Questions for the exam in Russian literature
realistic stories by Gorky.
At the end of the 19th century, a new hero appears in Russian literature - a tramp, a person rejected by society, an outcast whose fate interests no one. Such a hero is portrayed in the realistic stories of M. Gorky. The artist paints the image of a tramp ambiguously; he tries to identify the reason why the hero sank to the bottom of society. The writer is interested in the inner world, feelings, experiences of a tramp, the influence of social status on his worldview. Gorky examines and explores the hero’s state of disagreement with himself, the reason for his certain behavior.
One of M. Gorky’s early realistic works is the story “Konovalov,” which tells the story of the fate of the tramp Alexander Ivanovich Konovalov. The main character was an excellent baker, truly talented in his craft, but due to one special trait of his character, namely melancholy, a feeling of melancholy, such that “it is impossible to live at that time”, and “everything in the world ... becomes disgusting” , and the hero “becomes a burden to himself,” he gives up everything and goes to wander. Later Konovalov returns, and here his first meeting takes place with the narrator, who is the baker’s “helper”. The author ambiguously portrays his hero, starting from the portrait characteristics and ending with the thoughts and actions of the staff.
“In his costume he was a typical tramp, in his face he was a Slav” - this is how Konovalov appears before us for the first time. Gorky compares him to a hero and at the same time writes that Konovalov still remained a child in his perception of the world.
“You are a child, Sasha; you don’t understand anything,” Vera said to the hero, “... a big man with the clear eyes of a child” - this is how the narrator saw him, that is, he retained sincerity, gullibility, the ability to see good in everything, faith in goodness, in people and in their morality.
Konovalov is a tramp, and, it would seem, he should feel offended, deprived, should blame for all his misfortunes, and therefore be hostile to the society that expelled him, but this does not happen, on the contrary, the main character, to the great surprise of the narrator, “ with such a light spirit he singles himself out from life into the category of people who are not needed for it and therefore must be eradicated,” he believed that “only he himself was to blame for all the trouble in his personal life.” Such reflections testify to the hero’s ability for introspection, which sets him apart from the general mass of tramps “for a separate article.” Konovalov is also characterized by a different attitude towards nature, women, and enlightenment (education) than many other representatives of his social class. So, for example, the hero talked about a merchant’s wife with whom he broke up: “.., the tramp talks about the woman in a skeptical tone, with a lot of details that humiliate her, ... but a sad and soft tone (Konovalov) when remembering the “merchant’s wife” - the tone is exceptional.”
The hero of Gorky's story has a great interest in books and often asks the narrator to read to him. Konovalov sincerely believes in the events taking place in the book, sometimes even feeling like he is a participant in them.
Throughout the story, the narrator and the main character discuss many topics related to tramping, thereby revealing their points of view regarding them. Thus, we can say that Konovalov is capable of philosophical reflection. The character in the story is not limited and can see the true reason for the tramp’s certain behavior and the formation of his special thinking. Konovalov talks about the origin of the tramp's tendency to lie, deceive, invent various stories, and exaggerate any events that happened to him. The fact is that it is easier to live this way, “if a person has not had anything good in his life, he will not harm anyone if he invents some kind of fairy tale for himself, and even begins to tell it as a fact. He talks... and believes himself,...well, he’s pleased.”
It would seem that we have before us a really good person who deserves a better fate (share), but what is the reason for the unsettled nature of his life, where should we look for the origins of his melancholy and melancholy, which ultimately led him to suicide? “I haven’t found my point... I’m searching, I’m yearning, but I can’t find it...” - this is the result of Konovalov’s thoughts, this is the answer to the question asked above. .
This is Gorky's innovation. However, this unity is not a sign of harmony and mutual understanding between people; it reveals the facelessness, limitations of bakers, and the lack of individuality of each of them. The story depicts a picture of an incorrectly organized life, due to which the spiritual principle in a person is lost. A similar situation is considered in the story “The Orlova Spouses”. Here, too, due to the terrible living conditions, due to its instability, the relationship between the Orlov spouses is collapsing, and discord is occurring in their family life. Grigory and Matryona Orlov loved and were proud of each other, ... but they were bored with life, they did not have impressions and interests that ... would satisfy the natural human need of a person - to worry, to think, - to live in general. They were too immersed in work, in solving problems related to everyday life, that they became “poor in spirit” people, like all their neighbors.
The influence of external circumstances on the personal lives of the characters is also confirmed by the fact that after the Orlovs got a job in the infirmary (hospital), significant changes occurred in their lives. Grigory stopped beating his wife and stopped drinking, but, as we find out a little later, not for long.
Each period of time is characterized by its own type of hero, and literature, designed to reflect all the phenomena of reality (everyday human life), explores the character traits of the new person.
2. Issues, image, theme and central idea of the story “Makar Chudra”
“Makar Chudra” is the first printed work of A. M. Peshkov. It appeared in the Tiflis newspaper “Caucasus” in 1892 and was signed by the pseudonym that was destined to soon become known throughout the world - Maxim Gorky. The publication of the first story was preceded by years of wanderings of the author throughout Rus', to which he was driven by an insatiable desire to get to know Russia, to unravel the mystery of a huge destitute country, to understand the cause of the suffering of its people. The future writer’s knapsack did not always contain a loaf of bread, but there was always a thick notebook with notes about interesting events and people he met along the way. Later, these notes turned into poems and stories, many of which have not reached us.
In his early works, including “Makar Chudra”, Gorky appears before us as a romantic writer. The main character is the old gypsy Makar Chudra. For him, the most important thing in life is personal freedom, which he would never trade for anything. He believes that the peasant is a slave who was born only to pick the earth and die without even having time to dig his own grave. His maximalist desire for freedom is also embodied by the heroes of the legend he tells. A young, beautiful gypsy couple - Loiko Zobar and Radda - love each other. But both of them have such a strong desire for personal freedom that they even look at their love as a chain that fetters their independence. Each of them, declaring their love, sets their own conditions, trying to dominate. This leads to a tense conflict that ends with the death of the heroes. Loiko gives in to Radda, kneels before her in front of everyone, which among the gypsies is considered a terrible humiliation, and at the same moment kills her. And he himself dies at the hands of her father.
The peculiarity of the composition of this story, as already mentioned, is that the author puts a romantic legend into the mouth of the main character. It helps us to better understand his inner world and value system. For Makar Chudra, Loiko and Rudd are ideals of love of freedom. He is sure that two beautiful feelings, pride and love, brought to their highest expression, cannot be reconciled. A person worthy of emulation, in his understanding, must preserve his personal freedom at the cost of his own life. Another feature of the composition of this work is the presence of the image of the narrator. It is almost invisible, but we can easily recognize the author himself in it. He doesn't quite agree with his hero. We do not hear any direct objections to Makar Chudra. But at the end of the story, where the narrator, looking into the darkness of the steppe, sees how Loiko Zobar and Radda “were spinning in the darkness of the night smoothly and silently, and the handsome Loiko could not catch up with the proud Radda,” his position is revealed. The independence and pride of these people, of course, admire and attract, but these same traits doom them to loneliness and the impossibility of happiness. They are slaves to their freedom, they are not able to sacrifice even for the people they love.
To express the feelings of the characters and his own, the author widely uses the technique of landscape sketches. The seascape is a kind of frame for the entire storyline of the story. The sea is closely connected with the mental state of the heroes: at first it is calm, only the “wet, cold wind” carries “across the steppe the thoughtful melody of the splash of a wave running onto the shore and the rustling of coastal bushes.” But then it began to rain, the wind became stronger, and the sea rumbled dully and angrily and sang a gloomy and solemn hymn to the proud couple of handsome gypsies. In general, a characteristic feature of this story is its musicality. Music accompanies the entire story about the fate of the lovers. “You can’t say anything about her, this Radda, in words. Perhaps its beauty could be played on a violin, and even then to someone who knows this violin like his own soul.”
This is the first work of the young Gorky topical issues, vivid images and language immediately attracted attention and announced the birth of a new, extraordinary writer.
The hero of Gorky’s first story, “Makar Chudra,” reproaches people for their slave psychology. In this romantic narrative, slave people are contrasted with the freedom-loving natures of Loiko Zobar and the beautiful Rada. The thirst for personal freedom is so strong for them that they even look at love as a chain that fetters their independence. Loiko and Rada surpass everyone around them with their spiritual beauty and power of passion, which leads to a tense conflict that ends in the death of the heroes. The story “Makar Chudra” affirms the ideal of personal freedom.
