Gorky’s Reminiscences of Writers.

Adam Thirlwell has a wonderful LRB review essay (25 June 2026; archived) of a book I keep meaning to read, Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev (the review is of the new translation by Bryan Karetnyk). It opens irresistibly:

In a library​ when I was young I came across a book published by the Hogarth Press. It was so delicate I hardly wanted to touch it. It had a mottled green cover, it was maybe seventy pages long, and I read it in one amazed hour. The book was Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, from 1920, which the Woolfs would later republish in a fuller volume, with two more of Gorky’s reminiscences: of Chekhov and the less world-famous Leonid Andreyev. I loved the book entirely, and surely any book is lovable that has Tolstoy on the phone to Chekhov? For a while I considered stealing it, this rare object, which seemed to contain answers to the mystery of something called literature. The translation a century ago was by S.S. Koteliansky with Leonard Woolf (Woolf’s contribution presumably being to correct the occasional syntactical blemish), and was only rarely reprinted. Now at last there is a new translation, by Bryan Karetnyk, and everyone can contemplate this strange and moving work.

(Koteliansky was very helpful to Dorothy Richardson [see this LH post], whose experiences with translating you can read about here.) I’ll quote some more good bits and hope you’ll click through for the whole thing:

In the 19th century a new tone emerged in Russian writing and it created much confusion – both in Russia and elsewhere. Everyone was agreed that whatever it was, it wasn’t European. The only Russian who was European was Turgenev, and it made him highly suspicious. But maybe to give it this nationalist tinge isn’t accurate at all. There were basically three or four writers – Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov, with Turgenev a possible addition and Gogol an ancestor – who had crafted a form of fiction writing that seemed to offer such a radically fluid and cavernous account of human relations, so much less brittle than Thackeray or Zola, that it no longer seemed to be art at all. Anna Karenina was a ‘piece of life’, Matthew Arnold said, not a novel. Virginia Woolf wondered at Dostoevsky’s naked characters, vessels of ‘this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul’. Everyone else in European literature suddenly seemed ordinary. It was a freak of time and space.

One feature of such apparently exposed writing was to collapse any distinction between life and literature. It seemed natural in this era to covet biographical intimacy, to devour lives and letters, and Gorky’s Reminiscences are especially intense. He believed that no anecdote was too domestic to be meaningful, like this story of Tolstoy praising Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’ in front of Chekhov. ‘On that day, Chekhov had a temperature: he was sitting with red blotches on his cheeks and his head tilted forward, cleaning his pince-nez meticulously. He said nothing for some while, then finally, with a sigh, he said quietly and with embarrassment: “There are misprints in it …”’ Gorky writes as if everything private in the lives of these writers were a mystery to be decoded, as if this story of Chekhov might be some clue to his modesty, and therefore his talent. I don’t think he was mistaken. Maybe at a certain point all literature is personal. It’s difficult to admit this because the ideal is of something abstract and therefore perfect. It was the ideal for sure in Paris, where Flaubert proposed that the realist novel was also the impersonal novel, that the personality of the author was of no interest to anyone serious. […]

One way​ of reading the Reminiscences is as a novel about timeframes masquerading as an essay. Gorky and Tolstoy first met in 1900, when Gorky was 31 and Tolstoy 71. Tolstoy had a decade left to live. A photo of this unlikely couple survives from Yasnaya Polyana. Gorky has his feet arranged neatly in balletic first position, with a stick and a hat and a buttoned-up coat. Next to him Tolstoy is dressed as a luxury muzhik, with an unkempt white beard. Chekhov, the third character in this story, was forty. He was Gorky’s more brilliant elder contemporary, the preferred sibling, the one whom Tolstoy truly loved, partly for his soul but really for his talent. (‘He loved Chekhov and always, whenever looking at him, seemed to caress his face with a tender gaze.’ Or: ‘Ah, what a dear, wonderful man he is: modest and mild-mannered, just like a young lady! Why, he even walks like a young lady. What a marvel he is!’) At this moment, in 1900, almost all the realists were dead: Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Flaubert, George Eliot, the Goncourt brothers, Maupassant. Zola was about to die. An entire era had passed. In the absence of the dead, the three men were arguing over something, which was literature.

