The Lower Depths

by Maxim Gorky

  DOVER · THRIFT · EDITIONS

  The Lower Depths

  MAXIM GORKY

  TRANSLATED BY

  JENNIE COVAN

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  Mineola, New York

  DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

  GENERAL EDITOR: PAUL NEGRI

  EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JULIE NORD

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2000 by Dover Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Theatrical Rights

  This Dover Thrift Edition may be used in its entirety, in adaptation, or in any other way for theatrical productions, professional and amateur, in the United States, without fee, permission, or acknowledgment. (This may not apply outside of the United States, as copyright conditions may vary.)

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition, first published in 2000, and reissued in 2016, is an unabridged republication of the Jennie Covan translation of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, first published in 1923 by Brentano’s Publishers, New York. A new introductory Note has been specially prepared for this edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gorky, Maksim, 1868-1936

  [Na dne. English]

  The lower depths / Maxim Gorky ; translated by Jennie Covan.

  p. cm. – (Dover thrift editions)

  Originally published: New York : Brentano’s, 1923.

  eISBN-13: 978-0-486-15925-6

  I. Covan, Jenny.II. Title.III. Series.

  PG3463.N2 C6 2000

  891.72’3–dc21

  99-054723

  Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

  41115X02 2016

  www.doverpublications.com

  Note

  MAXIM GORKY was born Alexey Maximovich Peshkov in 1868 in Nizhni-Novgorod. At the age of 24, upon the publication of his first story, he adopted the name “Gorky,” which means “bitter” (his hometown later adopted it as well, in his honor). His early life explains his choice: When Gorky was just five his father died and he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. His grandmother was kind and jovial, but his grandfather was a harsh, often brutal man at the low point in his own fortunes and therefore at his angriest while Gorky lived with him. The boy’s own parents had never hit him, but the first beating he received from his grandfather left him unconscious, and then bed-ridden for weeks. Thereafter, beatings and displays of egregious cruelty were commonplace in his life, as they were for his grandmother, his aunts, his cousins—nearly everyone he knew. His male relatives were usually the perpetrators, and often they were violent amongst themselves as well. And so he was plunged into a world of desperation and pain in which the strong compulsively brutalized the weak and the weak simply clung to their lives by any sad means they knew.

  Gorky attended school briefly, but preferred to spend his time on the streets with his friends. By the age of eleven, he was already an experienced thief. His grandfather, now thoroughly destitute, sent Gorky out to work and from then on the boy was to move from job to job—errand boy, dish washer, printer’s devil—experiencing what clearly seemed every form of confinement, exploitation, and degradation imaginable. He was frequently beaten, underfed, ill clothed. The ordeal very nearly finished him, yet along the way he was learning more and more about the characters and the predicaments that would make his writings so powerful and ground-breaking. He was also discovering the world of books, which became his great passion: “Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison. . . . Each book was a rung in my ascent from the brutish to the human, towards an understanding of a better life and a thirst after that life.” Still, a life of unremitting misery stretched before him and there were no easy ways out. When he was nineteen his despair drove him to an unsuccessful suicide attempt, which left a bullet in his lung that eventually hastened his 1936 death by tuberculosis.

  Still, Gorky continued to read, study and write, and in 1892, having truly earned his pseudonym, he began to publish the stories, plays and journalism that were to turn him into the literary hero of his generation. His tales of hopeless lives and his jaded, world-weary characters were passionately embraced by his peers, people who had never before seen their existence validated in letters. Stefan Zweig wrote, “The effect of Gorky’s first works was indescribably portentous, like an upheaval, an alarm, a wrench, a breaking . . . a different Russia from that of the past had here spoken for the first time, [and] this voice came from the gigantic, anguished breast of a whole people.”