At the end of the 90s. critics, who often complained about the impoverishment of modern literature, were excited by the appearance of three volumes of “Essays and Stories” by a writer whom they had hitherto known only from a few works published in monthly magazines. The success of M. Gorky's books was enormous. Great and original talent - this was the general judgment of readers and critics. “You weren’t in a literary school, but started straight from the academy,” - Chekhov wrote to the young author. But such rapid recognition by the “academy” was preceded by years of hard work and deep thought.
The first story by Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov (1868–1936) “Makar Chudra”, signed with the pseudonym “M. Gorky”, appeared on September 12 (24), 1892 in the Tiflis newspaper “Caucasus”. Then hard work began in the Volga press.
Literature played a huge role in the life of young Peshkov. It was she who helped him rise above the everyday routine of everyday life, showing how broad, difficult and at the same time beautiful human life is. It also strengthened the emerging feeling of protest against reality. Literature also contributed to the awakening of the young man’s creative self-awareness, making it clear that the people he sees are different from the people depicted in the works of Russian writers; this gave rise to the desire to tell about what he saw himself.
However, the aspiring writer was not yet confident in his own abilities. In his view, the writer is a “herald of truth” who “possesses the indestructible power of resistance to the enemies of justice.” He is a “prophetic bell” that awakens the consciousness of the people, and the creator of sacred scripture about their life. The first major writers Gorky met, V. Korolenko and N. Karonin-Petropavlovsky, corresponded to this idea. But can he himself say something new and significant for readers - this question worried Gorky for a long time. And only in 1896, during the time of hard daily work at Samara Gazeta, he came to the conclusion that he could no longer write and that the work of a writer was inseparable for him from the stubborn struggle against the modern system.
Attempts by the populists to convert young Peshkov to their faith failed. Subsequently, he began to shun preachers of social truths, preferring social practice to theories. This will be reflected in one of Gorky’s letters from the late 90s, which said: “Are mental constructs important when it is necessary to free a person from the clutches of life, and is it absolutely necessary, on the basis of the laws of mechanics, to break an old, worn-out machine?” But at the same time, Gorky felt an urgent need to clearly identify his ideological and artistic position. In the programmatic story “The Reader” (1898), a restless reader whistles “the words of a song”:
How can you be a leader?
If you are unfamiliar with the road?
(4, 118)
A year later, Gorky will declare that he is close to Marxism, as he feels in it “a more active attitude towards life” (16, 485). The writer becomes closer to the social democratic organization of Nizhny Novgorod and more and more closely connects his life with the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.
At the end of the 19th century, writers from the people became more and more active in literature, organizing their own circles and publications (I. Surikov, S. Drozhzhin, etc.). Along with the rise of the labor movement, the voice of worker poets began to grow stronger. Worker poetry emerges, closely related to the freedom-loving poetry of the 1870s–1880s, but already speaking of new popular aspirations. All this is one of the components in the complex and rapid development of art at the turn of the century. Particularly significant for the literature of the period of the movement of the masses themselves was the emergence of a new type of revolutionary writer.
By the time of the creation of the first set of his works, Gorky had written a lot of stories and essays, but from a large number he selected only 30. What caused such severe strictness? The writer rejected everything that reminded him of his apprenticeship (following Chekhov, Korolenko, etc.), everything that seemed insufficiently artistic. He, who came to literature from below, needed to declare himself as a talent that did not need leniency. No one dared to talk about him as a self-taught writer.
The published books and the novel “Foma Gordeev” revealed the originality of Gorky’s worldview. Writers of the 19th century They showed in many ways how a person can be broken by life. Gorky, not forgetting about the difficult circumstances of life (he knew their strength very well), set himself the task of showing how the people he saw resisted. He did not deny the sharpness of vision of Russian writers and the veracity of their testimonies about life, but it seemed to him - he was convinced - that the people of his time were no longer “dressed like that”, and sought to identify what was new that had appeared in their attitude to modern life. in reality, in their actions.
Remembering the 1890–1900s, A. Lunacharsky wrote that “time itself seemed to place a huge order for militant, upbeat, major and at the same time civil music.” This music sounded most loudly and impressively in the works of Gorky.
Growing discontent in society and the expectation of decisive social changes caused an increase in romantic tendencies in literature. Gorky acts as a messenger of a quick renewal of life, as a representative of active romanticism, the goal of which is “to strengthen a person’s will to live, to arouse in him a rebellion against reality, against all its oppression.” Early legends and stories about tramps became an expression of this romanticism.
After the release of “Essays and Stories,” criticism began to talk about Gorky as a singer of “free will,” which manifested itself in the images of rebellious, freedom-loving people, in the author’s thoughts that accompanied stories about the people he met, in unusually bright, major-key paintings of nature, opposing the landscape of the previous literature. The critic A. Bogdanovich wrote: “Most of Gorky’s essays breathe this free breath of the steppe and the sea, one feels a cheerful mood, something independent and proud, which makes them sharply different from the essays of other authors relating to the same world of poverty and rejection. This mood is conveyed to the reader, which gives Gorky’s essays a special charm of freshness, novelty and truth of life.”
Representatives of the lumpen proletariat have long attracted the attention of writers (A. Levitov, N. Karonin, etc.); These were unhappy people, broken by the harsh life. At the turn of the century, due to industrial and agricultural crises, the army of the unemployed increased significantly, once again becoming an object of study for writers. In their depiction (L. Carmen, A. Svirsky) the inhabitants of urban slums are pariahs of society, having reached the last degree of material and spiritual impoverishment.
Gorky saw something different in the terrible social phenomenon. His attention was attracted not by the “exotica” of tramp life, not by the slums themselves, but by the reasons that brought people there. And this completely transformed the old theme, the old heroes. Gorky's tramps are a product of fermentation, an expression of spontaneous protest brewing among the people. Becoming a tramp or a vagabond meant lack of humility and unwillingness to accept the fate of slaves. In Gorky’s depiction, which amazed the contemporary reader, tramps are not rejected, but rejected people. They are disgusted by acquisitiveness, the bourgeois craving for satiety, and the narrowing of the sphere of manifestation of the human personality. These are freedom lovers who “even though they are hungry, are free” (3, 230).
The rebellion of the tramp freemen usually took ugly, anarchic forms, but the contemptuous attitude towards the comfortable life of the well-fed and the emphasized independence of behavior made the figures of the tramps more attractive than the figures of their antipodes (“Chelkash”, “Malva”). Gorky notes the emergence of a unique tramp intelligentsia. These are restless, “thoughtful” people, worried not only about their own fate, but also about the state of people’s life as a whole: “We need to build such a life that there is room for everyone in it and no one bothers anyone” (3, 31). The baker Konovalov refuses to admit that he and others like him are fed up with the environment, that he has suffered an evil fate. He places responsibility for a failed life on the person himself. “And why didn’t you put up any force against your fate?” (3, 31). Konovalov is drawn to people who resist oppression. The baker listens with surprised admiration to the reading of N. Kostomarov’s book about Stenka Razin’s rebellion, but he himself is still a “smoldering coal” that could not flare up. The story “The Orlova Spouses” also speaks of life, which does not allow the dormant forces of man to unfold.
The terrible living conditions of Gorky's Protestants (the pit-basement in The Orlov Spouses, the gloomy bakeries in Konovalov and Twenty-Six and One) are realistically reproduced by the writer, but the rebels themselves are romanticized by him. They are strong, beautiful, independent.
In the literature about Gorky, there is an opinion that the writer exaggerated the strength of the protest of the lumpen proletariat and that a sober attitude towards the previously romanticized tramp came to him only at the time of creating the play “At the Depths”. Such statements are not confirmed by the writer’s early work. Simultaneously with the freedom-loving heroes, images of embittered, outdated slum dwellers were created, who were characterized primarily by a bile-nihilistic attitude towards the world (“Former People”, “Rogue”). Rebel tramps seemed to Gorky a typical phenomenon of the 90s, but he did not associate any social hopes with them. Its truth-seekers are socially blind, do not see the real culprits of such an unjust life and do not understand what are the reasons for the oppression of the people. The people's thought is still raw, it is just beginning to awaken. “The severity of their thoughts,” writes Gorky, “is increased by the blindness of their mind” (3, 59). The motif of social blindness is one of the main motives of Gorky's early work.
