Tomas O'Crohan, an Irish-language writer, and The Childhood by Maxim Gorky

This paper investigates the influence of Russian realist prose on Irish prose literature of the late nineteenth century by examining the case of Tomas О Criomhthain (Tomas O'Crohan, 1856-1937), one of the major Irish-language writers of the early twentieth century and the author of one of the most influential 'Gaeltacht memoirs', autobiographical accounts of peasant life in Irish-speaking districts. I argue that Tomas О Criomhthain's memoir An t-Oileanach (The Islandman, 1928) was directly inspired by his reading of Maxim Gorky's memoir of growing up in provincial Russia, Detstvo (Childhood, 1913). О Criomhthain spent his entire life on the main island (the Great Blasket) of a rocky, windswept archipelago off Ireland's south-west coast, earning a living from fishing and subsistence farming. Despite the extreme poverty and isolation endured by the island community, at the turn of the twentieth century they were visited and intensively studied by international academics and visitors from the Irish mainland. This was because the Blasket Islanders, by reason of their isolation, were reputed to speak the purest Irish. Several islanders, including О Criomhthain, were singled out by visitors because of their storytelling gifts and intellectual ability. Influenced by these visitors, О Criomhthain became literate in both English and Irish; in the early 1920s, he read Gorky, Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890) and other literary accounts of peasant life which encouraged him to record his own memories. О Criomhthain's literary production is an isolated instance within a campaign by Irish nationalist ideologues and writers, including Padraig Pearse, Padraic О Conaire, and Daniel Corkery, to introduce Russian realist classics to Irish audiences. The Irish Literary Revival, which lasted from the 1880s to the 1920s, combined ambition for political autonomy from Britain with the desire to create an independent national literature. Organisations such as the Gaelic League (founded 1893) promoted the regular use of spoken and written Irish as well as traditional Irish sports, dance, and music. The increasing availability of Russian writing in translation from the 1880s onwards encouraged the choice of Russian literature, which had successfully defined itself despite the interventions of the authoritarian Tsarist government, as a cultural pattern for Irish literary nationalism. Other signs of Russian influence on Irish prose were the prominence of social realism with heroes chosen from the rural peasantry or urban working classes, as in Corkery's short fiction.

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