SOURCE: Gorky, Maxim. “Maxim Gorky.” In Broken Image: Foreign Critiques of America, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn, pp. 172-88. New York: Random House, 1972.

[In the following excerpt, originally published by Gorky in 1906, the Russian author reflects on his impressions of America following his expulsion from his own home country.]

Everywhere is toil, everything is caught up in its whirlwind, everybody obeys the will of some mysterious power hostile to man and to nature. A machine, a cold, unseen, unreasoning machine, in which man is but an insignificant screw!

—Maxim Gorky, “The City of Mammon,” Appleton's Magazine, (New York), Volume 8 (1906), pp. 177-82

The failure of the Russian Revolution of 1905 sent many people into exile and frustration. Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), a famous writer with ties to some of the more extreme revolutionaries, wrote of the pain he suffered in being pushed out of his native land. “If a tooth could feel after being knocked out, it would probably feel as lonely as I did. … ‘Everything is lost,’ people said, ‘they have crushed, annihilated, exiled, imprisoned everybody!’. … I often felt as if a pestilential dust were blowing from Russia.” The winds of expulsion drew him to Italy and then, in 1906, to America. “The land of Liberty!” he said to himself as his boat entered New York harbor, gliding past the great Statue of his dreams. Once ashore, he awoke to a nightmare.

Gorky acquired world fame before the turn of the century with his brilliant short stories and his play The Lower Depths. A socialist committed to the revolutionary overthrow of the Tsar and autocracy, Gorky became a close friend of Lenin and other Bolsheviks, helping the party with funds and prestige in the desperate years before 1917. Lenin tolerated certain “ideological deviations” in Gorky because of personal affection and respect for his work. After the Revolution, Gorky interceded with Lenin to save various intellectuals from the executioners in the Bolshevik secret police. But his quarrels with the Soviet regime continued and in 1921 he exiled himself, this time from Soviet Russia, and lived in Italy until 1933 when he returned home. His great friend Lenin was now dead and in his place was Stalin, who was once described to Gorky by Lenin in 1913 as “a wonderful Georgian” and an expert on the “nationalities question.” Again during the purges of the 30's, as he had done in days of 1917, Gorky tried to save writers and friends from prison and death. Stalin warned him that the Revolution was quite prepared to sacrifice its “great names,” which included, no doubt, Gorky himself. But he continued to oppose Stalin's harshness and in 1936 the “wonderful Georgian” ordered him poisoned to death.

THE CITY OF MAMMON: MY IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA

A gray mist hung over land and sea, and a fine rain shivered down upon the somber buildings of the city and the turbid waters of the bay. The emigrants gathered to one side of the steamer. They looked about silently and serious, with eager eyes in which gleamed hope and fear, terror and joy.

“Who is this?” asked a Polish girl in a tone of amazement, pointing to the Statue of Liberty. Some one from the crowd answered briefly: “The American Goddess.”

I looked at this goddess with the feelings of an idolater, and recalled to mind the heroic times of the United States—the six years' War of Independence, and that bloody struggle between the North and the South which the Americans formerly used to call “The War for the Abolition of Slavery.” Before my memory flashed the brilliant names of Thomas Jefferson and of Grant. I seemed to hear again the song of John Brown, the hero, and see the faces of Bret Harte, Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and all the other stars on the proud American flag.

Here then is the land about which tens of millions of people of the Old World dream as of the Promised Land. “The Land of liberty!” I repeated to myself, not noticing on that glorious day the green rust on the dark bronze.

I knew even then that “The War for the Abolition of Slavery” is now called in America “The War for the Preservation of the Union.” But I did not know that in this change of words was hidden a deep meaning, that the passionate idealism of the young democracy had also become covered with rust, like the bronze statue, eating away the soul with the corrosive of commercialism. The senseless craving for money, and the shameful craving for the power that money gives, is a disease from which people suffer everywhere. But I did not realize that this dread disease had assumed such proportions in America.

