The mother (Gorki)

The mother ( Russian Мать / Matj , English The Mother ) is a novel by Maxim Gorki . It first appeared in English translation in New York's Appleton Magazine in 1906/07 . The original Russian version came out in 1907. The novel is about the revolutionary struggle of the young worker Pawel and the proletarian awareness raising of his mother. The work is considered the first and one of the most important novels of Socialist Realism . The novel was filmed under the same title in 1926 by Vsevolod Pudovkin . Bertolt Brecht wrote a stage adaptation as part of his “Lehrstücke” , which was premiered in 1932.

content

In the first part, the hard life of the workers' wife Pelageja Nilovna is described, in which she has to suffer greatly from her violent husband. In the following chapters, the development of their son Pavel to become the local chairman of the social democratic party in the suburbs in which they live is described. The bearer of the Red Flag on May 1st also plays an important role, as the authorities usually send him into exile as a wheel leader. When Pawel is arrested because of a leaflet campaign, his mother continues his campaign so that he can be exonerated. When he was later finally brought to court, she continued his work until she was arrested, not without first being able to distribute a revolutionary leaflet by her son to the proletarian masses.

interpretation

In the novel, Gorky deals with the St. Petersburg Bloody Sunday , which initiated the Russian Revolution in 1905 , and calls for the struggle of the working class against tsarist rule and exploitation with the description of a simple worker woman who gains revolutionary consciousness through the activities and the arrest of her son .

Despite its importance as an early work of its style, the work is considered to be strongly agitatory and literarily rather weak, the artistic implementation as a "stepchild of didactic pathos". Nevertheless, due to its agitational attitude, the novel was a great success with the pre-revolutionary working class readership, and during the Soviet era it was regarded as the ultimate socialist model novel. The tedious, repetitive style and the exuberant hymns of praise with which the novel was honored by the party official literary criticism of the Soviet Union make it, according to the Slavist Armin Knigge, a "museum object" that is hardly read today.

literature

• Maxim Gorki: The mother. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1962.
• Gero von Wilpert (ed.), Lexicon of World Literature. Vol. 2: Main works of world literature in characteristics and brief interpretations, Alfred Kröner, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-520-80803X
• Reinhard Lauer : History of Russian Literature from 1700 to the Present , CH Beck, Munich 2008 ISBN 3406502679

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lauer, History of Russian Literature, p. 450
2. ^ Wilpert, Lexikon der Weltliteratur, Volume 2 (Works), p. 932
3. ↑ Armin Knigge: Gor'kij, Maksim - Mat ' . In: Munzinger Online / Kindlers Literatur Lexikon in 18 volumes, 3rd, completely revised edition 2009, (accessed on October 14, 2017).