On the eve of 1900, Gorky published the novel Foma Gordeev. In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina it was said that everything had turned upside down, but had not yet settled into post-reform times. In “Foma Gordeev” the “laying down” that has begun is depicted. As a participant in the populist circles of the 80s, Gorky was critical of the teachings of the populists, but echoes of his influence can still be found in the early works of the writer; These are, for example, the motives of sacrifice in the legend of Danko and in the “Song of the Falcon.” The novel “Foma Gordeev” testified to the obsolescence of such hobbies. This is the largest anti-populist work, which left no doubt that Gorky began to master the Marxist knowledge of social development. After the appearance of Foma Gordeev, readers and critics began to talk about him as a Marxist writer. Thus, the future People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs G.V. Chicherin wrote to a comrade in 1901: “Instead of the worldview of the era of natural economy, a completely new worldview of the urban proletariat is emerging<…>Marxism and Gorky are the main phenomena in our country in recent years. (And in “Foma Gordeev” there is a great influence of Marxism).”
Gorky built his great works (from “Foma Gordeev” to “The Life of Klim Samgin”) as chronicle novels, which allowed him to show not only the development of human life over time, as N. Leskov did in his chronicles, but also the movement of time itself as a historical category. The heroes turned out to be correlated with the historical steps of Russia. Some of them became active figures, others convinced that a person and “his time” are not always the same values. The tendency towards such a correlation was clearly manifested already in the first novel, the hero of which did not hear the true calls of his time.
The greatest attention in the novel is paid to two figures: the guardian and affirmer of bourgeois consciousness - Yakov Mayakin and the renegade of his class, who becomes a "side" to him - Foma Gordeev. In the 90s capitalism has taken a strong position in the country. The image of the “grimy”, so expressively captured in the works of Shchedrin, Uspensky and Ostrovsky, was becoming a thing of the past, giving way to money tycoons and factory owners. Gorky’s predecessors in creating the image of the offensive bourgeois (P. Boborykin - “Vasily Terkin”, Vas. Nemirovich-Danchenko - “Wolf’s Fill”, etc.) noted the emergence of a new type of merchant, “who begins to realize his strength”, but they did not create a typical figure of him.
Yakov Mayakin is a social type who embodied the potential strength of the bourgeoisie at the end of the century. Class, master consciousness permeates the entire life activity of a successful merchant, all his moral principles. This is a merchant who thinks not only about himself, but also about the fate of his class. Capitalism began to penetrate into all areas of social and economic activity, and it turned out that Mayakin was no longer satisfied with domination only in the economic field. He is striving for power on a larger scale. Noteworthy is the review of the Volga millionaire Bugrov, who told Gorky that he had not met the Mayakins on his way, but felt: “this is how a person should be!” (17, 102).
The author of “Foma Gordeev” learned from the classics a comprehensive understanding of human characters and the determination of their native environment and society as a whole. But, penetrating deeper and deeper as an artist into the class structure of society, he introduced something new into his study of man. In his works, the social dominance of the heroes’ worldview was strengthened, and in connection with this, the class coloring of their inner world became more noticeable. The organic fusion of the class with the peculiar allowed Gorky to create a large gallery of related, but nevertheless so different from each other, heroes.
Modern criticism has caught the characteristic feature of Gorky the psychologist. The critic L. Obolensky wrote, referring to Yakov Mayakin, that Gorky “grabs”, along with the individual traits of the hero, also traits “family, hereditary, formed under the influence of the profession (class), and strengthens these latter to such brightness that we already see not an ordinary figure that we would not even notice in life, but a half-real, half-ideal, almost symbolic statue, a monument to an entire class in its typical features.”
Along with the merchant, who traces his ancestry back to the 18th century, “Foma Gordeev” also shows one of the first accumulators of capital in the post-reform era. Despite all the limitations of the reform of 1861, it gave the opportunity to manifest the dormant energy and ingenuity of the people. Hence Gorky’s enormous interest in capitalists who emerged from the people’s environment and have not yet completely broken ties with it. Ignat Gordeev, Savely Kozhemyakin, Yegor Bulychev - all these are rich people, endowed not only with the desire for money, but also with “insolence of heart”, which prevents them from completely merging with the world of their masters.
Gorky's novel spoke about the development of capitalism in Russia and at the same time about the instability of the new way of life. Evidence of this is the emergence of protest among the workers, as well as the emergence of those who disagree with bourgeois practice and morality in the ranks of the bourgeoisie itself.
At first, Gorky wanted to create a novel about the prodigal son of capitalism. The break with one's environment, breaking out of it, became an increasingly remarkable phenomenon in life, attracting the attention of other writers. The hero of Chekhov's story “Three Years” stands on the threshold of such a breaking out. However, in the process of creative work, Gorky came to the conclusion that Thomas “is not typical as a merchant, as a representative of a class” (4, 589) and, in order not to violate the “truth of life,” it is necessary to place another, more typical figure next to him. This is how an equal-sized image of the second central hero arose. These are characters that mutually condition each other. Fearing that the typical image of a merchant, striving not only for economic, but also for political power, would cause a censorship ban, and trying to preserve this new figure in Russian literature, Gorky, in his words, “blocked” her with the figure of Thomas (“I blocked Thomas Mayakin, and the censorship did not touch him” - 4, 590). But Thomas remained dear to the author as evidence of the violation of the monolithic nature of the bourgeoisie, as, in turn, a typical phenomenon, although it did not become widespread.
Mayakin and Foma are opposing heroes. For one of them, everything is subordinated to the desire to get rich and rule. At the heart of his ideal is an economic principle. He subordinates everything to him, including the lives of people close to him. For another, the attitude towards life is connected with social and moral knowledge of it. The master's principle will manifest itself more than once in the behavior and consciousness of Thomas (he is the son of his environment), but it is not what dominates his inner world.
And if the “prodigal son” of the bourgeoisie Taras Mayakin, quickly forgetting his former opposition, returns to his father’s house in order to increase what his father has earned, then Thomas, endowed with a pure moral sense and an unsleeping conscience, acts as an exposer of the masters of life - a return to his father’s house for him impossible.
The novel is permeated with the idea of the need to awaken the consciousness of the people. This idea, manifested in the depiction of the character of the leading character, in the disputes of the characters in the novel, in the author’s thoughts about the fate of the homeland, holds together the heterogeneous material of life. In his early work, Gorky showed himself to be a master of the bright southern landscape. “Foma Gordeev” contains equally impressive pictures of the Volga nature, reminiscent of the greatness and painful slumber of the Russian people. “Everything around bears the imprint of slowness; everything - both nature and people - lives clumsily, lazily, but it seems that behind laziness hides a huge force - an irresistible force, but still devoid of consciousness, which has not created clear desires and goals for itself... And the lack of consciousness in this half-asleep life puts the whole beautiful expanse of her shadow of sadness” (4, 204–205). The lack of clear consciousness is also characteristic of the young Gordeev. Foma has a warm heart. He does not accept Mayakin’s everyday commandments; he is concerned about the humiliation and poverty of some and the unjust power of others. But, like Gorky's early heroes, he does not understand the causes of social inequality. Like the tramp rebels, he is socially blind, and this makes his anger less effective. The radical journalist Yezhov, who observes the growth of Gordeev’s spontaneous indignation against those in power, tells him: “Drop it! You can't do anything! There is no need for people like you... Your time, the time of the strong but stupid, has passed, brother! You’re late…” (4, 392).
Thomas’s spontaneous, “internal” rebellion is painted in romantic tones, and this has given rise to a number of literary scholars to argue that Gorky created a romantic image. But Gorky set himself the task not to approve, but to debunk a romantic of this type. He was already an anachronism. Thomas is above his environment in the world of moral values, but his intellect is low and his dreams are chaotic. The frenzied heart of young Gordeev longs to overthrow social evil, but he is incapable of social generalizations. His mind is asleep, and Gorky emphasizes this many times in the novel. The revealing speech on the ship is the highest expression of the angry rebellion of the prodigal son of the bourgeoisie and at the same time evidence of the archaic nature of his rebellion. The hero, freedom-loving by nature, suffers defeat not only because those exposed take up arms against him, but primarily because he himself is not yet ripe for effective social protest. Gorky's novel was the last novel of the century about a lonely romantic hero as a hero who does not meet the requirements of the new time.