The tempestuous turmoil of life on the water at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, and in the city on the shore, staggers the mind, and fills one with a sense of impotence. Everywhere, like antediluvian monsters, huge, heavy steamers plow the waters of the ocean, little boats and cutters scurry about like hungry birds of prey. The iron seems endowed with nerves, life and consciousness. The sirens roar as if with voices of the mythic giants, the angry mouths send forth their shrill whistles that lose themselves in the fog, anchor chains rattle, the waves splash.

And it seems as if all the iron, all the stones, the wood and water, and even the people themselves are full of protest against this life in the fog, this life devoid of sun, song, and joy, this life in the captivity of hard toil. Everywhere is toil, everything is caught up in its whirlwind, everybody obeys the will of some mysterious power hostile to man and to nature. A machine, a cold, unseen, unreasoning machine, in which man is but an insignificant screw!

I love energy. I adore it. But not when men expend this creative force of theirs for their own destruction. There is too much labor and effort, and no life in all this chaos, in all this bustle for the sake of a piece of bread. Everywhere we see around us the work of the mind which has made of human life a sort of hell, a senseless treadmill of labor, but nowhere do we feel the beauty of free creation, the disinterested work of the spirit which beautifies life with imperishable flowers of life-giving cheer.

Far out on the shore, silent and dark “skyscrapers” are outlined against the fog. Rectangular, with no desire to be beautiful, these dull, heavy piles rise up into the sky, stern, cheerless, and morose. In the windows of these prisons there are no flowers, and no children are anywhere seen. Straight, uniform, dead lines without grace of outline or harmony, only an air of cold and haughty presumption imparted to them by their prodigiousness, their monstrous height. But in this height no freedom dwells. These structures elevate the price of land to heights as lofty as their tops, but debase the taste to depths as low as their foundations. It is always so. In great houses dwell small people.

From afar the city looks like a huge jaw with black, uneven teeth. It belches forth clouds of smoke into the sky, and sniffs like a glutton suffering from overcorpulency. When you enter it you feel that you have fallen into a stomach of brick and iron which swallows up millions of people, and churns, grinds, and digests them. The streets seem like so many hungry throats, through which pass, into some unseen depth, black pieces of food—living human beings. Everywhere, over your head, under your feet, and at your sides is iron, living iron emitting horrible noises. Called to life by the power of gold, inspirited by it, it envelops man in its cobweb, deafening him, sucking his life blood, deadening his mind.

The horns and automobiles shout aloud like some giant ducks, the electricity sends forth its surly noises, and everywhere the stifling air of the streets is penetrated and soaked with thousands of deafening sounds, like a sponge with water. It trembles, wavers, and blows into one's nostrils its strong, greasy odors. It is a poisoned atmosphere. It suffers, and it groans with its suffering.

People walk along the pavements. They push hurriedly forward, all hastily driven by the same force that enslaves them. But their faces are calm, their hearts do not feel the misfortune of being slaves; indeed, by a tragic self-conceit, they yet feel themselves its masters. In their eyes gleams a consciousness of independence, but they do not know it is but the sorry independence of the ax in the hands of the woodman, of the hammer in the hands of the blacksmith. This liberty is the tool in the hands of the Yellow Devil—Gold. Inner freedom, freedom of the heart and soul, is not seen in their energetic countenances. This energy without liberty is like the glitter of a new knife which has not yet had time to be dulled, it is like the gloss of a new rope.

It is the first time that I have seen such a huge city monster; nowhere have the people appeared to me so unfortunate, so thoroughly enslaved to life, as in New York. And furthermore, nowhere have I seen them so tragicomically self-satisfied as in this huge phantasmagoria of stone, iron, and glass, this product of the sick and wasted imagination of Mercury and Pluto. And looking upon this life, I began to think that in the hand of the statue of Bartholdi there blazes not the torch of liberty, but the dollar.

The large number of monuments in the city parks testifies to the pride which its inhabitants take in their great men. But it would be well from time to time to clean the dust and dirt from the faces of those heroes whose hearts and eyes burned so glowingly with love for their people. These statues covered with a veil of dirt involuntarily force one to put a low estimate upon the gratitude felt by the Americans toward all those who lived and died for the good of their country. And they lose themselves in the network of the many stoned buildings. The great men seem like dwarfs in front of the walls of the ten-story structures. The mammoth fortunes of Morgan and Rockefeller wipe off from memory the significance of the creators of liberty—Lincoln and Washington. Grant's tomb is the only monument of which New York can be proud, and that, too, only because it has not been placed in the dirty heart of the city.