Older revered writers are a problem for the younger writer, however famous the younger writer may already be. The older writers are more respected, more famous, and often they now write in a way the younger writer dislikes, but still the younger writer needs or wants their love and respect, and this complicates the relationship. (The protégé also wants to distinguish himself from mere disciples like the spiritual intellectuals crowding Yasnaya Polyana who, Gorky wrote, ‘love to sigh and greet each other with a kiss; they all have sweaty palms, limp wrists and cheating eyes.’)

No wonder that in this memoir Gorky is all ambivalence. He complains about Tolstoy’s ‘stubborn, despotic wish … to turn the life of Count Tolstoy into some kind of hagiographic Life of St Leo’, but fervently records Tolstoy’s actions and conversations. ‘He leaped over the ditches and puddles like a young boy, shook the raindrops from the branches overhead, and told a marvellous tale of how Fet’ – the lyric poet Afanasy Fet – ‘had explained Schopenhauer to him in that very grove.’ And then: ‘With a loving, gentle hand, he stroked the damp satin trunks of the birch trees.’ […]

Instead of God, Gorky had Tolstoy. Gorky had been orphaned when he was eleven, and he is frank in his depiction of Tolstoy as his ideal patriarch. Once, he writes, he happened to see Tolstoy alone on a beach.

In the meditative stillness of the old man, I sensed something magical and prophetic, something that plunged down into the dark depths below him and soared up into the blue abyss above the earth, as if it were he, his concentrated will, that were summoning the waves and pushing them away again, directing the movements of the clouds and shadows that seemed to be disturbing the rocks, trying to awaken them.

And then, a few lines later: ‘To put into words what I felt back then is impossible: it was both ecstatic and terrifying, and later everything merged into a single happy idea: “I am not an orphan so long as this man lives upon the earth!”’

This is the problem with writers: they are real people, and therefore subject to major occlusions and inventions. They turn other people into objects of fantasy, and it’s part of Gorky’s talent for truth that he smooths out none of the contradictions or gaps in this encounter. Mostly he was unsure if Tolstoy even liked him, or if he liked Tolstoy.

That first meeting left me with a dual impression: I was both glad and proud of having met Tolstoy, but his conversation with me had reminded me somewhat of an examination, as though it was not the author of The Cossacks, ‘Pace-setter’ and War and Peace whom I had met but a nobleman who, in condescending to my level, had deemed it necessary to address me ‘in peasantese’, the language of the streets and marketplaces, and this upset my impression of him – one that I had cherished for so long.

There was always, it seemed to Gorky, the possibility that Tolstoy saw him merely as a curiosity, an emissary from the working class. ‘His interest in me is ethnographic. In his eyes, I am but a representative of some unknown race – nothing more.’ But this gap also allowed Gorky to see through the muzhik costume Tolstoy liked to wear. ‘Then suddenly, from under the peasant beard, from under the democratically rumpled blouse, would emerge the old Russian nobleman, the grand aristocrat.’ One day, he writes, they went out riding and came across some of Tolstoy’s Romanov neighbours, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke Georgy Mikhailovich and Grand Duke Pyotr Nikolaevich.

A droshky and a single saddle horse stood blocking the road. He fixed the Romanov men with a hard, expectant gaze, but they had already turned their backs on him. The saddle horse pawed the earth and moved a little to the side, letting Tolstoy’s horse pass.

We rode on for several minutes in silence.

‘They recognised me, the fools,’ he said eventually.

And, after another minute: ‘At least the horse knew to make way for Tolstoy.’

What a great story! Here’s Tolstoy on Gorky:

Whenever Gorky’s writing comes up, Tolstoy is dismayingly critical.