  Gorky’s rise to literary fame became inextricably linked to the liberation of the Russian people from the imperial order. In time, his was the body of work that came to define Socialist Realism, while the role of “father of Socialist Realism” came to define Gorky in a way that was not always accurate or to his advantage. Although he was always committed to political struggle and revolutionary inclinations, and although he was a life-long friend of Lenin’s, he frequently attacked the “party line”—to Lenin’s great distress. In fact, Gorky often published his arguments against Lenin’s programs, so that in time, Lenin saw fit to shut down Gorky’s newspaper and eventually all of his dissenting publications were expunged from “official” catalogues of his works.

  The Lower Depths, written in 1902 and produced that same year at the Moscow Art Theatre under the direction of Stanislavsky, was an enormous and immediate success. Even before its premiere, the great dramatist Chekhov had written Gorky to say, “I have read your play. It is new and unmistakably fine. The second act is . . . the best, the strongest, and when I was reading it . . . I almost danced with joy.” It is reported that Gorky received 22 curtain calls at the opening, and the reviews were all praise.

  Infinite pains were taken by both director and cast to render all the details of life “At the Bottom” (which is a more precise English equivalent of Gorky’s title, Na dne) as realistically as possible, and to determine the manner in which Gorky’s speeches should be delivered: “Our natures were alien to Gorky’s wide gestures, to his revelatory thoughts, to his sharp aphorisms, to his destructive flights, and to his peculiar pathos,” Stanislavsky later wrote. “One must be able to say Gorky’s words so that the phrases live and resound. The instructive and propagandistic speeches of Gorky . . . must be pronounced simply and with sincere enthusiasm, without any false and highfalutin theatricality. Otherwise a serious play will become a mere melodrama.” This realism was integral to the Moscow Art Theatre’s mission. Oliver M. Sayler, editor of Moscow Art Theatre Plays (1923), wrote

  In “The Lower Depths” more than in any other single play throughout its history, the Moscow Art Theatre . . . most emphatically justifies its artistic faith in spiritual or psychological realism as a dramatic means of expression. . . . Less than any play I know, is it possible to imagine its potential effect in the theatre from a reading of its printed lines. . . . “The Lower Depths” is not so much a matter of utterable line and recountable gesture as it is of the intangible flow of human souls in endlessly shifting contact with one another. Awkward but eloquent pauses and emphases, the scarcely perceptible stress or dulling of word or gesture, the nuances and the shadings of which life is mostly made and by which it reveals its meaning—these . . . are the incalculable and unrecorded channels through which “The Lower Depths” becomes articulate . . .

  For decades, this drama was held up as an indictment of the tsarist regime and its immense popularity was partially due to that assessment of its intent. Later scholarship has pointed out, however, that nothing in the play itself supports this view, that the bleak situation of the play’s characters is presented as resulting from their own failures or some malev
olent trick of fate. Indeed, Gorky’s most urgent concern seems to be, not who’s to blame for the misery of the lost souls who inhabit Kostilyoff’s night lodging (the play’s setting), but whether and how any of them might find release.

  It is a concern that also drives Gorky’s three-volume autobiography, and the characters that populate that work often seem to find their voices in those of The Lower Depths. Gorky’s grandmother, aunts, and mother—all the women he knew who bore their husbands’ violence in silence—seem to speak through Anna, whose husband’s beatings have left her so weak and ill that her only hope is death. Luka the pilgrim recalls another side of Gorky’s grandmother: the ever-faithful, purehearted side, full of affection, hope, and enchanting stories which provided a constant escape valve for both her and young Gorky. Nastya, the young prostitute who finds her escape in sentimental romance novels, reminds us of the adolescent Gorky, forced into work he found sordid and demeaning yet clinging to the dream-like worlds he was discovering in books. Pepel, the young thief in love, resembles the preadolescent Gorky who fell into a life of petty crime partly out of resentment and anger and partly out of ignorance—simply not knowing any other way to go. Each of these characters, and Gorky himself, can be seen as struggling to discover anything at all—God? Love? Work? Learning?—that is worthy of their faith.

  Gorky once wrote “I am a very dubious Marxist . . . I do not have any faith in the intelligence of the masses in general.” As a child, he had found solace in his grandmother’s religion. Later in life, though no longer a Christian, he sought continually after a connection to something mystical, to some type of faith that would recapture the sense of hope that the church had once offered. As he was to write many times, what Gorky did believe in was “Man,” and his life and work were dedicated to plumbing the truth about humanity—What is our purpose? What are we, finally, longing for? Why do we hang on to life, despite its pain?