“This is a new library they are building,” said someone to me, pointing to an unfinished structure surrounded by a park. And he added importantly: “It will cost two million dollars! The shelves will measure one hundred and fifty miles.”

Up to that time I had thought that the value of a library is not in the building itself, but in the books, just as the worth of a man is in his soul, not in his clothes. Nor did I ever go into raptures over the length of the shelves, preferring always the quality of books to their quantity. By quality I understand (I make this remark for the benefit of the Americans) not the price of the binding, nor the durability of the paper, but the value of the ideas, the beauty of the language, the strength of the imagination, and so forth.

Another gentleman told me, as he pointed out a painting to me: “It is worth five hundred dollars.”

I had to listen very frequently to such sorry and superficial appraisement of objects, the price of which cannot be determined by the number of dollars. Productions of art are bought for money, just as bread, but their value is always higher than what is paid for them in coin. I meet here very few people who have a clear conception of the intrinsic worth of art, its religious significance, the power of its influence upon life, and its indispensableness to mankind.

To live means to live beautifully, bravely, and with all the power of the soul. To live means to embrace with our minds the whole universe, to mingle our thoughts with all the secrets of existence, and to do all that is possible in order to make life around us more beautiful, more varied, freer and brighter.

It seems to me that what is superlatively lacking to America is a desire for beauty, a thirst for those pleasures which it alone can give to the mind and to the heart. Our earth is the heart of the universe, our art the heart of the earth. The stronger it beats, the more beautiful is life. In America the heart beats feebly.

I was both surprised and pained to find that in America the theaters were in the hands of a trust, and that the men of the trust, being the possessors, had also become the dictators in matters of the drama. This evidently explains the fact that a country which has excellent novelists has not produced a single eminent dramatist.

To turn art into a means of profit is, under all circumstances, a serious misdemeanor, but in this particular case it is positive crime, because it offers violence to the author's person and adulterates art. If the law provides punishments for the adulteration of food, it ought to deal unmercifully with those who adulterate the people's spiritual food.

The theater is called the people's school; it teaches us to feel and to think. It has its origin in the same source as the church, but it has always served the people more sincerely and truly than the church. While the government has been able to make the church subserve its own interests, it has never been able to enslave the theater. “The Sunken Bell” of Hauptmann is a liturgy of beauty and of thought, as are many of the plays of Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Aeschylus. The exploitation of the theater by capital ought not to be permitted by people who are interested in the development of the spiritual forces of the country.

But perhaps the Americans think that they are cultured enough? If so, they are easily in error. In Russia such an attitude is observed among the students in the fifth class of the gymnasium, who, having learned to smoke tobacco, and read over two or three good books, imagine themselves to be Spinozas.

A twelve-story building and a Sunday newspaper weighing ten pounds are certainly great. It is but hollow grandeur, however, the vast number of people in the building and the large array of advertisements in the paper notwithstanding. Without ideas, there can be no culture.

The first evidence of the absence of culture in the American is the interest he takes in all stories and spectacles of cruelty. To a cultured man, a humanist, blood is loathsome. Murder by execution and other abominations of a like character arouse his disgust. In America such things call forth only curiosity. The newspapers are filled with detailed descriptions of murders and all kinds of horrors. The tone of the description is cold, the hard tone of an attentive observer. It is evident that the aim is to tickle the weary nerves of the reader with sharp, pungent details of crime, and no attempt is ever made to explain the social basis of the facts.

To no one seems to occur the simple thought that a nation is a family. And if some of its members are criminals, it only signifies that the system of bringing up people in that family is badly managed. Cruelty is a disease; interest manifested in it is also an unhealthy symptom. The more that interest is developed, the more crime will develop.

I will not dwell on the question of the attitude of the white man toward the Negro. But it is very characteristic of the American psychology that Booker T. Washington preaches the following sermon to his race:

“You ought to be as rich and as clean outwardly as the whites; only then will they recognize you as their equals.” This, in fact, is the substance of his teachings to his people.

