But now let us suppose—a handy supposition, I admit—that our imaginary little nomad8 were endowed with that illuminating9 spark we call genius; let us suppose, too, that in late boyhood, or early manhood, he learnt to love letters, and deliberately10 set about describing his extraordinary experiences, as well as the strange bedfellows whom misery11 from time to time threw in his way—what piquant12, what grotesque13 pen-and-ink sketches15 we might expect from such an inspired ragamuffin! It would be Oliver Twist or Humphrey Clinker telling his own tale without the softening16 intervention17 of Mr. Charles Dickens or Mr. Tobias Smollett.
Let us further suppose not England but Russia to be the theatre of our hero's miseries18 and adventures, and the interest of the story will at once be infinitely enhanced. The odds20 would now be a thousand to one against our hero's attaining21 to manhood at all, and a hundred thousand to one against his ever attaining to authorship. His risks would be out of all proportion to his chances. From first to last starvation would constantly dog his footsteps, and Siberian exile would be the least terrible of a score of those administrative23 measures by means of which the servants of the Tsar wage unintermittent warfare24 against the vagrant population of their master's immense Empire. The career, then, of a professional tramp in Russia must needs be of tragic25 intensity26, and it was my good fortune, some eighteen months ago, in the pages of "The Pilot," to be the first to call the attention of English readers to the strange history of a Russian tramp of genius, who is, moreover, his own chronicler. Maksim Gorky—Maximus the Bitter—is the pseudonym27 deliberately chosen, at the outset of his career, by the young Muscovite author who is at the present moment (and I do not even except the revered28 name of Tolstoi) by far the most popular story-teller in the Russian Empire. The following brief biographical sketch14 of this remarkable29 man is the best introduction I can affix30 to this selection from Gorky's unique "Razskazui," in all of which the author has, more or less, embodied31 his grim experiences of life beneath the transparent32 veil of fiction.
Aleksyei Maksimovich Pyeshkov was born on March 14th, 1869, at Nijni-Novgorod. His mother Barbara was the daughter of a house painter and decorator, Vasily Kacherin; his father was Maksim Savvatiev Pyeshkov, an upholsterer of Perm. Aleksyei's parents seem to have been worthy33, colourless people, and fairly well educated for their station; but they dwindle34 into insignificance35 before their respective fathers. Young Pyeshkov's two grandfathers were undeniably men of character, self-made men of brutal36 energy, who terrorized their respective families, and were as hard and cold as the money they worshipped. So severe, indeed, was the regimen of Aleksyei's paternal37 grandfather, that his own son ran away from him five times in the course of seven years. On the fifth occasion he did not return, but walked all the way (he was only seventeen) from Tobolsk in Siberia, where the family then lived, to Nijni-Novgorod, where he settled down as an apprentice38 to a clothier. Five years later we find him occupying a responsible position in the office of a steamship39 company at Astrakhan. Gorky's maternal40 grandfather may well have been the prototype of Ignat Gordyeev, the most impressive character in Gorky's romance, "Thoma Gordyeev." Beginning life as a raftsman on the Volga, in the course of a short time he became a man of substance, started a dyeing factory at his native place, Nijni-Novgorod, was elected Starshina, or Chief of the Traders' Guild41 there, and was generally looked up to by everyone but his wretched daughter, whom he made more wretched still when she threw herself away—or so he accounted it—on such a poor non-descript as Maksim Pyeshkov.
The earlier years of Aleksyei Pyeshkov were as uneventful as are the years of most children. In 1873, however, when he was only four years old, he met with his first misfortune: his rolling stone of a father died of cholera42 at Astrakhan. His mother re-married shortly afterwards, and transferred him to the care of his grandfather, who seems to have been kind to the little lad—cruel fathers are very often indulgent grandfathers—and taught him to read with the aid of the Psalter and other liturgical43 books, by way of preparing him for school, whither he was presently sent But his regular schooling44 lasted no longer than five months, for about this time his mother died of consumption, and almost simultaneously45 his last natural prop22 gave way, his grandfather suddenly ruining himself utterly46 by over-speculation. Little Aleksyei, therefore, was obliged to exchange his schoolroom for the shop of a cobbler to whom he was apprenticed47; but after serving his master for two months, he burnt one hand so severely48 with boiling pitch that he was pronounced useless to the trade, and sent about his business.
