TWENTY-SIX MEN AND A GIRL (Dvadtsat' shest' i odna)
by Maksim Gor'kii, 1899

The reader of "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" ("Dvadtsat' shest' i odna") is most likely to be struck initially by the descriptive power of Maksim Gor'kii's writing. The story's opening has an almost Dantean quality about it. The 26 men of the title labor in an underground bakery, said to be based on Semyonov's bakery in Kazan where Gor'kii worked for some time. The narrator is one of the 26 "animated machines." The basement in which they work is cut off from all natural light. Its windows are barred, its walls are filthy and moldy, and its ceiling wholly covered by cobwebs and soot. The men are fed on "putrid offal," and their repetitive work is the very archetype of alienated labor. A cauldron bubbles in the cellar, which is dominated by the oven furnace and its flames:

From morning till night logs burned in one section of the oven, and the red reflections of the flame quivered on one of the walls of the bakers as if in mute mockery of us. The huge oven resembled the deformed head of a fabled monster. It seemed to project from under the floor, its gaping jaws bristling with bright fire, to breathe scorching heat upon us, watching our endless labors through a pair of black, hollow vents above the mouth of the oven. These two deep hollows were like the eyes—the pitiless and dispassionate eyes—of a monster: they always stared at us with the same dark gaze, as if tired of watching slaves at work and expecting nothing human from them; and they hated the slaves with all the frigid contempt of wisdom.

In some respects the machine has more about it that is human than the men do, for categories essential to the retention of human dignity are blurred. If the 26 men are not yet in hell, they work daily before a veritable mouth of hell.

The men, however, find and hold on to a single speck of light—"a substitute for the sun"—in their darkness. This is Tanya, a 16-year-old housemaid who comes each morning for pretzels. She stands at the door of the basement, and the "dirty, ignorant deformed men" look up at her since the door is at the head of the steps leading into the basement. Symbolically placed on a pedestal, Tanya serves as a Petrarchan idealization, a reassurance, or at any rate a token, of the possibility that there might be goodness and meaning in the world, however unattainable. The men "love" Tanya since, as the narrator observes, they have nobody else to love. But their love is founded so completely upon an idealization that it can find no room for the actuality of Tanya's individuality. She becomes an idol rather than a person. They perform services for her such as chopping wood, but when one man asks her to repair his only shirt, the request is deemed absurd.

An ex-soldier, a devil-may-care seducer, arrives to work at the superior bakery next door. In response to his bravado and his tales, the pretzel makers offer their idol, Tanya, as a challenge: "We were terribly eager to test the fortitude of our idol: with great intensity we demonstrated to each other that our idol was a strong idol, that it would emerge victorious from this conflict." Tanya, of course, is ignorant of all this. Two weeks is agreed upon for the term of the test. For the men it is a time of heightened intensity, and they are more alive, more intelligent than they have ever been.

On the last day of the challenge the men watch the soldier take Tanya to the cellar. That the snow on the roofs is "covered with a dirty brown deposit" is enough to tell them, as they watch and wait, what has happened. As the two emerge from the cellar, the soldier appears unchanged, but Tanya has a new joy on her lips and in her eyes. "This we could not quietly accept," says the narrator. Their love for Tanya is not one that can allow them to see her gain happiness through the expression of her natural sexuality. The 26 men surround and insult her. Their idol has fallen; their lady has shown herself to be a human girl. Tanya walks away "upright, beautiful, and proud." The 26 men must return to their basement, this time deprived of the illusory comfort from their idealization of Tanya.

The story may be read as wholly nihilistic. But the conclusion allows for the possibility at least that the 26 men, robbed of their escape into idealism, may now come to a fuller understanding of the nature of their own existence. The excitement of the challenge and the intensity of their reaction give them a momentary experience of a kind of vitality otherwise denied to them. The reader may, however, feel that the tale affirms the vitality of the ex-soldier and Tanya's fulfillment of her own womanhood, her achievement of a confident selfhood beyond anything possible at the beginning. There is much that is ambiguous in Gor'kii's tale, which is resonant with possibilities and power and which is simultaneously a fable and a naturalistic narrative. In this simultaneity resides one of the many justifications for his subtitling the tale "Poem." There are reiterated images—of animals, religious ceremonials, lights, and heavenly bodies, for example—that give the narrative a densely worked poetic texture and that carry much of the meaning and emotional power. Though "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" is deeply embedded in the social conditions of the period in which it was composed—it was first published in the magazine Zhizn in 1899—it is in no sense limited by those circumstances, for it raises issues of a much wider nature.

—Glyn Pursglove