A Legend Exhumed

STORMY PETREL: THE LIFE AND WORK OF MAXIM GORKY by Dan Levin. 329 pages. Appleton-Century. $7.95.

Maxim Gorky's life was the irresistible legend: unschooled Volga boatman turned great writer, angry appellant for Red Revolution, friend of Tolstoy and Lenin, humanist who loathed repression, diver to The Lower Depths and the grim, gritty world of his Childhood. In fact, judging from this careful exhumation of the man by Dan Levin, sometime novelist and lifelong Gorkyite, Gorky was at once a less noble and more tragic figure than his legend suggests.

Hemingway with Heartburn. A hulking, hardhanded man with a severe Stalin-style mustache, Gorky is best remembered for his grinding portraits of working-class life in the years immediately preceding the Russian Revolution. His plays and stories then could deal freely with the down-and-outers: barefoot bosyaki (hoboes) on the bum along Russia's great rivers; whores and thieves snarling "Ekh!" at one another in the dank cellars of Moscow; Lumpenproletariat in shiny leather jackets and dull despair. Gorky seemed a sort of Hemingway with heartburn.

As a tough kid from the Volga town of Nizhni Novgorod--it now bears his name--Gorky worked the river steamboats, reading Tom Jones even as he learned to steal. He hung out with gypsies, slung bales with stevedores, worked with men who toiled "like blind worms" in a basement bakery. "I saw that life was crisscrossed with theft," he wrote, "like an old coat with grey threads." Nothing worked right: even when he tried suicide, he succeeded only in shooting himself through the lung.

A View of Vesuvius. Then, suddenly, came fame. Chekhov liked his early stories; Tolstoy was delighted by his crude force ("You . . . are a real peasant!"). Moscow's intelligentsia embraced the tall, stooped figure in high boots and belted black tunic. Gorky's wildly onomatopoeic Song of the Stormy Petrel became the battle anthem of the revolution, and soon he was hip deep in politics: setting up capitalist pigeons for Lenin to pluck, polemicizing both for and against the Bolsheviks. During the Leninist purges following the October Revolution, Gorky used his special relationship with Lenin to save many writers' lives. Finally breaking with the Bolsheviks, he exiled himself in Sorrento. There, in a drafty villa with a fine view of Vesuvius, he swilled coffee-and-raw-eggs and completed his best work: the autobiographical accounts of his early life and his reminiscences of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Servile Pen. In 1931, at Stalin's urging, Gorky returned to Russia. He was set to work glorifying the slave-labor projects that were reshaping Soviet society and killing millions in the process. The "histories" and editorials that spewed forth in Gorky's name pandered to Stalin's every whim; his formulation of socialist realism resulted in the most servile cultural creed ever imposed on the human intellect. Then in 1936, just before the Great Purge began, Gorky mysteriously died. During the Bukharin "show trial," witnesses "confessed" that he had been murdered by the "rightist-Trotskyite conspiracy."

Not so, argues Author Levin. In his last, obscure works, Gorky had turned bitterly and bitingly against Stalin's repressions. Levin sides with a growing minority of Russian scholars who contend that he was liquidated by Stalin, who feared that Gorky would raise a mighty outcry over the killings that lay ahead. There is much to commend the argument: Gorky, the tough realist, was in reality a bighearted sentimentalist who could not condone Czarist cruelties and he would probably have refused to countenance Stalinist slaughter.

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