  Gorky’s answer seems to lie, at least in part, in Satine’s Act IV speech:

  Every one . . . lives in the hope of something better. That’s why we must respect each and every human being! How do we know who he is, why he was born, and what he is capable of accomplishing? Perhaps his coming into the world will prove to be our good fortune . . . Especially must we respect little children! Children—need freedom! Don’t interfere with their lives! Respect children!

  This plea surely speaks directly out of Gorky’s own childhood. It is an injunction directed towards all of humanity to protect other children from witnessing, from living, the sort of hopeless existence he endured and then faithfully captured in The Lower Depths; his brave effort, perhaps, to send such tales into permanent exile, from the realm of human experience to the realm of the theater.

  The Lower Depths

  Contents

  Act I

  Act II

  Act III

  Act IV

  Cast of Characters

  MIKHAIL IVANOFF KOSTILYOFF, keeper of a night lodging.

  VASSILISA KARPOVNA, his wife.

  NATASHA, her sister.

  MIEDVIEDIEFF her uncle a policeman.

  VASKA PEPEL, a young thief.

  ANDREI MITRITCH KLESHTCH, a locksmith.

  ANNA, his wife.

  NASTYA, a street-walker.

  KVASHNYA, a vendor of meat-pies.

  BUBNOFF, a cap-maker.

  THE BARON.

  SATINE.

  THE ACTOR.

  LUKA, a pilgrim.

  ALYOSHKA, a shoemaker.

  NIGHT LODGERS, TRAMPS AND OTHERS.

  The action takes place in a night lodging and in

  “The Waste” an area in its rear.

  Act I

  A cellar resembling a cave. The ceiling, which merges into stone walls, is low and grimy, and the plaster and paint are peeling off. There is a window, high up on the right wall, from which comes the light. The right corner, which constitutes Pepel’s room, is partitioned off by thin boards. Close to the comer of this room is Bubnoff’s wooden bunk. In the left corner stands a large Russian stove. In the stone wall, left, is a door leading to the kitchen where live Kvashnya, the Baron, and Nastya. Against the wall, between the stove and the door, is a large bed covered with dirty chintz. Bunks line the walls. In the foreground, by the left wall, is a block of wood with a vise and a small anvil fastened to it, and another smaller block of wood somewhat further towards the back. Kleshtch is seated on the smaller block, trying keys into old locks. At his feet are two large bundles of various keys, wired together, also a battered tin samovar, a hammer, and pincers. In the centre are a large table, two benches, and a stool, all of which are of dirty, unpainted wood. Behind the table Kvashnya is busying herself with the samovar. The Baron sits chewing a piece of black bread, and Nastya occupies the stool, leans her elbows on the table, and reads a tattered book. In the bed, behind curtains, Anna lies coughing. Bubnoff is seated on his bunk, attempting to shape a pair of old trousers with the help of an ancient hat shape, which he holds between his knees. Scattered about him are pieces of buckram, oilcloth, and rags. Satine, just awakened, lies in his bunk, grunting. On top of the stove, the Actor, invisible to the audience, tosses about and coughs.

  It is an early spring morning.

  THE BARON. And then?

  KVASHNYA. No, my dear, said I, keep away from me with such proposals. I’ve been through it all, you see—and not for a hundred baked lobsters would I marry again!

  BUBNOFF [to SATINE]. What are you grunting about? [SATINE keeps on grunting]

  KVASHNYA. Why should I, said I, a free woman, my own mistress, enter my name into somebody else’s passport and sell myself into slavery—no! Why—I wouldn’t marry a man even if he were an American prince!

  KLESHTCH. You lie!

  KVASHNYA. Wha-at?

  KLESHTCH. You lie! You’re going to marry Abramka. . . .

