Poole

Wilshire, Cahan, and others on the revenue cutter, boarded the ship at Quarantine, warned Burenin of the danger, and proposed that, instead of Gorki's going with Andreyeva to the hotel where Wilshire had reserved rooms, he come to the A Club and let Andreyeva stay at first in the Staten Island home of John Martin, a liberal English friend of ours. To Gorki this proposal was made. In vain we declared our sense of outrage in the exposure being planned, but argued that the cause of Russian freedom was more important than any one man's private affairs. Gorki remained adamant. He would go with his wife to the hotel where Wilshire had reserved a suite. Then Leroy Scott talked with the press men on the cutter, and put up to them the real facts involved, explaining that the Greek Orthodox Church made divorce so difficult that thousands of Russians in good repute separated and remarried without a priest and yet were commonly regarded as man and wife, as they would be after a common law marriage over here. The Gorki campaign in itself, he argued, would be a big news story for weeks. What a pity to spoil it all by springing this sensation at the start! The reporters were sympathetic and said that, so far as they knew, no paper had planned to follow the Russian Embassy lead. And in the front page stories that night Andreyeva was alluded to simply as Gorki's "charming wife."

Believing, however, that soon or late the Embassy story was almost sure to be used, to make hay while the sun still shone we made the most of our dinner on April 11, the next night. Present with Gorki were Mark Twain, Arthur Brisbane, Robert Collier, David Graham Phillips, Peter Dunn, Robert Hunter, Abraham Cahan, Burenin, Chaikovski, Narodny, Walter Weyl, Scott, Brubaker, and myself. As for the meal itself, the less said the better; for our little Japanese butler and cook had brought in as helper another Jap and, just after serving the soup, the pair struck for higher pay. But this we gave, so the dinner went on. Our guests cared little about what they ate - for Gorki, lean and gigantic, dressed in blue blouse and black trousers tucked into high boots, held all of us spellbound by the stories which in his low deep voice he told through Narodny to old Mark Twain. Then, as toastmaster, Robert Hunter announced the names on our national committee and others on local committees formed in cities east and west. In New York Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were to give a great literary dinner soon, and in Boston Alice Stone Blackwell had planned a meeting in Faneuil Hall. Long telegrams from Jane Addams, Howells, and other noted people were read. Speeches were made. Reporters arrived, and flashlights were taken of our guests while Arthur Brisbane dictated to a secretary an editorial appeal to




be run in Hearst papers all over the country next day. In brief, the evening went off with a bang and when, long after midnight we went out and got morning papers just off the press, in front pages stories in them all we found nothing but promise for Gorki's big tour.

So far, so good. The Wilshire dinner a night or two later was another success; but he followed it next day by a large reception for Gorki and Andreyeva in their suite of rooms at the Hotel Belle- claire. She had carefully kept in the background till then, and had not wanted to appear. The reception, she told us later, was a complete surprise to her, and she feared it was a mistake. So did we, and our first doubts soon increased. Gorki had unfortunately signed a contract to write only for Hearst papers while he was here. This was hard on Hearst's great rival, the World; rumors reached us of trouble brewing there; and from another source we heard that Gordon Bennett, then living in Paris with a young Russian countess of the Old Regime, had cabled his New York Herald to run an exposure of Gorki's "mistress" over here. Moreover, Gorki's socialist friends announced that he was soon to help the United Mine Workers then on strike, and they also gave out this telegram from him to William Haywood and Charles Moyer, I.W.W. leaders in jail out west, ac- cused of the murder of the governor of Idaho: "Greetings to you, my brother socialists. Courage! The day of justice and deliverance for the oppressed of all the world is at hand!"

Later I came to know Haywood well, and was able to help in some of his strikes; but Gorki had come here to raise money for Russia, and his telegram just at that time was bound to make trouble. It did. Together with his other mistak-es, it was too much for the New York press. On the morning of April 14, only five days after his landing, the World ran on the front page two photographs, one of Gorki and An- dreyeva, the other of his wife and child; and with it was printed a story of the affair, on the surface not brutally unjust, but deadly in the effect it had on the puritanical New York of those times. On that same day, Gorki and Andreyeva were asked to leave the Hotel Belle- claire. They moved down to the old Lafayette-Brevoort, only half a block from our house, were put out from there early that evening, and moved to the little Hotel Rhinelander across the street. Then they went to a small socialist meeting and, on returning toward midnight, found their luggage piled out on the sidewalk in the rain!

