Maxim Gorky’s Gods

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Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) gave up God though his grandfather, grandmother, and Nanny gave him three different versions of God to choose from when he was a child.

Since Gorky lost his parents as a little boy, he was brought up by his maternal grandparents and an old woman whom Gorky called Nanny (a housemaid of sorts). These three old people presented the same Christian God to Gorky in their own unique ways.

Grandfather’s God was the traditional Catholic God, a moral terror with harsh laws, sin and punishment, and demanded absolute submission to authority. The old man was himself quite a tyrant. Each one of us shapes our God in our own image. Grandpa’s God was cruel, petty, bureaucratic, and vengeful, a God who could be used expediently to justify violence, hierarchy, and submission.

Gorky’s grandmother’s God was quite the opposite: loving, compassionate, and deeply intertwined with the beauty of the natural world. Grandma created God in her own image. Gorky loved his grandmother and her gentle spirit. But he soon abandoned her God. The world he witnessed as he grew up didn’t justify the existence of such a God. Looking at the horrific poverty and exploitation across Russia, Gorky became convinced that traditional religion was a “spiritual booze” that kept the working-class submissive with promises of a heavenly reward.

His Nanny’s God was easier to accept. This God was driven by whim, luck, wit, and absolute capriciousness. That God was just like any ordinary human being: quite silly. In his essay on Russian folktales, Gorky retells one of this Granny’s tales about God.

One night God was taking a walk down the village with Saint George when the moan of a woman in labour was heard. God peeped through the window despite Saint George’s warning against it. And He “got a wallop on his forehead from the midwife with a milk pot that was smashed into smithereens in spite of its thickness.” God became furious and cursed the newborn baby: “The person who is being born there shall have no happiness on earth.”

The baby grew up into a fine peasant and had a field with rich crops. When Saint George pointed it out to God, God asked Satan to destroy the field. The peasant then turned to cattle-breeding. God destroyed that too with terrible vengeance when the man was doing immensely well with his cattle. Then the man started an apiary on the advice of Saint George. Finally when he was doing very well, Saint George called God’s attention to it. But now God felt pity on the man and said, “Let him be. I won’t pester him anymore.”

“Glory be to you, Lord,” the man responded, “but I’m not long for this world, I’ve already wasted all my strength for nothing.”

Narrating this tale, Gorky writes: “According to Nanny’s tales it appeared that everything on earth was rather stupid, funny, knavish and not right. The judges were venal, they traded in truth like butchers in veal. The noblemen-landowners were cruel… the merchants were greedy…”

In such a world, morality cannot be expected from heaven; it must arise from human beings themselves. That was the lesson Gorky learnt from his Nanny’s tales. The noblest qualities of humanity are our own creation. We should not wait for God to establish justice or compassion. It is our responsibility to build those.

Gorky lost faith in God. But he knew that humanity could not survive on cold, scientific materialism alone. So, along with other intellectuals, he co-founded a philosophical movement called ‘God-Building.’ Instead of worshipping a supernatural creator in the heavens, humanity should worship its own collective potential, creativity, and goodness. The myths, rituals, and other religious things should be redirected towards building a socialist society. Gorky wrote a novel, A Confession, to illustrate these ideas, depicting a pilgrim who searches for God and ultimately finds ‘Him’ not in a church but in the collective, united power of the working people.

 

 

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The Simplest Guide to Religion

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