Gorky combines recognition of the futility of spontaneous rebellion with the search for carriers of effective social protest. He finds them in the proletarian environment. The workers depicted in the novel “Foma Gordeev” had not yet embarked on the path of revolutionary struggle, but the dispute between the journalist Yezhov and the worker Krasnoshchekov about the “spontaneous” and “conscious” beginning in the labor movement testified to the workers’ desire for such a struggle.
This will be said more clearly in the story about three comrades looking for their path in life (“Three”, 1900). One of them dies, choosing the path of non-resistance. The second one also dies, trying not to change, but only somewhat to soften the ugliness of the possessive world. And only the third, the worker Grachev, will find the true path, drawing closer to the revolutionary circle.
Gorky could not yet create a full-blooded image of a hero-worker - this hero had only just begun to manifest himself in life, but he captured the ever-deepening revolutionary spirit of social aspirations. A romantic call to heroism, which always has a place in life, was heard in “Old Woman Izergil.” The Song of the Falcon called for heroism. In 1899, the author strengthened its revolutionary sound by creating a new ending with the famous slogan:
We sing glory to the madness of the brave!
The madness of the brave is the wisdom of life!
In Foma Gordeev, Yezhov talks about an approaching storm. Soon many heroes of Russian literature will be gripped by a premonition of the storm. Chekhov's Tuzenbach (“Three Sisters”) will say: “The time has come, a huge force is approaching all of us, a healthy, strong storm is preparing, which is coming, is already close and will soon blow away laziness, indifference, prejudice towards work, rotten boredom from our society.” In the prose poem “Lights” V. Korolenko will remind you that, no matter how dark life is, “there are still lights ahead!..”. Chekhov's play is fraught with a premonition of impending changes; in "Ogonki" hope for these changes is manifested. It was a response to the burning problems of the day, but both artists do not yet feel the immediate breath of the menacing storm.
This breath is embodied in the famous “Song of the Petrel” (1901), in which not only a call for revolution was heard, but also the confidence that it would win. This song gained even greater popularity than the Song of the Falcon, which glorified the revolutionary feat. The image of the storm that Burevestnik called for went back simultaneously to two literary sources: to the tradition of freedom-loving poetry (Yazykov, Nekrasov, etc.) and to the socialist journalism of the turn of the century. The new song was widely used in revolutionary propaganda, it was read at student parties, and distributed in the form of leaflets. Gorky began to be perceived as a singer of the revolution, as a writer calling for active revolutionary resistance. The revolutionary romanticism that pervaded the “Song of the Petrel” was the expression of a new ideal, a new historical perspective.
At the beginning of the century, Gorky became the ruler of the thoughts of his generation, and a fierce literary and social struggle arose around his work. The fame of the young writer abroad begins to compete with the fame of the giant of Russian literature - Leo Tolstoy. The doctrine of non-resistance to evil through violence collides with a call for revolutionary action, for all-round resistance to the old social system. Gorky's voice was especially resonant, since it was the voice of a rising Russia. “What a whirlwind of success here and abroad Gorky is experiencing now. This is one of the most popular writers in Europe, and all this in five or six years!” - wrote M. Nesterov in 1901.
Now Gorky acts as a unifier of the progressive forces of literature. Young democratic writers - L. Andreev, A. Kuprin, A. Serafimovich, I. Bunin, N. Teleshov and others - are grouped around the publishing house “Knowledge”, which he heads. The “Collections of the “Knowledge” Partnership” they created played a huge role in the development of literature the beginning of the 1900s, marking the emergence of a new movement within realism. Critics started talking about the emergence of the “Gorky school”.
The attention of contemporaries was attracted not only by his rebellious creativity, but also by Gorky’s personality itself. This was a new type of writer - a writer and a revolutionary, and the tsarist government tirelessly reminded of this: in 1898, Gorky was imprisoned in the Metekhi prison castle (Tiflis), and in 1901 - in the Nizhny Novgorod prison; At the behest of Nicholas II, the election of the writer to honorary academicians was canceled (1902). The censorship also kept a watchful eye on Gorky.
Znanievo people spoke of Gorky as a man possessed, on the one hand, by an inspired faith in the power of socialist ideas that possessed him, and on the other, by recognition of the enormous role of art in the life of society. Gorky seemed to them a prophet put forward by the people themselves.
The lyrical and philosophical poem “Man” (1903), published in the first collection “Knowledge,” seemed too pretentious to the older generation of writers. “The Man” reminded Chekhov of “the sermon of a young priest, beardless, speaking in a bass o.” But Leonid Andreev, who was close to Gorky at that time, rightly considered the poem unusually consonant with the nature of his friend. “And in your “Man,” he wrote to Gorky, “it was not its artistic side that struck me - you have stronger things - but the fact that, for all its sublimity, it conveys only the ordinary state of your soul. Ordinary is scary to say. What in other lips would be a loud word, a wish, a hope - you have only an accurate and direct expression of what usually exists. And this makes you so special, so unique and mysterious, and in particular for me so dear and irreplaceable.” It was a special mental attitude - a combination of a sober perception of reality with a revolutionary sense of purpose for the future, an attitude that Gorky carried throughout his entire life.
The heyday of Russian drama of the 19th century. associated with the name of A. N. Ostrovsky. After his death, criticism began to talk about the decline of modern drama, but in the late 90s - early 1900s. dramatic art and its stage interpretation are receiving a new generally recognized rise. The banner of the new theater becomes Chekhov's dramaturgy, creatively read by innovative directors, founders of the Moscow Art Theater. In essence, only from this time on did the director acquire great importance in the Russian theater. Soon after K. Stanislavsky and Vl. V. Meyerhold, F. Komissarzhevsky, A. Sanin and others will appear as Nemirovich-Danchenko.
The novelty of the director's interpretation of the plays and the actors' performances, unusual for the old stage, brought enormous success to the Art Theater and attracted the attention of young writers to it. M. Gorky wrote that it is “impossible not to love this theater; not to work for it is a crime.” Gorky's first plays, "The Bourgeois" and "At the Lower Depths," were written for the Art Theater. The passion for working on drama was so strong that Gorky almost stopped writing prose for several years. For him, the theater is a platform from which a loud call can be heard to fight against everything that leads to the enslavement of man; the writer valued the opportunity to use this platform.
Russian authors did not gravitate towards strict genre forms (remember L. Tolstoy, Shchedrin, Dostoevsky), and at the end of the century the genre forms themselves became unsteady: the differences between the genre of a story and an essay, a story and a novel became increasingly blurred. Chekhov brought the story and drama closer together, introducing into the latter a new type of psychologism and a narrative element in the form of remarks unusual for Russian drama. He abandoned the cross-cutting stage action determined by the fates of the central characters; his plays seemed to reproduce the flow of life itself with its internal conflicts. Several storylines emerged simultaneously; In this regard, episodic characters acquired great importance.
In his poetics, Gorky the playwright is close to the poetics of Chekhov, but his plays are characterized by different problems, different characters, a different perception of life - and his dramaturgy sounded in a new way. It is characteristic that picky contemporaries paid almost no attention to the typological similarity of the dramaturgy of both writers. Gorky's individual principle came first.
In Chekhov's lyrical-tragic plays one could hear a sigh about the ruined destinies of people ("Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters"), in Gorky's plays there is an accusation, a challenge, a protest. Unlike Chekhov, who tended to reveal life’s conflicts with the help of halftones and subtext, Gorky usually resorted to naked sharpness, to an emphasized opposition of the worldviews and social positions of the heroes. These are debate plays, plays of ideological confrontation.
In the play “The Bourgeois” (1901), the main thing is not the development of the relationship between Nile - Tatiana - Poli, but the clash of two worldviews, the opposition of the proletarian to the world of owners. This confrontation is the core of the play, its ideological center. Attempts to interpret this play as a family drama, as a depiction of the discord between fathers and children, met with sharp rebuff from modern progressive criticism. Such an interpretation contradicted the author's intention. The depiction of family life - Gorky would remain faithful to him right up to the play “Yegor Bulychev and Others” - did not prevent the playwright from combining the “family” theme with large social and political problems that went far beyond the walls of the Bessemenov and Bulychev houses.
At the turn of the century, Gorky felt more deeply than other writers that the time had come for the heroic. This was the order of the times, which increasingly aggravated the social contradictions of Russian life. In the same year, Gorky wrote “The Song of the Petrel” and “The Bourgeois”. The pathos of “Song” is also reflected in Gorky’s first play. Neil acts as a herald of a new attitude to reality, as a representative of a class beginning to realize that “the master is the one who works”, that the hour of changing the “movement” of trains is approaching. Theatrical censorship allowed the play “The Bourgeois” to appear on the stage with significant cuts to Nile’s speeches, but even in this cut-down form, a call to revolutionary action was heard in them. Neil's struggle with the morality, philosophy and life practices of the old and new philistinism bore a bright political overtones.
Chekhov created lyrical-psychological drama, Gorky entered Russian drama as the creator of a new type of social drama. Stanislavsky would later say: “The main initiator and creator of the socio-political line in our theater was M. Gorky.”
Following “The Bourgeois”, Gorky gave the social and philosophical play “At the Lower Depths” (1902) to the Art Theater. It was an indictment of the social system that turned people into the scum of society. At the same time, the world of the “bottom”, a flophouse in which people of tragic destinies huddle, equalized by complete lawlessness, poverty and the absence of any hope of getting out of here, was shown as a world marked by the birthmarks of the bourgeois society that gave birth to it.
Speaking about Gorky the playwright, one cannot help but say that he mastered the language of many social strata, and this gave him the opportunity to make the speech of his characters unusually colorful and individual.
At the turn of the century, a sort of correspondence dispute between L. Tolstoy and Gorky arose on the basis of attitudes towards language. Tolstoy did not consider aphorism to be an organic property of Russian speech and connected Gorky’s attraction to it with the desire of the young writer to elevate his heroes, rewarding them with a lofty language that was not typical for them. But Gorky firmly defended his artistic perception of his native language. He spoke more than once about the big role folklore played in his creative development, including the aphoristic talent of the people, expressed by him in numerous proverbs and sayings. The writer was also convinced of this talent by the living speech of the people among whom he grew up. Saturating the speech of his heroes with aphorisms, Gorky made it capacious and figuratively revealing the essence of the character of the person depicted. At the same time, Gorky’s aphorisms were often a generalization of the life philosophy not only of the hero himself, but also of an entire social group (remember the figurative speech of Yakov Mayakin).
In drama, where the revelation of characters occurs mainly through words, work on language acquired special significance. This was clearly demonstrated in the play “At the Bottom”; many of the remarks of the heroes quickly entered into everyday language and into the phraseology of the era. “At the Bottom” is crowded, and each character has his own life experience, his own social speech. Just a few remarks - and the former lordship with its contempt for those below can be seen in the rooming baron.
Central to Gorky’s socio-philosophical play (the play “At the Lower Depths” received great resonance abroad, such was the vital showing of the underside of the capitalist world) was the debate about Man and the attitude towards him. This dispute, which arose (although not in a direct clash) between the wanderer Luka and the former telegraph operator Satin, was reflected in the statements of other characters about truth, conscience, and lies.
Gorky here first raised the question of two types of humanism: humanism, which calls for compassion and pity towards a person in order to console and somehow reconcile him with an unfair life, and humanism, which rebels against this injustice in the name of the indisputable rights of man to be a Man, and not a passive victim.
The writer more than once called his Luka a swindler, but I. Moskvin, who was the first and with great success to play this role at the Moscow Art Theater, and then repeated it many times, rightly argued that Luka, who appeared in “At the Lower Depths,” does not correspond to his own judgment playwright. The artistic embodiment, apparently, did not completely coincide with the author's intention. Luka is a “crook” not in everyday terms (he does not derive any benefits for himself), but in a more general social sense. He is a groundless comforter, and this comforting turned into a social lie. Preachers of this type - and there were many of them in literature, in journalism, and in life - sought to muffle the feeling of protest growing among the people, while life demanded the appearance of humanists calling for a radical restructuring of the world. To be faithful to the truth of life, Gorky could not bring out the social antagonist Luka in the play (see Gorky’s letter to the Red Army soldiers of 1928 on this matter). This was Satin, who contrasted consolation and reconciliation with reality with a new attitude towards people. In his famous monologue, Satin stated that the name Man “sounds proudly”, that the truth “Everything is in man, everything is for man!” should be recognized, and in this regard, it is necessary to respect, and not pity him (7, 177).
The production “At the Lower Depths” was a huge success. At the center of the passionate debate that flared up around the play in 1902–1903 was the interpretation of the above-mentioned characters. Some critics argued that the author took the side of Luke, not Satin. Such judgments, largely caused by the talented performance of Moskvin-Luka (the production of “At the Lower Depths” preceded the publication of the text of the play), were unexpected for the author.
In response to a distorted interpretation of the central idea of the play, which caused a decrease in its social accent - it was well understood by a democratic viewer - Gorky came up with the already mentioned poem “Man”, in which, repeating Satin’s words “Everything is in man, everything is for man!” ", revealed his understanding of the meaning of life. It was a hymn to a rebellious Man, tirelessly moving forward, armed with the power of Thought. Man acted as the creator of life, called upon to “destroy, trample on everything old, everything cramped and dirty, everything evil, and create something new on the unshakable foundations of freedom, beauty and respect for people forged by Thought!” (6, 40–41). Reactionaries called this poem a “criminal proclamation.”
Criticism, hostile or wary of Gorky's social and artistic position, often reproached the writer for his lack of interest in “eternal themes”, in the general problems of existence. However, this was a distorted idea of the writer. For Gorky, as for previous classical literature, “eternal themes” are associated with ethical and aesthetic problems. At the center of Gorky’s creativity was one of the most profound “eternal themes” - the meaning of human existence, and in connection with it the problem of man’s responsibility to himself and the world. Coverage of this “eternal theme”, correlated with the problem of what exists (man) and what is desired (Man with a capital M), was given by the writer both in a generalized symbolic sense (the legend of Danko, the poem “Man”), and in conjunction with specific life material ( “Mother”, “Tales of Italy”, etc.).
No less significant (especially for pre-October creativity) was the “eternal theme” for Gorky - man in his connections with nature, with the universe.
Gorky's plays (before October he completed 13 plays) addressed pressing issues of modern life. They talked about the social and moral foundations of bourgeois society, about the degradation of the individual in it, about the struggle in the world of labor and capital, about the fate of the Russian intelligentsia.
After “At the Lower Depths,” Gorky wrote the play “Dachniki” (1904), dedicated to the ideological stratification of the democratic intelligentsia. Part of her sought an active connection with the people, while part of her began to dream, after a hungry and restless youth, about rest and peace, while arguing that a peaceful evolution of a society that needed “benevolent people” and not rebels was necessary. This was one of the first works about the new - after the dispute between the Marxists and the Narodniks - split among the intelligentsia. Renegade intellectuals increasingly moved to the camp of the bourgeoisie. Not satisfied with the “new ideals,” Varvara Basova came to the bitter conclusion: “The intelligentsia is not us! We are something else... We are summer residents in our country... some kind of visiting people” (7, 276).
At the same time, the play touched upon issues of contemporary art in a pointed form. Gorky rejected both wingless realism, represented by the work of the writer Shalimov, who betrayed the precepts of his youth, and “pure art,” whose supporters proclaimed the independence of art from life and sang abstract beauty. The assertion of such independence in fact acquired very clear social contours: the poetess Kaleria clearly reveals hostility towards the people, in whom she sees a barbarian who only wants to be well-fed.
In a play full of allusions to the speeches of apologists of the bourgeois world, Gorky addressed the intelligentsia with a very pressing question - who are they with, whose interests are they defending?
The blow dealt by Gorky to the bourgeois intelligentsia was accurate. The renegades, and primarily the preachers of idealistic philosophy and representatives of modernist art, recognized themselves in the characters of the play. The premiere of “Dachners” at the V.F. Komissarzhevskaya Theater on November 10, 1904 almost became a literary scandal. A number of writers and critics tried to boo the play after the first act, but this caused a lively protest from the public.
The production gave the playwright great satisfaction, emphasizing the social significance of his performance. “I have never experienced and am unlikely to ever experience to such an extent and with such depth,” he wrote, “my strength, my significance in life, as at that moment when, after the third act, I stood at the very footlights, completely engulfed in a violent with joy, without bowing his head in front of the “public,” ready for all the madness - if only someone would shush me.
They understood and didn’t make a fuss. Only applause and the “World of Art” leaving the hall.”
The modernists accepted the playwright's challenge. After the appearance of “Dachniki,” a fierce struggle began with Gorky and the literary movement he led.
Gorky's subsequent plays about the intelligentsia, in turn, spoke about the separation of a significant part of it from the life of the people and about the deep abyss that arose between a cultured society and the masses of the people still deprived of culture. This was especially clearly expressed in “Children of the Sun” (1905). “If the gap between will and reason is a grave drama in the life of an individual,” wrote Gorky, “in the life of the people this gap is a tragedy” (16, 156). Having again addressed the problem of reason and blindness of mind in his play, Gorky, however, did not answer the question of how the gap between them could be overcome. The absence of such an answer often led directors to a one-sided stage interpretation of the play, to placing all historical blame on the “children of the sun.” Later, in 1907, Gorky wrote to A.V. Lunacharsky: “Your thought about revolutionaries as a bridge, the only one capable of connecting culture with the masses, and about the restraining role of a revolutionary is a thought that is dear and close to me, it has been troubling me for a long time.”<…>In “Children of the Sun” I hovered around this thought, but I was unable to formulate it and I couldn’t. For who among my “Children of the Sun” is able to feel this thought and this task? It must be born in the mind and heart of the proletarian, must be spoken through his lips - right? And of course, he will expand it, he will deepen it.”
Thus, Gorky faced the same problem in his play as in “At the Lower Depths.” Among the “children of the sun” there could not be a hero who would speak expressively about the possibility of a living connection between the people and culture. This hero will appear in the play “Enemies” and in the novel “Mother”.
The revolution of 1905 completely controlled Gorky. He joins the Social Democratic Party and takes an active part in the revolutionary struggle. At the end of the year, he becomes one of the organizers of the first legal Bolshevik newspaper “New Life” and meets V.I. Lenin for the first time.
Gorky’s high spirit does not leave him abroad either. The party instructed him to speak abroad against the provision of foreign loans to the tsarist government, and also to organize fundraising in America to help the struggling people. The international authority of the revolutionary writer was very high, this was convincingly demonstrated by the angry protest of the progressive public of the West against the imprisonment of the author of “At the Lower Depths” in the Peter and Paul Fortress in January 1905.
The comparison of bleeding Russia with complacent Europe and rich America, seized by a furious passion for profit, led Gorky to the idea that Russia was becoming the center of the revolutionary movement and that it was there, in this backward country, that events were brewing that would shake the world. “Now we, Russians, will drag the world forward” (LN, 272), writes Gorky in August 1906. And in one of the December letters we read: “I live in delight, in a terribly elevated mood - every day convinces me more and more in the vicinity of a world revolution."
In this elevated mood, saturated with revolutionary thought, Gorky enthusiastically wrote the play “Enemies” and the novel “Mother,” which marked a new milestone in the development of not only Russian, but also world literature.
The fact that Gorky did not fit into the framework of traditional realism was clear even when he entered literature. In the article “New Trends in Russian Literature” A. Skabichevsky stated: “...Mr. Gorky is a completely unique phenomenon, having very few points of contact with the literary traditions familiar to us.” The critic was not yet able to determine what was new that was heard in the “songs” about the Falcon and the Petrel, in the stories about tramps, but for him there was no doubt that this was not realism in the old sense and not decadence.
At the turn of the century, the work theme powerfully entered literature, sounding especially loudly in 1905–1907. The works of these years showed the entry of the working class into the historical arena, the heroism of the masses, and the involvement of wide circles of the population in the liberation struggle. In the development of these topics, the contribution of Znaniew writers was especially significant. They saw a new social force - the proletariat, but, as A. Lunacharsky rightly noted, they saw it “without fully understanding it, without yet grasping the full enormity of what it brings with it.” The appearance of “Enemies” and “Mother” is a new stage in the socio-artistic comprehension of this problem.
Both works provoked a hostile reaction from bourgeois criticism, including symbolist criticism. Having been defeated in her early attempts to ideologically crush Gorky as a spokesman for the aspirations of the lower classes of society, she now tried to prove the aesthetic inconsistency of his speeches. She declared that addressing social issues was contraindicated for artistic creativity. For Libra employees, artistry and sociality are incompatible concepts. Works that reflect the struggle of the people are for them “business”, “practical” literature. A. Bely wrote: “We do not agree that art expresses class contradictions.” Z. Gippius argued that the party position destroyed the writer in Gorky. D. Filosofov came up with a sensational article “The End of Gorky.”
There was a fierce debate about the ways of development of Russian literature, about who would win in it - representatives of modernist art, isolated from acute social problems, or Gorky and his “school”, representing art associated with the struggle of the people, with the revolution. But what was rejected by Gorky’s opponents under the guise of protecting aesthetics from foreign, in this case social, “intrusions”, in fact served as the basis for the emergence of a new aesthetics, new criteria of beauty. “Mother” and “Enemies” were Gorky’s social and aesthetic manifestos, based on his long-standing artistic quest. The working man came to the fore; life was seen as an action and a struggle directed toward the future.
After the appearance of "Resurrection" and "Foma Gordeev" there was a "lull" in the field of the novel. It has been supplanted by drama and storytelling. "Mother" marked the emergence of a new type of social novel. But at the time of its publication, only L. Andreev, sensitive to innovative quests in literature, recognized “Mother” as a major work in which the people themselves “spoke about the revolution in large, heavy, cruelly suffered words” (LN, 522). And yet, without accepting “Mother,” writers of various literary camps could not help but admit that Gorky is the writer who has the right to speak on behalf of the people. It is characteristic that when at one of the literary meetings D. Filosofov accused - in the spirit of his article - Gorky of betraying his former views, N. Minsky responded, saying that “the revolution, having brought with it a revaluation of all values,” cast a “new light and on Gorky” and that “Gorky is as much a writer as he is a bearer of the feelings of an entire people, a prophet of his era,” he belongs not only to Russian literature, but also to Russian history. A. Blok and many others will note Gorky’s organic connection with the people. Thus, the magnitude of the figure of the writer and his latest works was recognized.
The novel “Mother” depicts one of the Russian provinces (city, factory settlement, village). But everything that was done here was typical for the whole country. The author made this universality felt, emphasizing the typicality of what was depicted: it was important for him to introduce the reader to what was happening in Russia, to show what led to the recent revolutionary explosion.
Having acted as the founder of a new type of social novel, Gorky abandoned the old plot structures. Russian writers of the 19th century. reproduced the movement of national history by revealing the private destinies of people, Gorky reveals this history by depicting the destinies of classes, class confrontation. For the first time in literature, the main characters of the novel were revolutionary workers, whose struggle is shown in close unity with the struggle of the revolutionary intelligentsia, bringing the ideas of socialism to the working masses and the awakening village.
The writer created a folk book, that is, a book dedicated to working people and addressed to them. Nationality in Gorky’s view is, first of all, penetration into the spirit and social aspirations of the people. The author of the novel always felt his direct connection with him, rightly asserting that “more than anyone else” he has “the right to call himself a democrat both in blood and in spirit.” “Mother” was supposed to lead the democratic reader to social reflections about life, to an irresistible desire to become a revolutionary fighter himself. It was a new “Song” about petrels, which have now been given a realistic appearance. It is characteristic that the crowd of workers at the May demonstration in the novel is likened to a bird: “...spreading its wings wide, it became alert, ready to rise and fly, and Pavel was its beak...” (8, 157).
It is well known how popular Chernyshevsky’s novel “What is to be done?” was. in a revolutionary environment. His hero Rakhmetov was the personification of revolutionary duty and courage. There is a lot of evidence of the influence of this image on the formation of the revolutionary worldview of youth.
Gorky highly valued Chernyshevsky, a critic, publicist and revolutionary figure, but spoke harshly about his novel. He did not deny the role he played, but believed that in the new historical conditions the hero of this novel could no longer serve as an inspiring example. Life put forward other heroes, created different norms of behavior and thinking. And if in the Soviet years Gorky names Rakhmetov among the notable rebels of a certain historical period (see, for example, a letter to A.K. Voronsky in 1931), then, while working on “Mother” and a little later, he will talk about the lack of life-like persuasiveness of this image (“... this is not a person, but “on purpose”).”
During the revolution of 1905, Gorky wanted to create a new exemplary book in which it would not be a “special” person who acted - and would not depict “special” methods of strengthening his will - but ordinary revolutionaries, whose deeds and psychology would correspond to the new stage in the life of the people . In a conversation with the Italian writer M. Serao, Gorky will say that he is writing “a novel about the psychology of revolutionaries in Russia, but not an abstract novel, but a novel about affairs and people, among whom the central role will be played by the mother of a revolutionary worker, and around her will be action different types of people."
Gorky became involved in revolutionary work in his early youth, but only now, as stated in one of his letters to his wife, did he understand what a real revolutionary, a revolutionary of the proletarian type, was. In the novel “Mother,” Gorky the artist, on the one hand, acts as a continuer of the traditions of the Russian ideological novel, and on the other, as an innovator looking for a new form of expression of his social and artistic vision of the world.
Having entered into a kind of creative competition with Chernyshevsky, Gorky sets himself a specific task: to comprehend the recent experience of the proletarian struggle and thereby answer in a new way the fundamental question of Russian life and Russian literature - “what to do?”, in the name of what and how should we fight?
The rebels of his early work were socially blind. The worker Krasnoshchekov (“Foma Gordeev”) stands at a crossroads; he is not yet sure that bravery and courage alone are not enough for a revolutionary, that mastery of social knowledge is necessary. The poem of 1903 became a hymn to the Thought of Man, who longs to sweep away “all the evil dirt” from the face of the earth<…>to the grave of the past" (6, 40). In the works of 1906, the abstractly expressed finds its real embodiment. Blind rebels find social intelligence in “Enemies” and “Mother.” The novel revealed the spiritual and political insight of the characters in many ways. Together with them, the reader also learned the goals of the revolutionary struggle.
A new, Marxist answer to the question “what to do?” caused a positive assessment by V.I. Lenin, who read the novel in manuscript. Gorky recalled Vladimir Ilyich’s words to him about how needed this book was: “... many workers participated in the revolutionary movement unconsciously, spontaneously, and now they will read “Mother” with great benefit for themselves. “A very timely book” (20, 9). The novel showed how the masses mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, combining the depiction of the practical activities of revolutionaries with the disclosure of new social and ethical ideas.
In the novel “Mother,” the cornerstone of populist ethics is revised - the self-sacrifice of the individual for the sake of fulfilling his duty to the people. At the turn of the century, the sociological and political essence of populist teaching suffered a collapse, but the ethics of populism was not defeated. It is characteristic that the works of young writers (V. Veresaev, E. Chirikov, etc.) spoke about the collapse of the populist doctrine, but did not touch upon ethical issues. No less characteristic of the turn of the century was the perception of Marxism as a purely materialist teaching, alien to the development of questions of ethics and questions of the Spirit. Gorky, who was not sufficiently familiar with Marxism at that time, also paid tribute to this perception.
The emergence of a new psychology, a new ethics, born in the process of revolutionary struggle, is one of the leading themes of the novel “Mother”. The idea of the intelligentsia paying their historical debt to the people is now losing its force. The people themselves come out to defend their rights; the fulfillment of revolutionary duty becomes a mass everyday phenomenon. This phenomenon is elevated by the writer to a high rank, but the revolutionaries themselves (Pavel, Nilovna and others), their deeds are devoid of an aura of sacrifice and heroic isolation. The feat of each one required great courage and will, but this and other feats were part of the general proletarian, collective cause. Gorky reveals the origins of new moral principles, showing that working people comprehend the great truth of the age not only with their minds, but also with their troubled hearts.
In 1906, Lunacharsky wrote about the need for a writer to come to literature who “will find beauty in the greatest phenomenon of social life - revolution”; a year later, in the article “Tasks of Social-Democratic Artistic Creativity,” he would declare: such a writer has already appeared. “Mother” and “Enemies” served as the basis for the first theoretical generalization of the creative principles of the new method of realistic literature.
The problem of the “little man,” for whom Russian literature so ardently called for compassion, did not remain unchanged throughout the 19th century. At the turn of the century, the working man began to be perceived not only as a victim of modern society, but also as a potential force of an imminent social explosion, as a person standing on the eve of his spiritual rebirth. However, such a perception was still characteristic of a few writers, and even among them it did not find wide enough manifestation. In Gorky this theme becomes the main one.
Thinking in the 80s On the problems that new literature will soon have to solve, V. Korolenko perspicaciously wrote that it will be necessary to “discover the meaning of the individual on the basis of the meaning of the mass.” This discovery was made by Gorky.
In "The Bourgeois" the hero-proletarian is brought to the fore, whose speeches left no doubt about their revolutionary orientation. However, the hero was shown outside the main (class) conflict of the era, outside the work collective. In the works of the Znanievites, dedicated to the events of 1905, the first attempts were made to recreate the appearance of the revolutionary masses as a single collective, but the personality put forward by the masses did not appear in these works. In “Mother” they are given in an inextricable connection. In romantic works, the hero usually rose above his environment, and we see the same in Gorky’s early works. In the novel “Mother,” the proletarian hero is shown in close unity with the class that gave birth to him; they support and enrich each other.
Lunacharsky saw the “delighted” discovery of a “new soul” - the soul of fighters for social justice - as one of the main tasks of the modern artist. Gorky, in turn, more than once spoke about the tasks of a democratic writer, likening him to a brave drummer, heralding “the approach of new people - the birth of a new psychological type.” Gorky himself became such a drummer. “Mother” is a novel about “new people”, who, unlike classical literature, were found not in common society, but in a working-class environment.
The reader saw “how quickly yesterday’s slave straightens up, how the light of freedom sparkles even in half-extinguished eyes,” At the same time, the awakening of the hero in the novel was accompanied by a world of new thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Gorky always attached great importance to the emotional basis of worldview. Subsequently, he will reproach young Soviet writers for the fact that their “ideas are suspended in emptiness and have no emotional basis.” The class never absorbed the universal from the author of “Mother”.
In his novel, Gorky showed the process of maturation of individual heroes and the working masses as a whole. This was the first time such an image was given in Russian literature. The resurrection of man in his work does not represent a craving for personal moral maximalism, characteristic of many heroes of classical literature, but involvement in the revolutionary struggle. What was important was not only the choice of the subject of the image (it was also in the field of view of other authors), but the special angle of view, the perception of life by the Marxist writer. Instead of the people of Stradlaan, in Gorky’s works there appeared “the people - the creator of history, the proletariat, coming to the consciousness of its great mission.”
The Marxist vision of the world sharpened the writer’s historical vision. Attention to the class structure of society appeared in Foma Gordeev, but the main figure of the 20th century. - worker - only outlined here. The novel “Mother” traces the deep connections of the present with the past and its messages into the future, perceived as a movement towards a socialist revolution - “Russia will be the brightest democracy on earth!” (8, 279). Later, the writer will say that this optimism was predetermined by the very course of Russian history. However, c. During the era of the first Russian revolution, only Gorky, who considered literature to be a military weapon, managed to penetrate so deeply into the progressive “spirit of the times” and see that it was no longer possible to stop the people who had awakened to historical creativity. A new type of historicism allowed the writer to focus on the romantic worldview of the proletariat.
Korolenko rightly argued that it is impossible to find a single definition of romanticism as a literary movement, since it includes contradictory and often opposing phenomena. Gorky also spoke more than once about the heterogeneity of romanticism, due to the difference in the positions of writers. The romanticism of some was passive in relation to the world, while that of others was active and protesting.
In the 90s Gorky acted as a revolutionary romantic. The period of the first Russian revolution was marked for him by the emergence of a new type of romanticism, social romanticism, which reflected the worldview of the proletariat, which was beginning to realize its role and its responsibility for the fate of its native country and all humanity. “Do not be confused by the use of the term romanticism to the psychology of the proletariat,” Gorky wrote in the notes of the Capri lectures on literature for workers (1909), “with this term, in the absence of another, I define only the heightened, fighting mood of the proletarian, resulting from his awareness of his strength , from the increasingly assimilated view of himself as the master of the world and the liberator of humanity<…>Individualistic romanticism arose from the desire of an individual, feeling his loneliness in the world, to convince himself of his strength, of his independence from history, of the possibility for the individual to lead life. Social romanticism - from the individual’s consciousness of his connection with the world, from the consciousness of the immortality of those ideas that are fundamental.”