On learning of this, we at once invited them into our house, and there they spent the rest of the night. Next day the full implications of the outrage came in brutal newspaper accounts of their plight and in messages from groups in New York and elsewhere cancelling meet-



82 Ernest Poole

ings and dinners that had been arranged to boost the campaign. In Boston Alice Stone Blackwell called off her meeting in Faneuil Hall. What could be done to quiet the storm? Since at our Club we had only one single bedroom available, -our English friend John Martin again invited Maria Andreyeva out to his Staten Island home, and there she went, but in the next days she often returned to help in our vain efforts to soothe Gorki dcown. For Maxim the Bitter was surely a bitter man at that time! I remember our talks and how, through her, we pleaded with him to help us save for Russian Freedom what we could of his big mission here. For this we still placed hopes in Mark Twain. Howells had already dropped off our committee but, if only old Clemens would remain as chairman and come out strong in a public appeal, we felt that his great reputation might even then turn back the tide. He would think it over, he said, and this he would do only on condition that, in order to keep Gorki from more blunders in talks to the press, for the present we keep his whereabouts an abso- lute secret. This we agreed to do.

How thoroughly we detested our role! We had gladly welcomed Gorki and his wife, yet now we were forced, as though ashamed, to deny his presence with us, not only to reporters but to other friends and visitors, warmly sympathetic to Gorki, who came to offer their aid. I remember the night when H. G. Wells came in and told me: "I've been hunting this whole city to find Maxim Gorki and tell him what I think of this outrage. I have heard that he is with you here." I drew a deep breath and lied once more.

"Sorry. He isn't here," I said. Wells looked at me keenly and perhaps he caught some meaning in the look that I gave him in reply. "We are trying hard," I added, "to keep Mark Twain as chairman of the committee and so save the campaign." Wells answered: "Then let me just say this. When you see Gorki, please tell him from me that, when this silly fuss is over and he comes to England, I do so hope that both he and his wife will come and stay with me in my home."

The very next morning we heard from Mark Twain. He felt that any effort now to go on with our plan was hopeless and therefore he resigned. The big dinner arranged by William Dean Howells and himself was called off. Bitterly disappointed, we still searched for some way to salvage Gorki's mission here. When informed of his trouble by cable, Gorki's first wife promptly cabled her protest against the "desertion" story. They had parted by mutual consent and she was now happily remarried, she said. This cable was sent to the papers, but by most of them it was ignored. Next, with no longer




any need for the detested secrecy, Gorki in press interviews made strong appeals both for the woman he loved and for the great cause he had come here to aid. They did no good. More stories and editorials were run in newspapers and magazines about Gorki and his relations with "the woman Andreyeva." One of our club members put it all neatly when he said that our campaign was "busted higher than a kite."

Then Gorki went out to join his wife in John Martin's Staten Island home; and in that hospitable house, with many Americans like ourselves, both liberals and socialists, coming to see him or sending messages of sympathy and protest against the great wrong done, his first bitterness slowly began to subside. The process was helped by an article which he wrote and published about "monstrous New York" for having given full expression to his bitterness, his feelings eased and he realized that, despite all the puritanism on earth, the Russian Revolution would grind inexorably on to fulfilment.

Well I remember one evening in May when a group of us met with him on South Beach. It was empty at that time of year, so we built a big driftwood fire and cooked our supper there. The clusters of lights by tens of thousands twinkling at us from the great harbor of New York made a spacious background for our guest. At that time only thirty-eight years old, gaunt and gigantic, he knelt on the sand, with an old slouch hat pulled down over his blunt Slav face and his eyes and, with his wife translating, told us stories of the Russia he knew. And then, toward the end of the evening, he recited a Russian translation of Poe's Raven, I can still hear his deep musical voice, so dramatic with all its quiet, sounding after each verse the fatal refrain - Ni- kogda.

I have never seen Gorki since that night, but perhaps his friendship for our group helped to cause him years later, when asked by the Soviet Government to edit and publish in Russian a World Series of significant books of all countries through the ages, to give my American novel, The Harbor, a place on that list. Of all translations of my novels that is the one I treasure most.



maxim gorki in new york

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