Gorki in New York

By J. B. Hogan

Steaming to America – April 10, 1906

On the voyage to America I cautioned restraint. We knew very little of that wild,
strange land and even less of her people. But Alexei Maximovich would have none of it.

“You are too suspicious,” he mildly chided me as we walked the promenade deck, Marya Fyodorovna Andreieva between us holding onto Gorki's arm. Marya Fyodorovna was a lovely woman, but an actress, temperamental and volatile. Not well suited for restraining Maxim's flights of fancy and emotion.

“Possibly,” I replied, “but it is a different culture than ours. Perhaps as different as two cultures may be.”

“Nonsense,” he laughed. “America, my good Burenin, is the freest land on earth.”

“You are very generous, Maximovich,” Marya interjected.

“We must be,” Maxim said, patting her hand gently, “for we hope that they will be generous to us and to our cause.”

Our cause? I thought, not speaking. Sometimes it seemed that the Bolshevik cause had become the Gorki cause. Marya and I were not cut from the same cloth as Maxim. This was the man who had been a street urchin at nine in Nihzni-Novgorod, a tramp, a worker on the Volga, and then a great writer.

Maxim was a friend of the late Chekhov and of the magnificent Tolstoy; he was a real man of the people, a true radical, a celebrated ex-prisoner of his majesty the czar. He had become Gorki the international sensation. Marya Fyodorovna was a marvelous actress, a loyal companion to Maxim – even a fine “aunt” to his little boy and girl, and she was accepted, however reluctantly, by Ekaterina Pavlovna, Gorki's estranged but still legally recognized wife. As for me, I was a party man, a competent secretary and translator, nothing more; but Maxim – he was the Gorki – the bitter one, one of the most famous men in the world.

 “I believe, Maximovich,” I did say out loud, somewhat timorously, “that your
generosity and your openness can be as harmful to you as useful. I don't trust the reporters nor the Germans we dine with each night, and you know very well there's even at least one czarist spy here on board with us.”

“Ah, Burenin,” Gorki laughed at my concern, “you have far too low an opinion of
yourself and you place it on those around you.”

“Nikolai Evgenievich is right about the spy, though, my dear husband,” Marya
Fyodorovna said.

“Of course, my dear wife,” Gorki smiled at his beautiful actress, “but what of it? How can a spy hurt me? I've already been a guest of our kind czar. Besides, we are no longer in Mother Russia.”

 “True enough, Maximovich,” I said, “but surely you see the need for circumspect….”

“Hush,” Gorki said, raising his left hand before me, “enough. Look there,” he then cried, pointing into the hazy distance, “is that not land? Is that not America?”

Suddenly a great cry rose up on the boat, temporarily overwhelming the steady
pounding of her steam engines. Passengers rushed to the side of the boat for a first glimpse of the golden promised land. Maxim was beside himself with joy.

“America! America!” he shouted, leaning perilously against the railing. Marya held onto him for fear he would fall overboard. “I have been waiting years for this moment. Columbus could not have been more anxious to discover America than I.”

For perhaps a quarter of an hour then, Maxim stood with his arms crossed at the railing, his gaze fixed on the slowly approaching shore. Marya and I stood behind and allowed him, as was his wont at great moments like this, to be alone with his thoughts and emotions.
      
Arrival – April 10

Nearing the Hoboken pier, a small cutter came out in a steady rain to greet us and we were surprised to see many old friends on board waving and welcoming us to America.

“Look, Maximovich,” I said, pointing at the smaller boat, “isn't that Ivan Narodny?” Gorki squinted to see.

“Yes,” he cried, “you're right, Nikolaievich, it is. Ivan! Ivan!” Then he spotted others on deck of the other vessel. “There,” he said, waving exuberantly, “our friend Mandelkern, and Abraham Cahan. And there Wilshire. Hallo, hallo.”

“Dearest,” Marya Fyodorovna said, pointing to the group of men on the boat now waving back at us, “in the midst there, by Ivanovich. It's Zinka.”

“Where?” Gorki exclaimed, terribly excited at the prospect of seeing his adopted son Zinovii Alexeivich Peshkov after some three years separation.

“There, Maxim,” Marya said, putting her hand by Maxim's face and aiming a long, slender finger at the men on the boat below.

“Yes, I see him now,” Maxim said joyfully. “Zinka, Zinka, hallo. How are you, son?”

Naturally, Zinka could not hear his father over the sound of the ship's engines but he waved back with great enthusiasm and jumped up and down with joy. Gorki was beside himself and it was a short, happy time as we steamed on into the Hoboken pier.
      
At the Pier – April 10

When the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse finally docked at the Hoboken pier, her
clanging, steaming engines silent at last, we were besieged by friends, reporters, anyone who could find a way on board to see Maxim. All of the people from the cutter that had greeted us in the harbor were there – including Zinka, who had a most tender and joyous reunion with his adopted, and much taller and bigger, father, the toast of Russian letters.

