/lit/ - Literature

>>18879875
Who would you call a good thinker?
On topic, pic related.

Has anyone read Gorky? What are some good works of his?

And yet, a year after Likhachev arrived at Solovki, he and his fellow-prisoners learned that Maxim Gorky, perhaps the most popular Soviet writer of the time, was coming to visit. Here, at last, was their witness and savior. Gorky was a hero to Russians, not merely for his prose but also for his proletarian authenticity, his adventures as an urchin and a juvenile delinquent, described in “Childhood” and “The Lower Depths.” Now Gorky’s ship, the Gleb Boky, named for the camp chief, was about to dock at Solovki. “All we prisoners were delighted,” Likhachev wrote. “ ‘That Gorky will spot everything, find out everything. He’s been around, you can’t fool him. About the logging and the torture on the tree-stumps, the hunger, the disease, the three-tier bunks, those without clothes, the sentences without conviction.’ “

For the occasion, the Solovki administration had spruced up the camp, painted walls, planted trees, allowed husbands and wives to be together (as they never were ordinarily). And, as it turned out, Gorky failed to see beyond the façade that had been erected for him. He seemed disinclined to try. He visited the punishment cells and, after a few short minutes, pronounced them “excellent.” He spent hardly any time at all with prisoners, though he did speak for forty minutes with a young boy and declared himself fascinated and pleased. (After Gorky left the camp, Likhachev writes, that boy was never seen again.) The writer stayed for three days and spent nearly all of it with the secret-police officers who ran the complex.

The Soviet leadership could hardly complain about the essay that Gorky eventually wrote about his experience: “There is no impression of life being over-regulated. No, there is no resemblance to a prison; instead it seems as if these rooms are inhabited by passengers rescued from a drowned ship.” The political prisoners at Solovki—men like Likhachev—were, according to Gorky, merely “counter-revolutionaries, emotional types, monarchists.” It is hard to know to what degree the censors shaped Gorky’s thoughts, but the text certainly suggests a man well satisfied with Soviet conditions and Soviet kindness. “If any so-called cultured European society dared to conduct an experiment such as this colony,” he wrote, “and if this experiment yielded fruits as ours had, that country would blow all its trumpets and boast about its accomplishments.”

After Gorky left Solovki, the guards began a round of mass executions. “The graves had been dug a day before the shootings,” Likhachev recalled. “The executioners were drunk. One bullet per victim. Many were buried alive, just a thin layer of earth over them. In the morning, the earth on the pit was still moving. . . . The camp had been cleared of ‘superfluous’ persons.”

Anyone else read Unlucky Pavel / Pavel, The Poor Devil? Why did he do it?