On recovering from the effects of this accident he was apprenticed by his kinsfolk to a draughtsman, who treated him so harshly that he ran away, becoming first an assistant to an ikon-maker, and then a turnspit on a steamer on the Volga. Here he met with an unexpected piece of good luck. His new master, the cook on board the steamer, Smurny by name, happened to be a lettered man of superior ability, and he proved to be one of the best friends young Pyeshkov ever had. But for him, indeed, modern Russian Literature in all probability would now have been minus of one of its chief ornaments49. Smurny awakened50 within the lad a love of literature, and placed at his disposal his own little library, a miscellaneous collection enough, in which fantastic lives of the Greek Orthodox Saints and interminable treatises51 on Freemasonry lay cheek by jowl; it was, however, an inestimable boon52 to Aleksyei, and it included, at any rate, the works of one indisputable European classic—Gogol—besides some of the novels of Alexandre Dumas. Pyeshkov himself, in his fragmentary autobiography53, insinuates54 that his chance encounter with the cultured cook was a turning-point in his career. "Till the advent19 of the cook," says he, "I could not endure books, or, indeed, any sort of printed paper—passports included." Why he quitted Smurny we are not told; but we do know that when he left the steamer to become a gardener's assistant, he pursued his studies whenever and wherever he had the chance. At the age of fifteen, indeed, his thirst for learning induced him to present himself at the gates of the University of Kazan, the great Volgan seminary, where Tolstoi had been educated forty years earlier, in the na?ve belief that instruction of all sorts was to be had there by anyone for the simple asking. "I was mistaken, it appeared," he observes with pathetic sarcasm55, "so I entered a biscuit factory at three roubles (6s.) a month." He has related his experiences of this grinding slavery in a subterranean56 "stone cage" in that powerful story, "Twenty-Six of Us and one Other."[1]
"It was a grievous evil life we lived within those thick walls.... We rose at five o'clock in the morning without having had our sleep out, and—stupid and indifferent—at six o'clock we were sitting at the table to make biscuits from dough57 already prepared for us by our comrades while we were still sleeping.... Our master called us niggers, and gave us rotten entrails for dinner instead of butcher's meat." No wonder he calls this drudgery58 "the hardest work I ever experienced."
And here there is a blank in our biographical record—a blank, however, which may, partially59, be filled up from conjecture60. To this period belongs, I opine, the first of Pyeshkov's gipsy-like wanderings through Russia. The most casual reader of his tales is struck at once by his delight for the free, careless life of a vagabond. The justification61, the philosophy of that life, so to speak, he has put into the mouth of that prince of vagabonds, Promtov[2], evidently a real person, whose antitype Pyeshkov must have met with on his rambles62, and who is one of his best creations It was now, too, that he must have made the acquaintance of the so-called "Buivshie Lyudi,"[3]—or "Have-beens," whom he has immortalized in so many of his tales, that numerous and unhappy class who have fallen, beyond recovery, from positions of trust or emolument63. These, too, were the days when, as he tells us, "I sawed wood, dragged loads," and, in fact, did all sorts of ill-paid, menial labour. On the other hand, he made the acquaintance of numerous students at Kazan, was admitted into their clubs, and his unquenchable ardour for learning revived. We do not know what he read during these years, but he must have read a very great deal. None can take up his works without being impressed by the richness and variety of his vocabulary, and it is not too much to say that no other Russian writer ever uses, or has used, so many foreign terms (English and French especially), or has coined so many new words from extraneous64 western sources. It is also plain from internal evidence that he has studied history, philosophy, and science with enthusiasm, and I agree with those Russian critics who complain that he has assimilated more Nietzschianism than is good for him, although, on the other hand, I consider that his obligations to Nietzsche are far less considerable than is commonly supposed. And at the same time he was consorting65 freely with ruffians of every description,[4] sleeping round camp fires with murderers and thieves, for the sake of a crust of bread, and once would actually have starved to death but for the charity of a kind-hearted prostitute[5] Naturally courageous66, and with the buoyancy of youth to hold him up, he seems to have endured these hardships cheerfully enough, and a fine sunset, or a majestic67 seascape, or even a glimpse of the monotonous68 grandeur69 of the endless steppe, would, as a rule, be compensation enough for the fatigues70 of a hard day at its close. But he, too, had his dark moments, and in 1888 (when only nineteen) he tried to commit suicide from sheer wretchedness. Fortunately the bullet struck no vital part, and he was nursed into convalescence71 at a hospital in Kazan. "Having sufficiently72 recovered," says Gorky, sarcastically73 summing up his position at this period, "I survived in order to devote myself to the apple-selling trade."
On quitting Kazan, Pyeshkov appeared at Tsaritsuin, where, for a time, he was a railway porter. He was summoned from thence to his native place, Nijni-Novgorod, to serve as a recruit. But Aleksyei was not of the stuff of which soldiers are made. "They don't take rubbish like me," he explains, so he eked74 out a living by selling lager-beer in the streets till he attracted the attention of the benevolent75 advocate, A. J. Lanin, who made young Pyeshkov his secretary.
