About this ebook
THE BEST-LOVED NOVEL of One of the World’s Great Writers Mother, the immortal classic of Maxim Gorky, one of the world’s best-loved writers, is the story of the radicalization of an uneducated woman. From her dull peasant existence into active participation in her people’s struggle for justice. Through her work she frees herself from the cowed state into which she has been beaten, and her simple motherly concern for her son becomes a motherly concern for all oppressed. To read Mother is to undergo a great emotional experience. It is a novel of strength and power, a tribute to the dignity of the individual. As one well-known literary critic puts it: “and then I came on Mother, the first of Gorky I had ever seen, and much of what I had read became thin and tasteless by comparison. It was tapestry after cotton and burlap, living, breathing people after cardboard cutouts... it was the hope and zeal of all human beings.”
THE BEST-LOVED NOVEL of One of the World’s Great Writers Mother, the immortal classic of Maxim Gorky, one of the world’s best-loved writers, is the story of the radicalization of an uneducated woman. From her dull peasant existence into active participation in her people’s struggle for justice. T...
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4 reviews
GOUR JANA
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October 2, 2016
Mother-"mile stone of communism"
2 people found this review helpful
About the author
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, better known as Maxim (Maksim) Gorky, was born on March 28th, 1968. Until the recent collapse of the Soviet state, Gorky was officially viewed as the greatest Russian writer of the twentieth century---an evaluation far above the true measure of his nevertheless considerable talent. Proclaimed the founder of socialist realism, he significantly influenced many Soviet writers, as well as others in Europe and in the developing world, and his works were for decades part of the Soviet school curriculum. His formal education was minimal. From the age of 11, he fended for himself with a variety of jobs. Self-taught, he published his first story, "Makar Chudra," in 1892. His first collection, Sketches and Stories (1898), is a romantic celebration of society's strong outcasts---the hobos and the drifters---and helped to popularize such literary protagonists. Foma Gordeyev (1899), Gorky's first novel, depicts generational conflict within the Russian bourgeoisie. A popular public figure on the left, Gorky was often in trouble with the tsarist government. During the 1900s, he was the central figure in the Znanie publishing house, which produced realist prose with a social conscience. Some of his own works were extremely successful. The play The Lower Depths (1902), set in a poorhouse and a strong indictment of social injustice, was not only a staple of Soviet theater but also influential in the United States. Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh was influenced by it. The propagandistic, extraordinarily influential novel Mother (1906) presents an iconic working-class woman who is transformed into a saint of the Revolution; its optimism in the ultimate triumph of the cause made it a prototype of socialist-realist fiction. During the years prior to 1917, Gorky published a number of autobiographical stories: All Over Russia (1912--18) (also Through Russia) and his memoirs; My Childhood (1913--14), My Apprenticeship (1915--16), and My Universities (1923). This trilogy shows his art at its best and includes some very lively reminiscences of such writers as Tolstoy and Chekhov. Although a Bolshevik party member since 1905, Gorky strongly criticized the new regime after the October Revolution: His collected articles from 1917-18, Untimely Thoughts, remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until recently. A cultural activist, he helped to save the lives of many writers, artists, and scholars during the cold and hungry years of the civil war. In 1921 he left Russia for Italy but returned permanently a decade later, recognized as the grand old man of Soviet literature. He then worked for Stalin's economic policies and presided over the institutionalization of socialist realism. At his death, he left unfinished a major novel of considerable interest, The Life of Klim Samgin, which he had been working on since 1925.
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, better known as Maxim (Maksim) Gorky, was born on March 28th, 1968. Until the recent collapse of the Soviet state, Gorky was officially viewed as the greatest Russian writer of the twentieth century---an evaluation far above the true measure of his nevertheless consider...
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