Having a dollar in one's pocket, wearing a frock coat, cleaning the teeth every day, and using soap—all this is still not quite sufficient to make a cultured man. Ideas are wanted also. Respect for one's neighbor is necessary, no matter what the color of his skin may be; and a whole lot of such trifles without which the difference between a human being in a frock coat and an animal with his woolly skin is difficult to discern. But in America they only think of how to make money. Poor country, whose people are occupied only with the thought of how to get rich!

I am never in the least dazzled by the amount of money a man possesses; but his lack of honor, of love for his country, and of concern for its welfare always fills me with sadness. A man milking his country like a cow, or battening on it like a parasite, is a sorry sort of inspiration. How pitiful that America, which they say has full political liberty, is utterly wanting in liberty of spirit! When you see with what profound interest and idolatry the millionaires are regarded here, you involuntarily begin to suspect the democracy of the country. Democracy—and so many kings. Democracy and a “High Society.” All this is strange and incomprehensible.

All the numerous trusts and syndicates, developing with a rapidity and energy possible only in America, will ultimately call forth to life its enemy, revolutionary socialism, which, in turn, will develop as rapidly and as energetically. But while the process of swallowing up individuals by capital, and of the organization of the masses is going on, capitalism will spoil many stomachs and heads, many hearts and minds.

Speaking of the national spirit, I must also speak of the morality of the nation. But on that subject I have nothing interesting to say. That side of life has always been a poser to me. I cannot understand it; and when people speak seriously about it I cannot help but smile. At best, a moralist to me is a man at whom I wink from the corner of my eye, and drawing him aside whisper in his ear:

“Ah, you rascal! It isn't that I am a skeptic, but I know the world, I know it to my sorrow.”

The most desperate moralist I have come across was my grandfather. He knew all the roads to heaven and constantly preached about them to everyone who fell into his hands. He alone knew the truth, and he zealously knocked it into the heads of the members of his family with whatever he happened to get a hold of. He knew to a dot everything that God wanted, and he used to teach even the dogs and cats how to conduct themselves in order to attain eternal happiness. But, with all that, he was greedy and malicious, he lied constantly, was a usurer, and with the cruelty of a coward—a trait common to each and every moralist—he beat his domestics, on every spare and unsuitable occasion, with whatsoever and howsoever he desired.

I tried to influence my grandfather, wishing to make him milder. Once I threw the old man out of the window, another time I struck him with a looking-glass. The window and the looking-glass broke, but Grandpa did not get any better. He died a moralist. Since that time I regard all discourses on morality as a useless waste of time. And, moreover, being from my youth up a professional sinner, like all honest writers, what can I say about morality?

Morality seems to me like a secret vessel tightly covered with a heavy lid of bias and prejudice.¹ I think that in that vessel are concealed the best recipes for a pure and ethical life, the shortest and surest road to eternal happiness. But beside that vessel, as guardians of its purity, people stand always who do not inspire my confidence, although they arouse my envy by their flowery appearance. They are such smug, round, lardy creatures, so well satisfied with themselves, and standing so firmly on their feet, like veritable mileposts pointing the way to the salvation of the soul. However, there is nothing wooden about them except their hearts. They are as elastic as the springs in a sumptuous equipage, as the tires of a high-priced automobile.

I wish it to be understood that in thus speaking of moralists I do not mean those who think, but only those who judge. Emerson was a moralist, but I cannot imagine a man who, having read Emerson, will not have his mind cleared of the dust and dirt of worldly prejudices. Carlyle, Ruskin, Pascal—their names are many, and the books of each of these work upon the heart like a good brush. But there are people who, being born scoundrels, act as if they were the world's attorneys.

Man is by nature curious. I have more than once lifted the lid of the moral vessel, and every time there issued from it such a rank, stifling smell of lies and hypocrisy, cowardice and wickedness, as was quite beyond the power of my nostrils to endure.