At first Maxim was overwhelmed by the number of people wishing to see him and Marya and I tried to shield him as best we could. Part of his reason for coming to America was, after all, to improve his health, to rest and regain his strength. We did not want him to weaken from overwork and stress, to decline and fail like his friend, the incomparable, tragic Chekhov.

To that end, the legal necessity of passing through customs – normally an annoyance – became a respite of sorts for Gorki as he good-naturedly responded to the simple questions that would allow him to enter the United States without restriction.

“No,” Maxim answered the only question the customs officer was really concerned about, “I am not an anarchist, I am a socialist. I believe in law and order.”

Beyond customs, standing patiently in the rain, waited a throng of Gorki enthusiasts and many curious onlookers. When the crowd spotted Maxim among the group coming down the pier, they went wild and lifted him to their shoulders, cheering and jolting him about. Gorki endured them as evenly as he could, but when they also tried to lift up Marya Fyodorovna, he forced himself back down onto the pier and stopped the unruly crowd firmly, though without rancor, from mishandling her.

We all returned, then, to the customs area long enough for the crowd to settle down and after, with the help of the Hoboken police, were escorted to carriages waiting beyond the pier. The crowd again became unruly, however – wanting to unhitch the horses and pull Maxim's carriage up to the ferry to Manhattan – but the police restrained them and we continued on without further incident.

The Club A Dinner – April 11

In the evening Maxim was to be feted at a dinner sponsored by Ivan Narodny at the Club A on Fifth Avenue where Ivan and several other Russian exiles made their home. Mr. Mark Twain, the celebrated American novelist, self-avowed revolutionist and supporter of the freedom movement in Russia, was to be a principal speaker there and other notables were expected to attend including William Dean Howells, Peter Finley Dunne, and a goodly portion of the better known Russians and pro-Russian Americans in the city. Maxim's declared goal of raising a large amount of money for the revolution seemed assured by the
warmth and generosity shown him and his cause in this our first day in America.

Earlier, still thrilled by all he saw in the New World, Maxim had marveled at the
Times Building and gazed happily out at the Hudson River.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” he had exclaimed when we drove by the Times Building in a carriage. “I mean to know how it is possible to erect such structures before I leave this country.”

And from a window in the Hotel Belleclaire, when he had a moment of quiet from the more than one hundred guests who called on him during the day, Gorki looked out over the Hudson and with chest swelling from perhaps longing, or nostalgia, addressed the great river below him.

“What,” he said with great emotion, Marya Fyodorovna interpreting for him, “is this my native Nihzni-Novgorod, and is this the Volga? Then I am at home, indeed.”

Later, Marya herself basked in the joy of the limelight as well. Interrupting Maxim as he was assuring reporters of the great standing of the American poet Edgar Allan Poe back in Russia, she told the journalists it was her opinion that Poe would rank higher here in his own native land if not for the “women who prevent you from loving him as well as you should.”

Turning their attention to the beautiful actress, the reporters asked if she had ever performed in her husband's plays.

“Oh, yes,” she said, Maxim smiling at her with admiration and affection, “but not for quite some time.”

“Believe me, gentlemen,” Gorki interjected, “it is due only to my poor health and my political duties that I have not produced more works for my wife to interpret on stage. She is a brilliant actress of great range and depth.”

“At present,” Marya Fyodorovna said, squeezing Maxim's hand and glancing briefly at me, “I am just my husband's wife, nothing else, and I don't wish to be before the public in any other capacity.”

Later, at the dinner party, our good fortune continued (except for the unavoidable absence of Mssrs. Howells and Dunne) and everyone was in good spirits. A sense of brotherhood and camaraderie informed the proceedings and a manifesto formally inaugurating the American movement to help free Russia, read by Mr. Robert Hunter, was very well received. At the head of the speakers' table, Mr. Twain sat between Ivan Narodny and Maximovich with Zinka to Maxim's right acting as translator. Twain and Gorki seemed to get along famously and when the American spoke, he praised both Maxim and his cause.

“It is a great honor for me and for all those who desire freedom for the Russian
people,” Twain said, “to welcome Maxim Gorki and his lovely wife Marya to our shores. Mr. Gorki's reputation as a man of experience and travail is well known to most of you and his status as a true man of the people and as an internationally recognized leader in Russian literature is beyond our poor words to enhance. Suffice it to say that I am proud to share the dais with a man of such impeccable qualities and that his cause is my cause as well.”

Zinka, leaning close to Maxim, who was dressed in a dark blue peasant blouse that highlighted his usual serious demeanor, quietly interpreted Mr. Twain's words and Gorki smiled as the American expressed his seemingly unqualified support for the American Free Russia movement.

“I am most emphatically in sympathy,” Mr. Twain went on to general approbation, “with the movement now on foot in Russia to make that country free. I am certain that it will be as successful as it deserves to be. Anybody whose ancestors were in this country when we were trying to free ourselves from oppression must sympathize with those who now are trying to do the same thing in Russia.”

When it was Maxim's turn to speak, Zinka doing the honors in English, he also began with an encomium for his fellow writer.