According to Gorky's own admission, Lanin had a considerable influence on his future development. But Gorky, who always felt himself "out of place among intellectual folk," and has an undisguised contempt for mere76 book-learning, now quitted his patron and returned to Tsaritsuin, whence he rambled77 through Southern Russia, the Ukraine, and Bessarabia, finally working his way through the Crimea and the Kuban District to the Caucasus. The tour was rich in new experiences, and may be said to have matured his genius, and taught him more than whole libraries of books could have done, but he suffered terrible privations by the way. He made a particular study during this period of the cities of Southern Russia, their commercial activity and their shifting, nondescript population, and that noble story, "Chelkash," which contains his finest descriptions of nature, was the ultimate result of his experiences.
At Tiflis he worked as a navvy for a time, and in 1892 his first printed story, "Makar Chudra," appeared in the columns of the Tiflis journal, Kavkaz. I have described elsewhere[6] his dramatic introduction to the astonished but appreciative78 editor on that occasion. Returning to Nijni-Novgorod, Gorky got several subsequent stories inserted in the principal newspapers of the various Volgan cities; but he wrote but little at this period, and that little did not win general favour.
In 1893 he made the acquaintance of the eminent79 Russian writer, Korolenko, to whose encouragement he always attributed his ultimate success. Korolenko urged him to have done with trifles, aim high, and, above all things, cultivate his style. Shortly afterwards, Gorky published his first indisputable masterpiece, "Chelkash," No. 8 of the present collection, which opened "the big reviews" to the young author, and made him famous. "Chelkash" was speedily followed by a whole series of vivid stories. In 1900 appeared his first romance, "Thoma Gordyeev," a disappointing performance on the whole, though not without superlative merits. The descriptions of Volgan scenery are magnificent, and the characterization is masterly. But it is far too long, and, the narrative80 is swamped by floods of second-rate philosophy. A collection of all Gorky's works, under the title of "Razskazui" (Tales), is still in progress. At present Gorky is, without doubt, by far the most popular author in Russia, and the authorities there have already paid him the compliment of branding his writings as even more dangerous than those of his veteran contemporary, Count Leo Tolstoi. He is also, I fancy, likely to give them much more trouble in future than the Count, as his temperament81 and genius are distinctly of the volcanic82 order.
R. NISBET BAIN.
[1] No. 2 of the present collection.
[2] In "A Rolling Stone."
[3] Lit., those who have been.
[4] See "In the Steppe."
[5] See "One Autumn Night."
[6] In the Monthly Review for December. In the same number of the same periodical appeared the first English translation of one of Gorky's tales, curiously83 enough, the first tale he wrote.
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1
vagrant
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n.流浪者,游民;adj.流浪的,漂泊不定的 | |
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2
disposition
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n.性情,性格;意向,倾向;排列,部署 | |
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3
infinitely
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adv.无限地,无穷地 | |
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engrossing
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adj.使人全神贯注的,引人入胜的v.使全神贯注( engross的现在分词 ) | |
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5
edifying
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adj.有教训意味的,教训性的,有益的v.开导,启发( edify的现在分词 ) | |
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humdrum
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adj.单调的,乏味的 | |
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7
inevitable
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adj.不可避免的,必然发生的 | |
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8
nomad
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n.游牧部落的人,流浪者,游牧民 | |
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9
illuminating
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a.富于启发性的,有助阐明的 | |
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10
deliberately
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adv.审慎地;蓄意地;故意地 | |
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11
misery
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n.痛苦,苦恼,苦难;悲惨的境遇,贫苦 | |
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12
piquant
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adj.辛辣的,开胃的,令人兴奋的 | |
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grotesque
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adj.怪诞的,丑陋的;n.怪诞的图案,怪人(物) | |
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14
sketch
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n.草图;梗概;素描;v.素描;概述 | |
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sketches
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n.草图( sketch的名词复数 );素描;速写;梗概 | |
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16
softening
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变软,软化 | |
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17
intervention
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n.介入,干涉,干预 | |
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18
miseries
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n.痛苦( misery的名词复数 );痛苦的事;穷困;常发牢骚的人 | |
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advent
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n.(重要事件等的)到来,来临 | |
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20
odds
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n.让步,机率,可能性,比率;胜败优劣之别 | |
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21
attaining
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(通常经过努力)实现( attain的现在分词 ); 达到; 获得; 达到(某年龄、水平、状况) | |
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22
prop
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vt.支撑;n.支柱,支撑物;支持者,靠山 | |
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23
administrative
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adj.行政的,管理的 | |
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warfare
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n.战争(状态);斗争;冲突 | |
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tragic
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adj.悲剧的,悲剧性的,悲惨的 | |
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intensity
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n.强烈,剧烈;强度;烈度 | |
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pseudonym
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n.假名,笔名 | |
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revered
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v.崇敬,尊崇,敬畏( revere的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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remarkable
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adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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30
affix
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n.附件,附录 vt.附贴,盖(章),签署 | |
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31
embodied
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v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 );象征;包括;包含 | |