I am willing to think that the Americans are the best moralists in the world, and that even my grandpa was a child in comparison. I admit that nowhere else in the world are there to be found such stern priests of ethics and morality, and, therefore, I leave them alone. But a word about the practical side. America prides itself on its morals, and occasionally constitutes itself as judge, evidently presuming that it has worked out in its social relations a system of conduct worthy of imitation. I believe this is a mistake.

The Americans run the risk of making themselves ridiculous if they begin to pride themselves on their society. There is nothing whatever original about it; the depravity of the “higher classes of society” is a common thing in Europe. If the Americans permit the development of a “high society” in their country, there is nothing remarkable in the fact that depravity also grows apace. And that no week passes without some loud scandal in this “high society” is no cause for pride in the originality of American morals. You can find all these things in Europe also. There is perhaps less hypocrisy in these matters on the other side of the Atlantic, but the depravity exists all the same, and to scarcely a lesser degree. These are the common morals of the representatives of the “high society,” a cosmopolitan race, which, with the same zeal, defiles the earth at all its points.

I must mention the fact that in America they steal money very frequently, and lots of it. This, of course, is but natural. Where there is a great deal of money there are a great many thieves. To imagine a thief without money is as difficult as to imagine an honest man with money. But that again is a phenomenon common to all countries.

But enough! It is an unpleasant subject, and has not Edgar Allan Poe said once, “Keep telling a thief that he is an honest man, and he will justify your opinion about him.”

I put Poe's statement to the test, by taking a man strongly persuaded of his honesty and convincing him of the opposite. Results proved that the great fact was always right. Hence I infer that we must treat people mildly and gently. It is not important how they treat me, but how I treat them. The individual elevates society, the individual corrupts it.

You think this is a paradox? No, it is the truth.

A magnificent Broadway, but a horrible East Side! What an irreconcilable contradiction, what a tragedy! The street of wealth must perforce give rise to harsh and stern laws devised by the financial aristocracy, by the slaves of the Yellow Devil, for a war upon poverty and the Whitechapel of New York. The poverty and the vice of the East Side must perforce breed anarchy. I do not speak of a theory; I speak of the development of envy, malice, and vengeance, of that, in a word, which degrades man to the level of an antisocial being. These two irreconcilable currents, the psychology of the rich and the feeling of the poor, threaten a clash which will lead to a whole series of tragedies and catastrophes.

America is possessed of a great store of energy, and therefore everything in it, the good and the bad, develops with greater rapidity than anywhere else. But the growth of that anarchism of which I am speaking precedes the development of a socialism. Socialism is a stage of culture, a civilized tendency. It is the religion of the future, which will free the whole world from poverty and from the gross rule of wealth. To be rightly understood, it requires the close application of the mind, and a general, harmonious development of all the spiritual forces in man. Anarchy is a social disease. It is the poison produced in the social organism by the lack of healthy nourishment for his body and soul. The growth of anarchism requires no intellectual basis; it is the work of the instinct, the soil on which it thrives is envy and revenge. It must needs have great success in America, where social contrasts are especially sharp and spiritual life especially feeble.

Impurities in the body come out on the surface as running sores. Falsehood and vice, now festering and spreading in society, will some day be thrown up like streams of lava, suffocating and drowning it if it betimes heed not the life of the masses corrupted by poverty.

But, methinks, I, too, am turning moralist. You see the corrupting influence of society.

The children in the streets of New York produce a profoundly sad impression. Playing ball amidst the crash and thunder of iron, amidst the chaos of the tumultuous city, they seem like flowers thrown by some rude and cruel hand into the dust and dirt of the pavements. The whole day long they inhale the vapors of the monstrous city, the metropolis of the Yellow Devil. Pity for their little lungs, pity for their eyes choked up with dust!

The care taken in the education of children is the clearest test of the degree of culture in any country. The conditions of life with which children are surrounded determines most certainly the measure of a nation's intellectual development. If the government and society employ every possible means to have their children grow up into strong, honest, good, and wise men and women, then only it is a government and a society worthy of the name.