“I am very glad to meet Mark Twain,” Maxim said sincerely. “I knew him through his writings almost before I knew any other writer. When I was little more than a boy I dreamed of this meeting, hoped for this day – this evening, and it has been a happy meeting, happy beyond all expectation to me. Mark Twain's fame is so well established all the world over that I could not add anything to it by any words of mine.”

With the rapt crowd firmly in his corner, Maximovich then launched into his three-pronged fund raising assault: praise for his benefactors, self-deprecation for his own role, and stirring political rhetoric.

“I come to America,” Gorki said in his grave, emphatic way, “expecting to find true and warm sympathizers among the American people for my suffering countrymen, who are fighting so hard and bearing so bravely their martyrdom for freedom. Now is the time for the revolution. Now is the time for the overthrow of Czardom. Now! Now! But we need the sinews of war, the blood we will give ourselves. We need money, money. I come to you as a beggar that Russia may be free.”

With a bow to his audience, Gorki concluded to a chorus of cheers and loud applause. Zinka hugged his adopted father warmly and Marya Fyodorovna beamed at her husband proudly. Maxim allowed himself a small smile of victory.

After the dinner, we were given a reception at the West Ninety-third Street home of H. Gaylord Wilshire. It was a very open affair and innumerable people came and went, most congratulating Maxim on his successful speech, many promising financial support for our cause. Only the brazen appearance of the czarist spy who had tailed us over on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse cast a negative light on the wonderful evening and he was confronted by Mr. Wilshire and forced to make a hasty exit before his presence caused any real disruption in the reception. Maxim laughed the whole non-incident off and dismissed concerns about the presence of the spy with a casual flip of his hand.
      
A Drive in Manhattan – April 12

Late in the afternoon on the Thursday after our arrival in New York, following a full day of receiving guests, debating politics, and entertaining offers from several contentious newspapers and magazines for Maxim's literary impressions of New York City, America, Russia, and the world in general, after all that we took an automobile ride through Manhattan.

Maxim, Marya and I joined Mr. Joseph Mandelkern, the real estate magnate who had traveled in Russia the year before and made friends with Maximovich, in his large touring car and headed down Fifth Avenue towards Central Park. Along the way, with either Marya or myself interpreting for Mr. Mandelkern, Maxim kept up a steady banter about what he saw. In Central Park he was taken by the sight of children feeding squirrels while tiny sparrows hopped about fighting for leftover crumbs at the children's feet.

“Look there,” Gorki exclaimed happily, pointing to the park scene with as much
delight and wonder as a child.

“Ah, yes,” Mr. Mandelkern said, nodding at Maxim, “Mr. Gorki, you are a great lover of nature and animals as I recall.”

“Of course,” Maxim replied through Marya, his eyes sparkling with delight as he spied the little houses built in the park for the birds and squirrels. “Even the squirrels and the little gray birds seem to realize that they have the right to – what is it you say in your constitution?”

“To life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” said Mr. Mandelkern.

“To life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Maxim echoed in Russian.

After Central Park we stopped at the large monument to the victorious Union General and President, Ulysses S. Grant.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Gorki enthused, to the great surprise of a policeman who had courteously opened our car door and who understood, naturally, not one word Maxim exclaimed. “Thank you so much, you are very kind,” Gorki added, pumping the startled officer's hand, “very kind indeed.”

We all laughed at Maxim's exuberance. The officer lifted his hat and scratched the side of his head. He hardly seemed to know what to make of it all.

“This is a wonderful country,” Maxim had me tell Mr. Mandelkern, “surely the
Promised Land. I hope I shall live to see the day when things are this way in Russia.”

Later, as we drove along Riverside Drive, Mr. Mandelkern pointed out the homes of several very rich American capitalists.

“You know, Mr. Gorki,” he said, indicating the home of a man named Charles
Schwab, “there is as much money in the aggregate among the wealthy men of this city as in all of Russia.”

“I have no doubt,” Maxim said as I translated for him, “but I hope no part of it will be subscribed to the national loan the Russian government is trying so hard to raise. I think it would be unworthy of any true American to furnish money for the purchase of guns and bullets with which to murder peaceful, liberty-loving Russians who are only trying to gain their freedom.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Mandelkern agreed gravely, “indeed so.”
      
Mr. Twain and Mr. Howells Call – April 12

In the evening after our drive in Manhattan, Maxim received the two great American writers Mark Twain and William Dean Howells in our suite at the Hotel Belleclaire. For a good half hour the three men discussed literature in very animated but mutually respectful tones. Maximovich used the opportunity to praise, besides his renowned visitors, the British poet Byron, France's Gustave Flaubert, and Alexandre Dumas, pere.

As the meeting ended, Mr. Twain and Mr. Howells invited Maxim to attend a literary dinner to be held in about a fortnight. Gorki was very pleased to accept the invitation. I escorted the American gentlemen downstairs and as we were walking in the lobby towards the front door, we were approached by several newspapermen who had apparently been waiting for just such a chance to waylay the two well known men of letters.

