MOTHER IBD

Sinopsi

Mother is a novel written by Maxim Gorky in 1906 about revolutionary factory workers. It was first published, in English, in AppletonâÇÖs Magazine in 1906, then in Russian in 1907.áThe work was translated into many languages, and was made into a number of films. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht and his collaborators based their 1932 play The Mother on this novel. Modern critics consider it possibly the least successful of GorkyâÇÖs novels, however, they call it GorkyâÇÖs most important novel written before 1917. áGorky wrote the novel on a trip to the United States in 1906. The political agenda behind the novel was clear. In 1905, after the defeat of RussiaâÇÖs first revolution, Gorky tried to raise the spirit of the proletarian movement by conveying the political agenda among the readers through his work. He was trying to raise spirit among the revolutionaries to battle the defeatist mood.áGorky was personally connected to the novel as it is based on real life events, revolving around Anna Zalomova and her son Pyotr Zalomov. Gorky, being a distant relative of Anna Zalomova who visited GorkyâÇÖs family when he was a child, had a deeper connection to the story. The event took place during a May Day demonstration in Sormovo in 1902. The shipbuilding town of Sormovo was near GorkyâÇÖs native town, Nizhny Novgorod, where after the arrest of Piotr Zalomov by tsarist police, his mother, Anna Zalomova followed him into revolutionary activity.áThe novel was first published by Appleton Magazine in the US and later by Ivan Ladyzhnikov Publishers in Germany. In Russia, it was published legally only after the February Revolution because of the Tsarist censorship. áMother is the only big novel of Gorky on the Russian revolutionary movement, however, of all his novels, it is possibly the least successful. Nevertheless, it remains the best known work of Gorky among the authorâÇÖs other novels. Modern critics consider it GorkyâÇÖs most important pre-revolutionary novel because of the vivid image of his 'God-Builder' ideas.áAfter GorkyâÇÖs return to the Soviet Union, the novel was declared by authorities as 'the first work of Socialist realism', and Gorky as its 'founder'. Nevertheless, Gorky called Mother 'one of his worst things'.áNumerous artistic flaws of Mother and GorkyâÇÖs other novels, written before 1910 have been widely described in reviews and critical essays by Korney Chukovsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Ilya Serman, Marylin Minto and many others. As Minto notes, NilovnaâÇÖs portrayal is very successful, but the other characters are one-dimensional. (wikipedia.org)