Back in high school, my teacher listed the step-by-step plot development of Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace, telling us this was a perfectly constructed short-story.
For years I have been looking for comparable perfection in a short-story. I found it! Maxim Gorky’s Twenty-Six Men and a Girl is simply breathtaking. As I reread over and over again I can almost not believe my eyes. Such stark social realism combined with the mythic, how art and beauty and love are at the very core of infusing our lives with depth and meaning; particularly love, just how much we as humans love one another, and how we hold on and sacrifice for love’s tender beauty.
The story begins: “There were six-and-twenty of us--six-and-twenty living machines in a damp, underground cellar, where from morning till night we kneaded dough and rolled it into kringels. Opposite the underground window of our cellar was a bricked area, green and moldy with moisture. The window was protected from outside with a close iron grating, and the light of the sun could not pierce through the window panes, covered as they were with flour dust.”
Maxim Gorky grew up an orphan and was sent out by his grandfather to work at the age of eight, such jobs as errand-boy, dishwasher, icon painter, kitchen help. Frequently beaten by his employers, nearly always hungry and ill clothed, as a teenager Gorky hit the road to live the life of a tramp. Reading over the details of his hardscrabble life, it strikes me Gorky the lowlife tramp wanted to write as much as a drowning man wants air. Thank goodness he succeeded!
Back to the story. The narrator tells us how music was a large part of men’s lives in the cellar, “Then, all six-and-twenty of us would be singing; our loud, harmonious song would fill the whole cellar, our voices would travel outside and beyond, striking, as it were, against the walls in moaning sobs and sighs, moving our hearts with soft, tantalizing ache, tearing open old wounds, and awakening longings.” So, so telling. When all appears to be dank and dismal, sublime music to the rescue.
And, then, alas, we read how there is a ray of beauty in their lives come from the outside world, “Tanya, a little maid-servant of sixteen. Every morning there peeped in through the glass door a rosy little face, with merry blue eyes; while a ringing, tender voice called out to us: "Little prisoners! Have you any knugels, please, for me?"
To say more would be to say too much. Gorky’s story is almost too good to be true. Available on-line:
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-sto...
Russian author Maxim Gorky, 1868-1936
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