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transparent
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adj.明显的,无疑的;透明的 | |
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worthy
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adj.(of)值得的,配得上的;有价值的 | |
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dwindle
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v.逐渐变小(或减少) | |
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insignificance
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n.不重要;无价值;无意义 | |
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brutal
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adj.残忍的,野蛮的,不讲理的 | |
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paternal
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adj.父亲的,像父亲的,父系的,父方的 | |
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apprentice
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n.学徒,徒弟 | |
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steamship
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n.汽船,轮船 | |
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maternal
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adj.母亲的,母亲般的,母系的,母方的 | |
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guild
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n.行会,同业公会,协会 | |
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cholera
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n.霍乱 | |
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liturgical
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adj.礼拜仪式的 | |
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schooling
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n.教育;正规学校教育 | |
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simultaneously
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adv.同时发生地,同时进行地 | |
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utterly
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adv.完全地,绝对地 | |
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apprenticed
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学徒,徒弟( apprentice的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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severely
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adv.严格地;严厉地;非常恶劣地 | |
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ornaments
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n.装饰( ornament的名词复数 );点缀;装饰品;首饰v.装饰,点缀,美化( ornament的第三人称单数 ) | |
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50
awakened
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v.(使)醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 );(使)觉醒;弄醒;(使)意识到 | |
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51
treatises
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n.专题著作,专题论文,专著( treatise的名词复数 ) | |
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boon
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n.恩赐,恩物,恩惠 | |
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autobiography
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n.自传 | |
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54
insinuates
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n.暗示( insinuate的名词复数 );巧妙或迂回地潜入;(使)缓慢进入;慢慢伸入v.暗示( insinuate的第三人称单数 );巧妙或迂回地潜入;(使)缓慢进入;慢慢伸入 | |
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sarcasm
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n.讥讽,讽刺,嘲弄,反话 (adj.sarcastic) | |
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subterranean
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adj.地下的,地表下的 | |
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dough
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n.生面团;钱,现款 | |
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drudgery
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n.苦工,重活,单调乏味的工作 | |
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partially
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adv.部分地,从某些方面讲 | |
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conjecture
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n./v.推测,猜测 | |
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61
justification
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n.正当的理由;辩解的理由 | |
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62
rambles
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(无目的地)漫游( ramble的第三人称单数 ); (喻)漫谈; 扯淡; 长篇大论 | |
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63
emolument
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n.报酬,薪水 | |
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extraneous
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adj.体外的;外来的;外部的 | |
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consorting
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v.结伴( consort的现在分词 );交往;相称;调和 | |
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courageous
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adj.勇敢的,有胆量的 | |
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majestic
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adj.雄伟的,壮丽的,庄严的,威严的,崇高的 | |
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monotonous
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adj.单调的,一成不变的,使人厌倦的 | |
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grandeur
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n.伟大,崇高,宏伟,庄严,豪华 | |
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fatigues
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n.疲劳( fatigue的名词复数 );杂役;厌倦;(士兵穿的)工作服 | |
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71
convalescence
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n.病后康复期 | |
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72
sufficiently
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adv.足够地,充分地 | |
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73
sarcastically
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adv.挖苦地,讽刺地 | |
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eked
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v.(靠节省用量)使…的供应持久( eke的过去式和过去分词 );节约使用;竭力维持生计;勉强度日 | |
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benevolent
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adj.仁慈的,乐善好施的 | |
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mere
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adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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rambled
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(无目的地)漫游( ramble的过去式和过去分词 ); (喻)漫谈; 扯淡; 长篇大论 | |
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appreciative
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adj.有鉴赏力的,有眼力的;感激的 | |
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eminent
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adj.显赫的,杰出的,有名的,优良的 | |
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narrative
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n.叙述,故事;adj.叙事的,故事体的 | |
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temperament
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n.气质,性格,性情 | |
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volcanic
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adj.火山的;象火山的;由火山引起的 | |
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curiously
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adv.有求知欲地;好问地;奇特地 | |
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