Without Lifting A Finger

Reading. Finished Barnes ' Arthur and George (after watching the PBS series) and have moved on to Gorky. I've tried some stories before and gave up. This time starting with his autobio (I have two of three parts) and enjoying it. This snippet is about his grandmother (paragraphs be damned.:)): “But why do people abandon children?” “It is because the mother has no milk, or anything to feed her baby with. Then she hears that a child which has been born somewhere lately is dead, and she goes and leaves her own there.” She paused and scratched her head; then sighing and gazing at the ceiling, she continued: “Poverty is always the reason, Oleysha; and a kind of poverty which must not be talked about, for an unmarried girl dare not admit that she has a child people would cry shame upon her. “Grandfather wanted to hand Vaniushka over to the police, but I said ‘No, we will keep him ourselves to fill the place of our dead ones. For I have had eighteen children, you know. If they had al...

He liked absolutely any person who introduced an element of rebellion or, at the very least, mischief, into the world—up to and including maniacs and arsonists, whom he wrote about extensively and was happy to talk about for hours on end. He was a bit of an arsonist himself. Not once did I ever see him put out a match after lighting a cigarette: he would invariably throw the match away unextinguished. After lunch or during his evening tea, when the ashtray would be filled with a sufficient quantity of cigarette butts, matches, and papers, he made it his cherished habit to furtively shove a lit match inside the pile. After doing so, he would attempt to distract the attention of those around him—while he himself cast cunning glances over his shoulder at the blazing bonfire. It seemed that these “little family fires,” as I once suggested calling them, took on a certain wicked and joyful symbolic meaning in his eyes. He felt great respect for the experiments being done in atomic fission; h...

 I lived a good distance away from Gorky. Walking the streets at night was exhausting and not without its dangers: a person could get robbed. For this reason, it was not uncommon for me to stay the night; a bed would be made up for me on the divan that stood in the dining room. Late in the evening, the hustle and bustle would die down. The hour would arrive for the family to take their tea. I served as an audience for Gorky’s much-loved reminiscences, the ones that he always trotted out when he wished to “charm” his new acquaintances. Later on, I would learn that these stories were rather limited in number and that, though they retained the appearance of improvisations, they would repeat themselves verbatim, year after year. More than once, I came across character sketches written by people who had happened to visit Gorky’s at one time or another and each time I would laugh when I arrived at the stereotypical phrase: “Alexei Maximovich’s thoughts unexpectedly turn toward the past, ...

 ... Gorky is younger than you or I, he has his life before him.... As for the Nizhni theatre, that's a mere episode; Gorky will try it, "sniff it and reject it." And while we are on this subject, the whole idea of a "people's" theatre and "people's" literature is foolishness and lollipops for the people. We mustn't bring Gogol down to the people but raise the people up to Gogol....