“Mr. Twain, Mr. Twain,” a reporter I recognized from the Times called out, “were you visiting Mr. Gorki? What were you discussing?”

“We were guests of Mr. Gorki,” Twain confirmed, overwhelmed by the throng of a half dozen or more reporters crowding around him. Mr. Howells hung back from the crowd, content for the moment to let Mr. Twain field the men's questions. “And we merely discussed the state of literature in the world. That's all.”

“Nothing of the Russian revolution or of Mr. Gorki's mission here in America?” a
Herald man asked.

“No,” Twain answered simply.

“Do both you and Mr. Howells support Mr. Gorki's position with regard to how the revolution may be carried out,” Franklin Giddings of the Independent inquired.

“Well, I...," began Mr. Twain, then with a sparkle in his eyes called back to Mr. Howells who had remained some distance back from the group. “Come here, Howells. You look as if you have some information. Be a good fellow. Come back here and tell these gentlemen all about our visit with Mr. Gorki. Be sure, of course, to restrict your comments to such private talk as we had, so as to get it in the papers.”

The reporters, excepting Giddings, laughed at Mr. Twain's wit. Mr. Howells
reluctantly faced the journalists.

“All that we did,” he told them, in a soft voice that did not carry far, “was invite Mr. Gorki to attend a literary gathering in two weeks. Nothing more.”

“That's right,” Mr. Twain said, “we are going to offer Gorki the literary hospitality of the country. He is big enough for the honor. It is going to be a dinner with only authors and literary men present. We want to do it in proper style, and will have authors not only from New York, but from Chicago, and we may have some literary geniuses from Indiana, where I believe they breed ‘em.”

The reporters laughed again at the great American humorist and seemed well satisfied with his words. Mr. Twain corralled the reticent Mr. Howells and the two American literary giants each gave me a little bow and then hurried on through the Belleclaire's sumptuous lobby away from the lingering reporters and out into the New York spring evening.

A Quiet Day of Work, Spies, and Socialist Brothers – April 13

On Friday, Maxim awakened feeling poorly. His incipient consumption had flared up and he blamed it on the heavy social schedule he had maintained since our arrival in America. I was commissioned to reschedule his day with an eye towards rest and perhaps a bit of light literary work later on should he feel better. A reception planned for the evening by the Jewish Bund in the city was canceled and Maxim settled in for a quiet day.

Marya Fyodorovna fussed over Maximovich, waiting on him hand and foot, and by early afternoon he was feeling a good deal better. As a result of his improvement, Maxim allowed a few reporters in for a short interview. They were all agog with the news, hardly a surprise to us, that Maxim was being shadowed by a spy. They told us their papers would be filled with this news in tomorrow's, Saturday's, editions. Maxim was asked if he was aware of the agent.

“Of course,” he laughed. “It is a constant and expected part of my life.”

“Do you know why, specifically, that this man is following you and what he is after?” a reporter from the Times asked.

Maxim gave me a helpless look after I translated for him. We had been asked such questions so many times before that Maximovich didn't always want to deal with them.

“Nikolai Evgenievich,” he said to me, with a small gesture towards the reporters. I nodded my understanding.

“Gentlemen,” I addressed the newspapermen, “Mr. Gorki is tired and has asked me to respond to your questions.”

“You are, sir?” one of the reporters asked.

“Nikolai Evgenievich Burenin,” I answered, “Mr. Gorki's private secretary.”

“Then tell us, please, why the spy here in America? What does he want?”

“It is our belief,” I explained as best I could, “that the only good the Russian
government – and we are certain this man is an agent of the czar – could make of this activity is if they could prove, which they will never be able to do, that we are in your country to purchase arms for our revolution to use against the czar and his terror state.”

“You deny that that is your purpose here? To get arms for the violent overthrow of the Russian government?”

“Absolutely. If we did such a thing your country would be justified in preventing it and would have the legal right to expel us from these shores. But it will never happen because we are not here to engage in such criminal acts. We are here simply to elicit support, in the form of monetary donations, for our cause. Nothing more.”

My answer seemed to conclude the spy matter for the time being but the reporters still wanted to ask Maxim more questions and he consented to a final one – he thought.

“Mr. Gorki,” the Times man again presented the query for the others, “do you consider yourself to be in exile from Russia?”

“In no sense am I an exile,” Maxim spoke through me. “But while nominally I am at liberty to return to Russia at any time, I have no doubt that I would be arrested and cast into prison – much like your great union leaders in Idaho today – the moment I set foot on Russian soil, especially after my words of the last few days.”

“Will you not return to your homeland, then?” one of the other reporters pressed Maxim.

“When the right moment has come to return,” Maxim answered firmly, “we will go back and brave the danger. But the time has not yet come.”

“You believe, then, that the czar absolutely means to imprison you if you go home, Mr. Gorki?” the Times man inquired.

“Well as you know, gentlemen,” Maximovich joked, “I have already been the czar's guest and his next door neighbor, so to speak, when I was enjoying his hospitality in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul in our lovely capitol of St. Petersburg.”

