The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

196 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

slogans of class struggle. In 1923 the Futurist-inspired LEF (“Left Front of Literature”) was attacked by the more militant “On Guard” and “October” groups, which had no patience with formally innovative poetry even when it supported the Bolshevik cause. Peasant writers and proletarian writers each had their own national organizations. Some insisted on the author’s right to be political in an individually chosen way (excluding, of course, the option of opposition to Bolshevik rule); Trotsky labeled these non-aligned but non-hostile writers poputchiki, “fellow travelers” of the Revolution, and recommended that they be tolerated. In 1925, the Central Committee of the Communist Party formally resolved that it would not commit itself to support any particular literary school.

By the mid-1920s, a certain “normalization” had set in. One index of stability was Maksim Gorky’s decision in 1927 to return to Russia from Sorrento, Italy, after seven years of self-imposed exile. Such returns into the lap of Stalinism would be repeated by other great Russian creative artists, including the composer Sergei Prokofiev in 1936 and the poet Marina Tsvetaeva in 1939. A world-famous and well-traveled writer before the Revolution, Gorky had exiled himself once before, 1906–13, to the Italian island of Capri. There he befriended Lenin and other visionary revolutionaries. But his relations with Lenin became tense, and at times bitter, during the Revolution, especially over repressions of the cultural elite. By temperament Gorky was more a revolutionary humanist than a Bolshevik (he was not a Party member). His humanitarian activity on behalf of threatened writers embarrassed the more iron-fisted of the Bolsheviks. But Gorky, an autodidact from a working-class family with no formal schooling after the age of eleven (and with no “suspicious” foreign languages at all despite his several sojourns abroad), had achieved the Soviet-era equivalent of the status that Count Leo Tolstoy enjoyed under the Old Regime. Ties with Lenin, together with his fame and reputation for moral goodness, made him a difficult man to silence. Lenin himself pressed a second voluntary exile on Gorky in 1921, “for reasons of his health.”

The regime trumpeted Gorky’s return as a political and cultural triumph, rewarding him with fabulous gifts. He received a former millionaire’s mansion as his Moscow residence, an estate in the Crimea, an unlimited bank account (although Gorky cared little about money), and the honor of having towns, streets, schools and factories namedafterhim while he wasstillalive. Atthe same time, police surveillance over Gorky (sustained at modest levels during the exile years through members of his own household) significantly increased. Surely Gorky’s monolinguality heightened his willingness to return; unlike the quatra-lingual Prokofiev or Tsvetaeva, Gorky carried Russia within him wherever he was and could make for himself no other verbal home. It seems that he accepted