Gorky Quotes

“The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.”
― Peter Ackroyd

“To a friend, in an unguarded moment, he [Maxim Gorky, 1932] declared his ambition: simply to portray the world and man as they were, without the myth of love, ‘repudiating noting, praising nothing’; repudiation was unjust, while praise was premature—‘for we live in chaos and ourselves are fragments of chaos.’ He compared his desire with Einstein, ‘trying to alter radically our representation of the universe.”
― Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky

“And the time was also coming when the great purges, long in blueprint, could no longer be postponed. The whole subject of the slaughter by a revolution of its children is mysterious. But it is clear that the group warfare, by the ‘logic of things,’ had opened into the next stage: the fanatical idealists of the 1880's and 1890's needed to be destroyed by the realists now in control of the Party, their younger fanatics of the apparatus, and their Calibans (a new breed). Some of the original revolutionaries had become disillusioned, and there is nothing worse than an ex-believer. Some were haunted by old romantic notions of ‘freedom,’ and therefore opposed the rough measures needed to forge a modern totalitarian state. Some probably still dreamed they could change the balance, and leadership, of the Party.”
― Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky

“...the attitude of Gorky and his paper. He had returned to Russia early in 1914, taken a pacifist line on the the outbreak of war, but had pursued it with a restraint which protected him from most of the obloquy poured on others of similar views After the February Revolution of 1917 he had regarded the Bolsheviks as merely one among a number of progressive parties, and it was not unexpected that in October he should warn about the future. Now, he not only printed the Zinoviev-Kamenev statement but also a leading article in which he said:

'Ever more persistent rumors are spreading to the effect that on 2 November a Bolshevik rising will take place; in other words, that the hideous scenes of 16 to 18 July may be repeated. That means that once more there will appear motor lorries overfilled with men with rifles and revolvers in their trembling hands, and these rifles will shoot at shop windows, at people, at random. They will shoot only because the men armed with them will try to kill their fear. All dark instincts of the crowd irritated by disorder, by the falsehood and filth of politics, will flare up and ooze forth poisonous malice, hatred, vengeance. People will be killing one another, in their inability to destroy their own bestial stupidity.
The unorganized crowd will creep out into the streets, hardly understanding what it wants, while under its cover, adventurers, thieves, [and] professional assassins will set out to "create the history of the Russian revolution".
In brief, there will be repeated that bloody, senseless slaughter, which we have already witnessed, and which has undermined through our whole land the moral importance of the revolution, and has shaken its cultural meaning.”
― Ronald William Clark, Lenin

“To a friend, in an unguarded moment, he [Maxim Gorky, 1932] declared his ambition: simply to portray the world and man as they were, without the myth of love, ‘repudiating nothing, praising nothing’; repudiation was unjust, while praise was premature—‘for we live in chaos and ourselves are fragments of chaos.’ He compared his desire with Einstein, ‘trying to alter radically our representation of the universe.”
― Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky

“The scythe went down the ranks, in cities and provinces, lopping the heads of the Party apparatuses, of intellectuals, activists. Nearly the entire Party Central Committee was killed; nearly the entire Soviet war council; nearly the entire Red Army command, starting with its head, Tukhachevsky; 35,000 officers; most Soviet ambassadors, almost the entire staffs of Pravda and Izvestia, most of the officials of the Cheka (including its head, Yagoda), most of the leaders of the Young Communist League . . . From late 1936 into 1939 the slaughter went on. The tortures and shootings that took place in the basement of the Lubyanka, headquarters of the security police, must have set a world record for one building.”
― Dan Levin, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky