"Proletarian" writer
Bitterly about Gorky
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On June 18, 1936, Maxim Gorky, the most important Soviet writer, died, whose name has been immortalized in thousands of monuments, streets and other objects within the former Soviet Union. During his lifetime, the city in which he was born was named after him. No other writer has ever received such an honor. At the funeral of the writer, Stalin personally carried the urn with his ashes.
Gorky lived an unusual life.
Having started writing at the age of 20, he instantly turned into a living classic and gained such a lifetime fame that no other Russian writer had. His whole life is woven of contradictions: he called for rebellion for the sake of rebellion and despised the bourgeoisie, but he himself led an absolutely bourgeois lifestyle, he cried over books, but showed an amazing callousness to his loved ones.
Both friends and enemies of Gorky tried to unravel the phenomenon of the writer and his fame. The writer Surguchev believed in all seriousness that Gorky had sworn allegiance to the devil in exchange for earthly glory. Bunin considered him a hoaxer and a graphomaniac, albeit a talented one. Gorky all his life “browned” and “powdered” his images, confusing friends and foes and hiding his true character from them and from himself. Gorky was also a mystery to himself. And it is no coincidence that on the eve of his failed suicide, the future writer left a note in which, half-jokingly, half-seriously, he wrote: "I ask you to cut my remains and see what the devil was sitting in me."