While the reporters had a good chuckle over Maxim's cavalier attitude about his
imprisonment and the danger he faced daily as an enemy of the Russian state, Marya Fyodorovna whispered something into his ear.

"Ah, yes,” Maxim said, with some vigor, “gentlemen, my lovely wife has reminded me that I did in fact intend to communicate with my fellow socialists Mr. Haywood and Mr. Moyer who are the prisoners in Idaho I alluded to before. Would you care to hear the telegram I will send momentarily?”

The reporters said they did, but one of them – a World writer – seemed to want to question Marya about something first.

“Mrs. Gorki,” this man asked, pen poised on paper, “my readers are fascinated by your beauty and would very much like to know how long you and Mr. Gorki have been married?”

Marya looked at both Maxim and me before answering. “We have been together about three years,” she said, looking directly at the reporter.

“I thought it had been much longer,” the man said.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” I interrupted, “Maximovich, er, Mr. Gorki wanted to share the text of his telegram with you and then he needs to rest. Mr. Edwin Markham, the artist, will be calling on us shortly. Shall we, please?”

The reporters agreed, although the World man did so reluctantly. Maxim and Marya stood beside me as I read the telegram.

“Mr. Gorki has written his communiqué as follows,” I said. “To W.D. Haywood and Charles Moyer, County Jail, Caldwell, Idaho: ‘Greetings to you, my brother Socialists. Courage! The day of justice and deliverance for the oppressed of all the world is at hand. Ever fraternally yours.' Maxim Gorki.”

When I finished reading, Maximovich clapped happily and Marya mouthed her thanks behind a gloved hand. The reporters, perhaps a little surprised by the telegram, nonetheless respected our wishes and without further comment withdrew so that we might prepare for the remainder of the evening.
      
A Firestorm of Indignation – April 14

Saturday morning began pleasantly enough. Maxim woke up feeling stronger and so we breakfasted early at the hotel and afterwards went out for a leisurely drive in the mild New York spring air. We briefly cut through Central Park, which was near our hotel, and Maximovich again marveled at the squirrels coming up to people for food and at the many little houses inhabited by innumerable small, gray birds. At Fifty-fifth Street we cut over to Broadway and began to head back to our hotel. Though we chatted happily, the shrill cry of several boys hawking newspapers from a street corner caught our attention.

“We should get all the papers this morning, papa,” Zinka said from the rider's seat up front, “and see what they say of the triumphant mission of the great Gorki - writer, revolutionist, fundraiser nonpareil.”

“Zinka,” Marya Fyodorovna, sitting between Maxim and me in the backseat, laughed, “how you carry on. You should be more respectful of your father.”

“Oh, but I am,” Zinka protested, “I meant what I said. I meant no disrespect father.”

“Of course you didn't,” Maxim smiled at the boy, “I know it is just your youthful
exuberance. I felt it as much myself when I was your age.”

“Thank you, father,” Zinka said, with a bow of his head. “You have always been more kind to me than I deserve.”

“Now, now,” Gorki said, patting his adopted son on the arm just as the paperboys reached me in the back seat of the vehicle.

“Hey, mister,” one of the little urchins cried out, “buy the Times?”

“No, the Herald,” another broke in.

“The World, the World,” a third called out, thrusting his newspaper towards me.

“Yes,” I said, “and yes, and yes.”

“Yes?” the boys asked.

“Yes.”

Suddenly I was inundated with newspapers. I must have had a half dozen shoved at me at once. I tried to keep track of the foreign American coins as I paid for the papers, but was sure when the boys had finished depositing their newspapers on me and had raced back off to their street corners laughing and cheering that I had most certainly been taken advantage of. Maxim dismissed my concern with a laugh and a wave of a hand.

“Just like me as a boy in Nihzni-Novgorod,” he said. “I was just the same.”

Passing the papers around the car, we each – except for Maxim who could not read the English – took one and checked it for stories about Gorki. Only a moment after we began our reading, Marya let out a cry.

“Monstrous, terrible,” she said, shaking her head, “how could they? How could they do this to us?”

“What is it, my dear?” Maxim asked. Zinka and I looked at each other, then at Marya Fyodorovna. “What is it?” Gorki repeated.

“This horrible, horrible paper,” she said with disgust.

“Which one?” I asked, worried.

“What?” Gorki asked again.

“The World,” Marya said. “The filthy World. Listen to this headline: “Gorky Brings Actress Here As ‘Mme. Gorky.'”

“What's wrong with that?” Maxim wanted to know.

“They say in the story that I am your mistress,” Marya said unhappily, “and that you have abandoned your true wife and your children to the whims of fate back in Russia.”

“What trash,” Gorki said heatedly, “this is libel.”

“This is what we feared,” I said, “what Narodny and others warned us about.”

“What are you talking about?” Gorki demanded.

“That America was stricter in her attitudes about marriage and relationships than we are in Russia. We were told it might damage our cause if it was revealed.”

“Hogwash,” Gorki huffed.

“That's a fine thing to say, Nikolai Evgenievich,” Marya upbraided me.

