On Reading Gorky

Before Maxim Gorky discovered books, he had already learned the language of hunger, cruelty, and loss. Orphaned at the age of 11, he was raised in an extremely abusive and impoverished household by his maternal grandparents. He started working at the age of 8 – as dishwasher, longshoreman, baker’s apprentice, and railway porter. He lived among ‘social dregs’ like thieves, tramps, and crude labourers.

The discovery of books and reading changed his life radically. Soon he learnt that books could transform human beings. They open the doors to a world of magic. They reveal the human potential for goodness and greatness. “Books taught me to believe in man,” as Gorky wrote in one of his essays (which I read this morning just by chance).

He once wrote that books enlarged his mind and heart. That is perhaps the finest description of what great literature does. It stretches our imagination beyond the narrow boundaries of our own experience. We begin to see lives we have never lived, cultures we have never known, and emotions we have never felt. We become larger than ourselves.

I read this morning about how a book given by Gorky to read altered a very ordinary, one-eyed cobbler into a revolutionary. This man approached Gorky one day and said that he wanted a book that could help him make sense of life. Earlier he had approached a mathematics professor with the same request. Soon he learnt that mathematics had little to do with real life.

Gorky gave him a book titled World and Social Evolution by Dreyfus. Five days later, he returned with a question: “May I draw the conclusion from this here book that there is no God?”

The man who had read only the scriptures and holy books was truly enlightened by Dreyfus. “All dissent is essentially against the Holy Scripture,” he asserted. “All the laws of submission come from the Scriptures, while the laws of freedom all come from science, that is to say, from the mind of man.”

That man went on to become a rebel, a revolutionary, and was killed in 1907 after the failure of the first Russian Revolution in 1905.

Books can be dangerous.

Books are the gospel of the human spirit, Gorky writes in the essay I mentioned above, which is titled ‘How I Studied.’ Literature is humanity’s real scripture, in Gorky’s view. Literature is written not by any divine authority sitting up there somewhere but by men and women who wrestle with life constantly.

Every great novel, poem, and play carries the accumulated joys, sorrows, failures, dreams, and struggles of countless human beings. They are records of the human soul trying to grow beyond its limitations.

Books preserve the anguish of those who refused to stop asking questions. They offer us the courage of those who refused to surrender. They carry the wisdom painfully earned through generations. That’s why literature is the true gospel of humanity.

“Each book was a rung in my ascent from the brutish to the human,” Gorky writes [same essay]. Literature introduces us to empathy. It teaches us to imagine another person’s suffering. It challenges our prejudices. It asks us uncomfortable questions.

And we need all of that more than ever now, in our day of government-sponsored falsehoods everywhere.

Both E-book and Paperback editions

of my book

The Simplest Guide to Religion 

are available now. 

Ebook: Here

Paperback: Here