Is this only a social realist agitprop novel? An attempt to re-read “Mother” by Maxim Gorky
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31261/SSP.2020.16.10Keywords:
1905 revolution, Maxim Gorky, God-Building, utopias in literatureAbstract
My paper is a proposal for a non-standard reading of Mother by Maxim Gorky, often perceived as a piece of propaganda with low artistic value, a novel overfilling with ideology, subjugated to the doctrine of social realism. I would like to step beyond these stereotypes and show some contexts that have hardly been identified in the Polish reception of Russian literature from the early 20th century. I distinguish three main issues in the content of the novel: the image of the mother (novel about a mother), socialism as the “new religion” and the utopia of the “new man”. I see the current of Marxism called God-Building as a very important ideological context. I refer to research by Polish and Russian literary scholars and to my own findings.
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