Song of the Falcon, Maxim Gorky
II
Laying in his crevice, Snake contemplated the death of Falcon, her love of flying. He lay a long time in the narrow crevice, staring into this puzzling air that teases the eyes of the misguided with silly dreams.
– What did she see there, in total emptiness, without bottom or edge or cover? The likes of her, in death as living, why do they dare confuse one’s soul with their passion for skyward flying? What do they see there? What do they hear? And might not I grasp all its meanings if I could fly there for just one moment?
Snake said – and did it! His body tightened, he fast uncoiled, cutting through the air, like a flash of lightning.
Those born to crawl – will never fly!.. Forgetting that, Snake hit the stones; not hurt, however, he thought, elated:
– So, that’s the beauty of skyward flying! It is – in falling!.. Birds are so foolish! Not knowing earth, depressed when grounded, they feel the calling to rise to heaven and seek life’s pleasures in empty vastness. It is but empty. It is filled with light but void of food and of protection for us the living. Why, then, was Falcon so bold and proud? Just to conceal the sheer madness of her desires and lack of fitness among the living. Birds are so foolish!.. But I am wiser! I shan’t be bullied by their tattles. I know now! I saw their heaven, the sky of flying. I launched into it, its depths I measured; endured falling, but did not shudder, and gained much confidence from this endeavor. Let those wretches who cannot love this solid ground live in delusion. I know the truth. I won’t be fooled. Of earth created – by earth I’m living.
And feeling proud, he coiled tightly, and was quite happy.
H/T: The USSR Tomorrow
Related:
Radical Books: Maxim Gorky, ‘Song of the Falcon’ (1894)
One admirer was V. I. Lenin, who met Gorky in 1902. In his essay ‘To the author of Song of the Falcon’ (1914), Lenin noted that ‘the workers have grown accustomed to regard Gorky as their own. They have always believed that his heart beats as warmly as theirs for the cause of the proletariat, and that he has dedicated his talent to the service of this cause’.
In the early 1910s, Lenin was exiled in Switzerland and Gorky on the island of Capri, but they were part of an international revolutionary community that included 25,000 Russians in Paris. Gorky’s friend Mikhail Pavlovich, a Russian Menshevik-turned-Bolshevik based in Paris from 1909 to 1914, associated closely with Indian revolutionaries in the city, especially Madame Bhikaiji Cama [Indian independence movement].
According to Pavlovich, when he read Gorky’s poem aloud to Cama, she shed a few tears and declared that ‘it was better than any revolutionary essay, any proclamation, better than Tolstoy and against British rule in India’. Pavlovich subsequently introduced Cama to Gorky. In the autumn of 1912, Gorky invited Cama to write an essay on the condition of women in India for a Russian publication. Although this never materialised, the exchange between Pavlovich, Gorky and Cama is evidence of the revolutionary nature of Gorky’s poem ‘Song of the Falcon’ beyond the admiration of Lenin. Indeed, with its call to rebel against oppression, be it Tsarist or imperialist, the poem resonated equally with Russian and Indian revolutionaries and illuminates the ways in which radical literature circulated within the international revolutionary community in the decades before the Russian Revolution.
Maxim Gorky, Selected Short Stories, 1982-1901
V. I. Lenin and A. M. Gorky, Letters, Reminiscences, Articles
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