I read him my story ‘The Bull’. He laughed greatly and remarked that I know ‘the tricks of language’.

‘But you handle words poorly,’ he said. ‘All your peasants speak very sensibly, whereas in reality what they say is foolish and incoherent. You can never tell what a peasant means to say right away.’

Later on, Gorky reads to him from The Lower Depths. ‘He listened carefully, then asked: “Why did you write this?” I explained as best I could.’ And Tolstoy once again takes apart his language (‘You must write more simply’) then adds a larger disapproval: ‘You speak a great deal from your own perspective, and this is why you have no characters, and all your people wear the same face. You do not understand women, I expect: none of them – not one – comes off well in your writing. They are unmemorable.’

Honestly, sometimes you don’t get what they saw in each other. Another issue was sex. Tolstoy could be madly puritanical, telling Gorky that ‘man alone is given to endure all this shame and the terror of such torment – in the flesh given him. We bear it within ourselves like an inescapable punishment – but for which sin?’ But also he loved talking about sex, and Gorky didn’t.

Like a French novelist, he talks of women willingly and at great length, and yet always with the coarseness of a Russian peasant, which I used to find unseemly. Today in the Almond Grove he asked Chekhov:

‘Did you go whoring much in your youth?’

Chekhov smiled in consternation. Tugging at his little beard, he muttered something unintelligible in response.

Looking out to sea, however, Tolstoy confessed:

‘I was a tireless …’

He pronounced the words with contrition, but at the end of the sentence he used a salty peasant turn of phrase.

Like a French novelist. The amusing thing is that in the end it was Gorky who loved the French realists, and Tolstoy who looked down on them. ‘The French have three writers: Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert. There is also Maupassant, of course, but Chekhov is better. As for the Goncourts – what clowns they are! They merely feign seriousness. They learned life from books written by such fabulists as themselves, believing it all to be serious stuff. Nobody needs that.’ ‘I could not agree with his estimation,’ Gorky reports, ‘and this irked him somewhat.’ […]

But then Gorky knew enough to acknowledge that Tolstoy was incomparable, and Tolstoy knew it too. ‘One evening at twilight, narrowing his eyes and shuffling his brows’, Gorky recalls, Tolstoy ‘read a variant of the scene in “Father Sergius” where the woman goes to seduce the hermit. He read it through to the very end, looked up, and, with his eyes shut, said distinctly: “Well written, old man. Well written!”’ It seemed to these writers that they were operating in an environment without serious criticism. ‘For a quarter of a century,’ Gorky records Chekhov as saying, ‘I have read reviews of my works, and I cannot remember a single valuable remark made by any critic, nor even a solitary good piece of advice.’ Almost none of them wrote much criticism either, and if they did it existed in prefaces and minor works. So maybe this was why their conversations felt so intense: they were the testing lab for the writers’ new inventions. […]

The kind of truth-telling Chekhov achieved in his writing, his method of miniature ironies, is redescribed by Gorky as an attack on ‘the dingy chaos of bourgeois mundanity’, the ‘tragedy’ of bourgeois existence, whereas that kind of judgmental tone is precisely what Chekhov’s writing refuses. If you need a lesson in this, Gorky offers it himself in his description of Chekhov’s funeral. On the one hand, this duo of mistaken identity:

The coffin of this writer so ‘dearly beloved’ by Moscow arrived on some green freight wagon with an inscription stencilled on the doors in enormous letters: OYSTERS. A part of the small crowd that had gathered at the station to meet the writer followed the coffin of General Keller, which had been brought from Manchuria, and was greatly surprised to find Chekhov being buried to the strains of a military band.

On the other hand, this unnecessary moralising sentence: ‘The dirty-green smudge of that freight wagon strikes me as nothing but the great, triumphant smile of banality over a weary enemy.’

OYSTERS! Truly, art can’t hold a candle to life in certain respects.