  THE BARON [snatching the book out of NASTYA’s hand and reading the title]. “Fatal Love” . . . [Laughs]

  NASTYA [stretching out her hand]. Give it back—give it back! Stop fooling!

  [THE BARON looks at her and waves the book in the air.]

  KVASHNYA [to KLESHTCH]. You crimson goat, you—calling me a liar! How dare you be so rude to me?

  THE BARON [hitting NASTYA on the head with the book]. Nastya, you little fool!

  NASTYA [reaching for the book]. Give it back!

  KLESHTCH. Oh—what a great lady . . . but you’ll marry Abramka just the same—that’s all you’re waiting for . . .

  KVASHNYA. Sure! Anything else? You nearly beat your wife to death!

  KLESHTCH. Shut up, you old bitch! It’s none of your business!

  KVASHNYA. Ho-ho! can’t stand the truth, can you?

  THE BARON. They’re off again! Nastya, where are you?

  NASTYA [without lifting her head]. Hey—go away!

  ANNA [putting her head through the curtains]. The day has started. For God’s sake, don’t row!

  KLESHTCH. Whining again!

  ANNA. Every blessed day . . . let me die in peace, can’t you?

  BUBNOFF. Noise won’t keep you from dying.

  KVASHNYA [walking up to ANNA]. Little mother, how did you ever manage to live with this wretch?

  ANNA. Leave me alone—get away from me. . . .

  KVASHNYA. Well, well! You poor soul . . . how’s the pain in the chest—any better?

  THE BARON. Kvashnya! Time to go to market. . . .

  KVASHNYA. We’ll go presently. [To ANNA] Like some hot dumplings?

  ANNA. No, thanks. Why should I eat?

  KVASHNYA. You must eat. Hot food—good for you! I’ll leave you some in a cup. Eat them when you feel like it. Come on, sir! [To KLESHTCH] You evil spirit! [Goes into kitchen]

  ANNA [coughing]. Lord, Lord . . .

  THE BARON [painfully pushing forward NASTYA,s head]. Throw it away—little fool!

  NASTYA [muttering]. Leave me alone—I don’t bother you . . .

  [THE BARON follows KVASHNYA, whistling.]

&nbs
p; SATINE [sitting up in his bunk]. Who beat me up yesterday?

  BUBNOFF. Does it make any difference who?

  SATINE. Suppose they did—but why did they?

  BUBNOFF. Were you playing cards?

  SATINE. Yes!

  BUBNOFF. That’s why they beat you.

  SATINE. Scoundrels!

  THE ACTOR [raising his head from the top of the stove]. One of these days they’ll beat you to death!

  SATINE. You’re a jackass!

  THE ACTOR. Why?

  SATINE. Because a man can die only once!

  THE ACTOR [after a silence]. I don’t understand—

  KLESHTCH. Say! You crawl from that stove—and start cleaning house! Don’t play the delicate primrose!

  THE ACTOR. None of your business!

  KLESHTCH. Wait till Vassilisa comes—she’ll show you whose business it is!

  THE ACTOR. To hell with Vassilisa! To-day is the Baron’s turn to clean. . . . Baron!

  [THE BARON comes from the kitchen.]

  THE BARON. I’ve no time to clean . . . I’m going to market with Kvashnya.

  THE ACTOR. That doesn’t concern me. Go to the gallows if you like. It’s your turn to sweep the floor just the same—I’m not going to do other people’s work . . .

  THE BARON. Go to blazes! Nastya will do it. Hey there—fatal love! Wake up! [Takes the book away from NASTYA]

  NASTYA [getting up]. What do you want? Give it back to me! You scoundrel! And that’s a nobleman for you!

  THE BARON [returning the book to her]. Nastya! Sweep the floor for me—will you?

  NASTYA [goes to kitchen]. Not so’s you’ll notice it!

  KVASHNYA [to THE BARON through kitchen door]. Come on—you! They don’t need you! Actor! You were asked to do it, and now you go ahead and attend to it—it won’t kill you . . .

  THE ACTOR. It’s always I . . . I don’t understand why. . . .