Gorky's Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences: Key Writings by and about Maxim Gorky (Russian Literature and Thought Series)

Full disclosure: I was a student of Dr. Fanger's and admire his scholarship extravagantly. Gorky's life history is very complex and his legacy has been tarnished by his convoluted attempts to compromise with Soviet Communism, particularly as ruthlessly practiced by Stalin. He at one time had worldwide fame the equal of Hemingway's in our time. Now I don't know if anyone in the West---or in Russia---still reads his fiction or if his plays (I have not read the most famous one, "The Lower Depths") are still being produced.His reminiscences have been known in the West since the 1920s, when I think they were translated and published in English for the first time by S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf. In Russian they were the only work of Gorky's that Nabokov admired, which is saying something. Dr. Fanger has apparently made his own translations, at which he is a past master, always getting difficult nuances correct and the English prose elegant. He has also included background on Gorky's helping the starving intelligentsia during the chaotic early years of the revolution, and has translated, I think for the first time, curious fragmentary notes which do not correspond to any genre or style which I have encountered in a lifetime of reading.For more insight into the quite opaque nature of this once famous writer now nearly forgotten, I recommend the passages in Nina Berberova's "The Italics are Mine" where she is living and travelling with Gorky's entourage. In Karlinsky's edition of the collected letters of Chekhov there is correspondence with Gorky, and Chekhov's kind comments about the failings of Gorky's prose are penetrating.

What a stupendous work it is! The writings of one titan about another, and there's no exaggeration in either adjective. Gorky's descriptive ability is incredible - e.g., Tolstoy having eyes set around his head at regular intervals... The very ambivalence of his reactions gives them such power.Nothing that was published before even scratched the surface. What Tolstoy had to say about Chekhov and Dostoevsky, Gogol and Pushkin - the way Gorky reports it without diluting it with his own views (at least that's how it looks), is absolutely fascinating. It is often tragic, and sometimes excruciatingly funny!Moreover, it is also a wide-angle view of a whole period in Russian history, in its European context. No matter how much or how little you know about these figures, this book will add a lot to it.