“I don't mean it to hurt you, either of you,” I said, “but it was a risk we chose to take. Now it has apparently come back to hurt us.”

“Possibly it will just blow over?” Zinka suggested.

“We can hope so,” I said.

“Let's get back to the hotel,” Gorki said emphatically. “We can better judge our
position from there, if in fact this filth truly attaches itself to us and is no more than another bump in our long road to success and freedom.”

“I suppose,” Marya said, rather mildly considering the circumstances, “we will find out who are friends are now, won't we?”

“Yes, my dear,” Gorki said to her, “I'm certain that we will.”

Back at the Hotel Belleclaire, the reporters were waiting for us in the lobby like a pack of hungry wolves. We walked right by them, ignoring their clamoring requests for comment. Marya Fyodorovna strode by them to the lift, her head held high, her carriage proud and dignified. Maxim gave the reporters a crisp, military salute, then blocked off their questions with an upraised hand.

In our rooms on the ninth floor, we found H. Gaylord Wilshire and Joseph
Mandelkern anxiously awaiting our return. Their news was worse than that of the newspapers. We had been asked to leave the premises of the Hotel Belleclaire.

“Roblee, the manager,” Mr. Wilshire explained to us, “is intransigent. He feels the public outcry against Maxim and Mrs. Gorki will damage the hotel's reputation and therefore its business.”

“Business,” Gorki sniffed. “Let me talk to him about business.”

“No, Maxim,” Mr. Mandelkern advised, “it will do no good now. This Roblee has
publicly stated his intention to have you find other lodgings. He made a grand pronouncement to the press that he could not ‘tolerate the presence of persons whose character has been questioned' or some such drivel as that. He was very indignant and self-righteous.”

“We did our best to dissuade him,” Mr. Wilshire added. “He was quite adamant.”

“The bloody hypocrite,” Maxim said angrily. “How does a glorified innkeeper
presume to pass such judgments on other people. Who does he imagine himself to be, the arbiter of taste for the entire country?”

“Nevertheless,” Mr. Wilshire said, “we must move you out of here.”

“Outrageous,” Gorki shook his head, “a dirty, slimy scandal.”

“Please, Maxim,” Mr. Wilshire continued, “come stay with me and my wife. It will get you out of the public eye and avoid further negative publicity. At least for today.”

“No,” Maxim replied sternly, “I will not hide from this storm. Marya Fyodorovna is
my wife. No law devised or made by man could make her any more so. It is a base calumny to suggest otherwise. Never was a union more holy that that between she and I. I will prepare a statement that says so for this American press by later today. Mr. Mandelkern may I impose on you to help relocate us?”

“Well, yes,” Mr. Mandelkern said, looking to Mr. Wilshire, whose countenance had fallen with Maxim's rejection of his offer. “We can try the Lafayette-Brevoort downtown. Perhaps they will be less nice in their personal judgments.”

“Very well,” Maximovich said sharply, “let's get to it.”
      
Dispossessed – April 14

Word of Maxim's relationship with Marya Fyodorovna apparently moved through town nearly as fast as we did, because we had barely gotten inside the
Lafayette-Brevoort at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street before its manager, a Mr. Lablancha, let us know that we were not welcome in his establishment. Mr. Mandelkern again took our part and at least was able to wrest a concession from Lablancha to recommend us to the Rhinelander apartments across the street. This appeared to be a great boon and we thankfully took our belongings to the Rhinelander and were assigned two suites by the manager, Mr. Geraty, one on the sixth floor, the other on the eighth.

We had to settle in rather hurriedly as it was late in the day and we were expected at the Grand Central Palace for a socialist gathering and later were to attend a performance by the Russian Players at the Lyceum. Maxim nonetheless made sure that the American press was fully advised of his position with regard to our “predicament.”

“The publication of such a libel,” Maxim had said for the record, “is a dishonor to the American press. I am surprised that in a country famed for its love of fair play and reverence for women such a slander as this should have gained credence. I think that this dirt is conspired by friends of the current Russian government. I do not believe this disagreeable act could have come from the American people. And to my enemies I say: I am always strongest when I stand alone. The bitter cup contains the noblest wine of life, and I am not afraid to drain it. All is harmony in my soul. There is music in the air and an atmosphere of poetry all about.”

With Maxim's brave words ringing in our ears, we went out for our evening
engagements escorted by Joseph Mandelkern, Ivan Narodny, and several of our fellow Russian socialists. And at both the meeting at the Grand Central Palace and then when we entered the Lyceum later to see our marvelous Russian Players, the reception for Maxim, and especially so for Marya Fyodorovna, was loud, long, and warm. It was as if our friends – and we still had many – wanted to let all of the city, all of America, know that the moral judgments, the condemnation passed on Maxim and Marya were of the most narrow, illegitimate, and irrelevant kind. Gorki was a great writer, a great revolutionist, a great man; and the particular circumstances of his domestic life were of absolutely no importance in the grand scheme of things.