I have seen poverty aplenty, and know well her green, bloodless, haggard countenance. But the horror of East Side poverty is sadder than everything that I have known. Children pick out from the garbage boxes on the curbstones pieces of rotten bread, and devour it, together with the mold and the dirt, there in the street in the stinging dust and the choking air. They fight for it like little dogs. At midnight and later they are still rolling in the dust and the dirt of the street, these living rebukes to wealth, these melancholy blossoms of poverty. What sort of a fluid runs in their veins? What must be the chemical structure of their brains? Their lungs are like rags fed upon dirt; their stomachs like the garbage boxes from which they obtain their food. What sort of men can grow up out of these children of hunger and penury? What citizens?

America, you who astound the world with your millionaires, look first to the children on the East Side, and consider the menace they hold out to you! The boast of riches when there is an East Side is a stupid boast.

However, “there is no evil without a good,” as they say in Russia, country of optimists.

This life of gold accumulation, this idolatry of money, this horrible worship of the Golden Devil already begins to stir up protest in the country. The odious life, entangled in a network of iron and oppressing the soul with its dismal emptiness, arouses the disgust of healthy people, and they are beginning to seek for a means of rescue from spiritual death.

And so we see millionaires and clergymen declaring themselves socialists, and publishing newspapers and periodicals for the propaganda of socialists. The creation of “settlements” by the rich intellectuals, their abandonment of the luxury of their parental homes for the wilds of the East Side—all this is evidence of an awakening spirit; it heralds the gradual rise in America of the human life. Little by little people begin to understand that the slavery of gold and the slavery of poverty are both equally destructive.

The important thing is that the people have begun to think. A country in which such an excellent work as William James's Philosophy of Religion was written can think. It is the country of Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Jack London, who gives his great talent to socialism. This is a good instance of the awakening of the spirit of “human life” in this young and vigorous country suffering from the gold fever. But the most irrefutable evidence of the spiritual awakening in America seems to me to be Walt Whitman. Granted that his verses are not exactly like verses; but the feeling of pagan love of life which speaks in them, the high estimate of man, energy of thought—all this is beautiful and sturdy. Whitman is a true democrat, philosopher; in his books he has perhaps laid the first foundation of a really democratic philosophy—the doctrine of freedom, beauty, and truth, and the harmony of their union in man. More and more interest in matters of the mind and the spirit, in science and art—this is what I wish the Americans with all my heart. And this, too, I wish them, the development of scorn for money.

After all that I have said, I am involuntarily drawn to make a parallel between Europe and America. On that side of the ocean there is much beauty, much liberty of the spirit, and a bold, vehement activity of the mind. There art always shines like the sky at night with the living sparkle of the imperishable stars. On this side there is no beauty. The rude vigor of political and social youth is fettered by the rusty chains of the old Puritan morality bound to the decayed fragments of dead prejudices.

Europe shows evidence of moral decrepitude, and, as a consequence of this, skepticism. She has suffered much. Her spiritual suffering has produced an aristocratic apathy, it has made her long for peace and quiet. The spiritual movement of the proletariat, carrying with it the possibility of new beauty and new joy, arouses in the cultured classes of European society nothing but dread for their peace and their old comfortable habits.

America has not yet suffered the pangs of the dissatisfied spirit, she has not yet felt the aches of the mind. Discontent has but just begun here. And it seems to me that when America will turn her energy to the quest of liberty of the spirit, the world will witness the spectacle of a great conflagration, a conflagration which will cleanse this country from the dirt of gold, and from the dust of prejudice, and it will shine like a magnificent cut diamond, reflecting in its great heart all the thought of the world, all the beauty of life.

America is strong, America is healthy! And although even a sick Dostoevsky is more needful to the world than rich, healthy shopkeepers, yet we will trust that the children of the shopkeepers will become true democrats; that is to say, aristocrats of the spirit. For it is much pleasanter to live if you treat people better than they deserve. Is it not?

Note

1. [Gorky was attacked in the American press for bringing his mistress with him. “Gorky Brings Actress Here as ‘Mme. Gorky,’” a headline ran. Mark Twain accused him of violating the “customs” of America, thereby tarnishing the cause of all revolutionary opponents of Russian despotism. “The man might just as well have appeared in public in his shirt-tail,” Twain remarked. GES]