Book Review: Life of a Useless Man

Title: The Life of a Useless Man 

Author: Maxim Gorki (pseudonym for Alexis Peshkov)

Translator: Moura Budberg

Date: 1917 (Russian), 1971 (English)

Publisher: Doubleday (1971)

ISBN: none

Length: 240 pages

Quote: "[E]veryone called the boy Old Man. The nickname suited him perfectly."

Yevgeny, the little orphan nicknamed Old Man, is a timid little fellow who thinks the world around him ought to be nicer than it is, but lacks the courage to seek the goodness he admires either inside or outside himself. When he witnesses a homicide, he has no particular reason to report it or person to report it to. Nevertheless, he becomes a political spy, and when he learns that his duty requires him to do harm to the living people he likes best, he feels despair.

Alexis Peshkov, who chose a pen name that can be translated as "The Most Bitter One," wrote from his own formative experience in the years before the Russian revolution. Spying, corruption, appeals to the Czar that didn't lead to the results they led people to expect, are the substance of his story. They were things he presumably fictionalized from personal experience. 

Neither Czarist Russian nor Soviet publishers were willing to publish what Budberg tells us was the full text of Gorki's novel. According to her this was the first complete edition, available only in countries that were still officially enemies to Gorki's country in the Cold War, only in a language foreign to its author. Gorki was greatly admired by his contemporaries but his work was censored.

How much can you trust a novel that purports to be the first complete edition of what someone no longer living wrote, that is published only in translation? Is this Gorki's novel, or Budberg's? I have no idea. 

As a novel it's a lively, picturesque, not exactly cheerful read. Its form can be classified as either a biography or a tragedy, depending on whether or not we accept Yevgeny as a tragic hero whose fatal flaw is weakness. How can a hero be weak? If you're looking for a novel where the protagonist overcomes his fatal flaw and lives happily ever elsewhere, this is not it. If you're willing to read about the events that led up to the revolution as seen through the eyes of a weak character, this book is for you.