When we left the Lyceum, around midnight, the day's earlier nastiness had worn off to some degree, been muted by the pleasantness of our evening's activities. As we drove back to our apartments, then, we were in restored spirits and were still hopeful for our American fund-raising mission. The moment we entered the Rhinelander, however, our spirits and hope were bluntly dashed, as the new American reality we had been experiencing this day was waiting for us in the form of our luggage, which was piled neatly in the lobby of the apartment building.

“What is this?” Marya Fyodorovna demanded of Mr. Geraty, the Rhinelander's
manager.

“It is your party's luggage, madame,” the manager told her, coming around from
behind the lobby counter. “Or should I say mademoiselle?”

“You should say madame,” Marya snapped, talking to the man as if he were an
unmanageable child, “and I want to know why our things are out here in the lobby?”

“I am afraid, madame – and sir,” the manager explained coldly, turning to face
Maxim, who appeared suddenly very nervous when the man's sharp English was aimed at him – I translated for Maxim as rapidly as I could, “that given the current circumstances of your personal arrangements, Mrs. Kelly, the proprietor of these apartments, has insisted that you find lodgings elsewhere.”

“Oh, she has, has she?” Marya snarled at the manager. “You miserable shadow of a man, how dare you and your despicable proprietor judge mine and my husband's relationship? How dare you throw us out into the night with not so much as a notice of any kind? You and your establishment are the most onerous of all things in a city that I now see is inhabited only by the lowest of hypocritical, self-righteous worms. How dare you, indeed.”

“Nonetheless, madame, monsieur,” this Geraty responded haughtily, “I must insist that you and your party vacate the premises forthwith.”

“Forthwith my foot,” Marya Fyodorovna laughed harshly. “You hateful man.”

“Please, my dear,” Maxim intervened, taking her arm. “There's nothing left for
it. We must find another place.”

“But … Maxim,” she protested.

“Come,” he said softly to her. “We will find other lodgings.” Then to the manager, which I again interpreted: “Can you please get a car here for us, and for our things?”

“At once, sir,” the manager said.

“Here Nikolai Evgenievich,” Gorki spoke to me while leading Marya to my side, “stay with my wife for a moment please. And Zinka,” he addressed his son, “help the manager with the baggage and make sure everything is here.”

“Yes, father,” Zinka said.

I took Marya by the arm and led her to a couch where she sat down and held her head in her hands. I stood alongside, uselessly patting her shoulder. Maxim, seemingly oblivious to us all now, walked out the glass front door and stood on the sidewalk just beyond, his head held high, his shoulders thrust up and back in a manner suggesting pride and dignity even at a time of personal resignation. He waited there by himself until the car arrived for our luggage.
      
Reaction and Response – April 15

Despite being hurt by Maxim's rejection of the offer to stay at his home during our current lodging crisis, H. Gaylord Wilshire reappeared and found us a place to stay after we were removed from the Rhinelander and then also enabled us to find Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Martin who graciously offered us exile in their home on Staten Island. Mr. Wilshire seemed overjoyed to have reconciled with Maxim and he and Mr. Martin breakfasted with us at the Lafayette-Brevoort – the second hotel from which we had been ejected the day before – where Maxim grilled him, through me, about the public reaction to our situation.

“What about Twain and Howells?” was Gorki's first question to Mr. Wilshire. “Surely they defended me, did they not? And what of our fund-raising efforts, are they damaged beyond repair?”

“I wish, Maxim,” Mr. Wilshire said, “that I had better news, but you already know
most of what's been said in today's papers.”

“Yes, yes,” Maxim sighed, “right next to the story of the Negroes being burned in Missouri. Read it, Nikolai Evgenievich.”

“The Times says,” I read in English, “'Gorky and Actress Asked To Quit Hotel.' The Sun says, ‘the purity of our inns is threatened.'”

“Ridiculous, of course,” Mr. Wilshire said, “but as for Twain and Howells … well,
that's public record now also. Howells has taken the coward's path and refused any comment whatsoever, and Twain – the great ‘revolutionist' as he likes to color himself – now says that your ‘efficiency as a persuader is seriously impaired' perhaps even destroyed by your violation of certain ‘laws of conduct.'”

“The miserable bourgeois hack,” Maxim said bitterly.

“It is almost certain,” Mr. Wilshire went on, “that he and Howells will resign as your literary sponsors and cancel all the scheduled fundraisers we had planned.”

“You have more from the great Twain?” Maxim asked me as I pointed to yet another passage in the Times. “Read it to them and then translate for me.”

“It says here,” I began, “that Maximovich has violated custom, which is worse than violating the law because ‘law is only sand while custom is custom; it is built of brass, boiler iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.'”

“Absurd hyperbole,” Mr. Martin commented.

“A self-serving, cowardly, prude's way out,” Marya Fyodorovna added.

“Remarkable, isn't it?” Mr. Martin said, “that the gentlemen and ladies who supported revolution in Russia, bloody or otherwise, just two days ago are so appalled by a simple matrimonial irregularity that they will now deny Mr. Gorky, the renowned spokesman for that very same revolution, as if he had become a pariah.”

