Places: The Artamonov Business

Dromov Artamonov Business, The (droh-MOV). Russian town in which the Artamonov family establishes its business. Located on the Oka River in central Russia, not far from Nizhny Novgorod, it is based heavily upon many of the towns Gorky himself knew in his difficult youth, when he was working various menial jobs to survive while honing his literary powers. The novel begins not long after 1862, when Czar Alexander II abolished the institution of serfdom–the time when the Artamonov patriarch Ilya brings his family to Dromov, whose name means “sleepytown” in Russian.

A large, brusque man full of raw animal energy, the elder Ilya Artamonov makes his first appearance by barging in on a church service. Not long afterward, he barges in on the mayor just as presumptuously and announces his intention to marry his eldest son to the mayor’s daughter. Artamonov’s forwardness alienates many of the established figures of the town, and he runs roughshod over their various objections to build his factory. However, he is soon removed from the action, killed in an industrial accident at his factory, and the business is taken over by his son Peter. Yet Peter lacks his father’s essential characteristics, and from that point the success of the factory wavers and declines. Several times Peter comments upon the steady coarsening of the residents of Dromov, and ponders what relationship that has to the presence of his family’s business.

*Oka. River on which Dromov is located. One of the major rivers of central Russia, it is upon its banks that the elder Ilya Artamonov builds his linen factory, upon which the family fortune rests. Thus the factory is on the edge of the town of Dromov, but is never truly integrated with it, and in fact is often regarded with hostility by the more respectable citizens of the town.

Monastery. Russian Orthodox religious community in which Nikita becomes a monk. After the elder Artamonov’s hunchback son, Nikita, attempts to kill himself in a fit of despair, it is decided that he is more suited to the religious life and sent to the monastery on the outskirts of Dromov. There he finds a place, and is actually spoken well of by the abbot. However, when Nikita is old, he returns to his family, against the rule of his order, and attempts to evade the necessity of being taken back to the monastery to die and be buried.

Vorgorod (vorh-goh-rod). Nearby town from which police and other authorities come to Dromov. Several of the major characters visit it, but it is never actually seen in the narrative.

*Moscow. Traditional capital of Russia until 1712. Although it would not be Russia’s political capital again until 1918, when the Bolsheviks restored the seat of government to Moscow’s Kremlin, Moscow remained in many ways a cultural capital. Several of Gorky’s major characters visit the city repeatedly. Yakov complains after one such visit that middle-class Muscovites care nothing but to ape the manners of the nobility and are buying their betters’ cast-offs to further their ambitions.

*St. Petersburg. Political capital of Imperial Russia at the time in which the novel is set. In this northern city, built by orders of Czar Peter the Great to be his “window on the West,” the czar and his government rule. Although some of the characters of the novel write letters of protest to various government officials in St. Petersburg, or discuss political events going on there, it remains a distant city, never seen in the narrative.