“What about the other cities we had planned to visit?” Maxim wanted to know.
“Chicago, Boston.”

“In all candor, Maxim,” Mr. Wilshire said, “they do not seem well disposed to
receiving you after this.”

“Perhaps we should return to Europe?” I suggested mildly.

“No,” Marya said firmly, “we came to America as much for Maximovich's health as for the bloody revolution. Perhaps there is some other place, somewhere where we can stay that is out of the way. Somewhere that Maxim could restore his health and continue his work and writing without the distractions of this fiasco.”

“My writing, or I should say my commitment to writing, is as responsible for our
predicament as anything else,” Maxim said sadly.

“I'm afraid you may be right,” Mr. Wilshire concurred, to our surprise. “It appears that when the other papers learned you had signed exclusively with the Hearst papers, their jealousy and ire was aroused. The newspaper business, especially here in New York is highly competitive – to use a clean term – and it was Hearst's rival, Mr. Pulitzer's World, that broke the relationship between yourself and Mrs. Gorki.”

“All the more reason to get away from here,” Marya said.

“If it wouldn't seem too forward of me,” Mr. Martin interjected, “my wife and I have a retreat home in the Catskill Mountains. We would be more than happy to have you as our guests there. We seldom get the opportunity to use it ourselves, so you would be undisturbed most of the time. I mean, of course, if such an arrangement would suit you.”

I leaned over and translated Mr. Martin's generous offer to Maxim. He looked at
Marya and she nodded her head. With a broad smile and a big sigh, Maximovich stood and came around the table to Mr. Martin.

“Thank you, my friend,” he said through me, pumping Mr. Martin's hand over and over and hugging him several times until the gentleman became embarrassed. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart. And thank you also,” Maxim added with a sweep of his arm that took in the rest of us at the table, “for all of us.”

Mr. Wilshire coughed a little cough, Maxim and Marya Fyodorovna exchanged a
warm embrace, and I signaled the waiter to bring another round of tea. It promised to be another lovely spring day in New York and we raised our cups to the hope of a better, perhaps more tranquil, future in America.
      
Aftermath – April to September, 1906

After the New York experience, our time in the Catskills was, in fact, frequently
idyllic. Maxim made a few more attempts at fundraising, going to Philadelphia and even making the delayed trip to Boston, but they were of little use; the New York debacle had left him a persona non-grata in post-Victorian American society – especially in mainstream literary circles.

Despite this, he was happy. His health improved and he began to work again, hard and steady. He read and wrote for hours on end and produced two of his greatest works: a play, Enemies and the working-class novel, Mother; and he carried on a correspondence with other writers and revolutionists that would have exhausted a far healthier man.

To release his disappointment and frustration over the failure of our mission to
America and to recoup some of the money he had hoped to raise, Maxim also wrote many articles and essays for pay in American newspapers and magazines in which he took American capitalistic excesses to task. He found it ironic and humorous that the very people he was criticizing so openly were willing, even happy, to pay for the right to publish that criticism. It was one of the aspects of democratic capitalism that Maxim found most fascinating and simultaneously repulsive.

Gorki, who was simultaneously embroiled in a battle with the publisher William Randolph Hearst – Hearst was still printing Maxim's essays but no longer paying for them – and increasingly concerned about Marya Fyodorovna's weakened health after the many harsh and personal attacks on her in the American papers, struck back with a vengeance.

In a strident essay entitled “City of the Yellow Devil,” Gorki called the people of New York “ignorant, barbaric.” When the article was printed in late summer, it generated yet another storm of virulent assaults on Maxim and the revolution. Describing New Yorkers as slaves to the yellow devil that is capitalist greed, Maxim's piece provoked more than twelve hundred objections from its readers and many cries for his deportation from the country.

Then, as our own economic and social prospects grew dimmer with each passing day, we were dealt the final blow when we learned the tragic news that Maxim's little daughter, Katia, had died during August in Russia. Gathering our things together, concluding our journalistic commitments, and saying farewell and thank you to those who had helped us during our troubled stay, we spent September in preparation for our departure.

At the first opportunity in early October, on a fine, crisp day, we left America, going first to Germany then on to the warm and healthy atmosphere of Capri. Our American adventure was over. Maxim himself had gone there a conquering hero, been reviled as an immoral anarchist, and then denied and ignored by the very people who had so ardently clamored for his presence in that young and enigmatic land. And though Maximovich's reputation as a great writer and international figure would only grow brighter over the years that followed – even in the United States – he was never to set foot on American soil again. Ever.

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J.B. Hogan is a freelance writer with a Ph.D. in Literature. Recent publications include "Time Pieces: Something Lost - A Night of Stars", Megaera, "The Circle: Ballad for L.," "Rice Paddies Lost," and "Aqui no se Rinde Nadie", Poesia, "Hurricane", The Square Table, "Out at Sea", Mobius, "Angels in the Ozarks", Mid-America Folklore Journal, and "Napalm Night", Viet Nam Generation.