The heroes of “Mother” have not yet mastered such consciousness, but the writer makes it clear that they are on the eve of mastering it. Recreating the worldview of the proletariat, which combined a sober assessment of reality with social optimism, with faith in their imminent victory, became a kind of social and artistic discovery of Gorky. His innovation was also evident in the reconstruction of a revolutionary perspective. Pavel Vlasov and Andrei Nakhodka are convicted for their activities, the constantly persecuted Yegor Ivanovich dies, Rybin and Nilovna are arrested. And yet, the novel is covered in life-affirming revolutionary romantic pathos.
The romantic principle inherent in Gorky's early work now changes its character, embodying the aspiration to the socialist ideal. New fighters take the place of those who are leaving; it is impossible to stop the general movement that has begun. Later, when the battles around “Enemies” and “Mother” died down, Gorky, in his conversations about literature, would again name social romanticism as a defining feature of new literature.
Creating a socio-political novel that focused on the revolutionary awakening of the people, Gorky compressed to the limit the image of the life phenomena themselves, following in this the master of the short and at the same time unusually capacious novel - I. S. Turgenev. He also echoed Turgenev in posing the problem of “fathers” and “children,” which is now being solved in a different social way. Reporting a conversation with Gorky in 1907, the critic Ugo Oietti wrote: “Parents connected with children by hope - that is the innovation of this book and also the psychology of the proletarian struggle in Russia, as it seems to Gorky.”
The title of the novel is noteworthy. It focuses attention on the central character, Pelageya Nilovna, and at the same time serves as the embodiment of the philosophical and moral potential of the work: the life-giving one stands up to defend a life worthy of man and humanity.
In the article “On the Destruction of the Personality,” Gorky wrote that Russian literature “managed to show the West an amazing, unknown phenomenon - the Russian woman, and only she can tell about a person with such inexhaustible, soft and passionate love of a mother.”
Gorky’s work, having inherited love for man from previous literature, in turn enriched Russian literature with amazing images of Russian women, and above all the images of Nilovna (“Mother”) and grandmother in the autobiographical trilogy.
Gorky did not consider the novel “Mother,” which bore a clear reflection of the revolution of 1905, to be his best work (in the first edition the novel was drawn out, the rhetoric in the speech of the characters was strong; the writer agreed that he was guilty of sentimentality in it), but he always singled him out as a book that played a huge role in awakening the “revolutionary legal consciousness of the working class” (8, 487). Gorky wrote his novel with great passion and anger, and this passion and anger, combined with the progressive ideas of the century, made his work necessary for many. He was convinced more than once that he was able to answer the question “what to do?” and thereby create a book of great example. Letters to the writer and conversations with leaders of the revolutionary movement spoke about this. “Mother” gained worldwide fame, becoming a reference book for the proletariat. The words of V.I. Lenin, who wrote to him in 1909, serve as a high assessment of Gorky’s creative activity: “With your talent as an artist, you have brought such enormous benefit to the labor movement of Russia - and not only Russia.”
After October, foreign readers, including writers and critics, will say that it was Gorky, and not the writers of the 19th century, who helped them understand what happened in Russia in 1917, and will primarily note the novel “Mother”.
In the history of Russian literature, “Enemies” and “Mother” marked the emergence of a new literary movement, which later received the name socialist realism. Based on the achievements of realism of the 19th century, socialist realism brought to literature a new, Marxist worldview, a new interpretation of the problem of “man and history,” a new perception of human psychology, social optimism and a special chiaroscuro that made it possible to most clearly highlight what needed to grow.
It was realism, inspired by aspirations to a socialist future. Literature as a human study has entered a new phase of its development.
Every writer has themes that particularly concern him; he returns to them at different stages of his journey. Such a leitmotif for Gorky was the long-standing theme of philistinism for Russian and foreign literature. However, he claimed that he inherited it primarily from N. Pomyalovsky, who drew his attention to exposing hidden and overt philistinism.
Gorky himself explored this topic in a variety of ways. At first we see a social and everyday image of a stagnant bourgeois existence, with its ignorance, acquisitiveness, and desire for peace. The heroes of Gorky's early work are troublemakers of the bourgeois world, deniers of its well-fed ideal. But showing the terrible and at the same time primitive worldview of small owners is only one side of Gorky’s struggle with the philistinism. The play “The Bourgeois” gives a socio-political assessment of this phenomenon. The bourgeoisie is shown here both in the old possessive guise and in the liberal-enlightened one.
The differences between old Bessemenov and his son, a participant in student unrest, but who has already “come to his senses” (he no longer wants to be a citizen and admits that for him Russia is an empty sound), are external, not internal. Peter does not like the old shell of possessiveness, but not the essence of it. The recent frondeur turns into a settled bourgeois. The singing Teterev perspicaciously tells Bessemenov about his son: “If you die, he will rebuild this barn a little, rearrange the furniture in it and will live like you, calmly, wisely and comfortably...” (7, 104). Bessemenovs of this cut are still devoid of an offensive spirit.
In 1905, the concept of philistinism as a certain system of views began to expand; Gorky now includes in it a defense or justification of a passive attitude towards life. The new understanding of the essence of philistinism will appear especially clearly in Gorky’s “Notes on philistinism,” published in a number of issues of the Bolshevik newspaper Novaya Zhizn. The philistinism is seen here as a socio-political force that “is trying to delay the process of normal development of class contradictions”, i.e. the process is revolutionary. The position of the tradesman is defined by Gorky as the position of a person who is deprived of a sense of the future and powerlessly rushes between the modern masters of life and those who should become the masters of the world - people of labor; rushes about or tries to escape from the storms of life. Gorky included the modernists among such “self-eliminators,” meaning primarily Merezhkovsky’s group. “The bourgeoisie is always a lyricist,” wrote Gorky, “pathos is completely inaccessible to the bourgeoisie, here they are as if cursed with the curse of impotence... What should they do in the battle of life? And so we see how they anxiously and pitifully hide from her, wherever they can - in the dark corners of mysticism, in the beautiful gazebos of aesthetics, hastily built by them from stolen material; wander sadly and hopelessly in the labyrinths of metaphysics and again return to the narrow paths of religion littered with the rubbish of age-old lies.”
Gorky the publicist is characterized by the convergence of journalistic and literary critical thought. Many of the writer’s articles represent a fusion of journalism and criticism. Such are his “Notes on Philistinism.” It is known how highly their author valued progressive Russian literature. “In Russia there has not been and there is almost not a single writer who, in one way or another, would not serve the goals of the revolution through the most severe criticism of reality,” Gorky would say in 1925. But in the days of intensified class struggle, in the heat of polemics against everything that hindered revolutionary development, he would draw attention to other features of Russian literature and accuse the writers of the 19th century of creating a hymn to the patience and humility of the Russian people. “The contradictions of life,” says the “Notes on Philistinism,” “must be freely developed to the end, so that from their friction true freedom and beauty will flare up,” but with their conciliatory sermons, the bourgeoisie seek to slow down the forward movement of life.
Criticism of the early 20th century. was characterized by shockingness. The Symbolists' speeches against modern realistic literature were largely designed to incite the reader's indignation. Shockingness was characteristic of many critical feuilletons by K. Chukovsky, in which he characterized the artistic style of contemporary writers. Elements of the floor also contained “Notes on Philistinism.” Among the reconcilers of social contradictions, and therefore among the philistines of the spirit, were Leo Tolstoy, the generally recognized moral authority of Russia, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, soon proclaimed by the symbolists as the prophet of the Russian revolution. Gorky immediately introduced a caveat: we are not talking about the artistic creativity of these writers (“Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are two greatest geniuses, with the power of their talents they shocked the whole world, they drew the amazed attention of all Europe to Russia”), but about their social and philosophical preaching , who “once” rendered “a disservice to her dark, unhappy country.” Calls for patience, self-improvement and non-resistance to evil through violence led away from the active struggle against tyranny and violence and thereby indirectly introduced, according to Gorky, supporters of a passive attitude to life to the world of rapists. Both artists will excite Gorky for the rest of his life. In the course of Russian literature for workers (1909), the author of “Mother” will pay tribute to the genius of Tolstoy, but in the stormy days of 1905, when the question of whether the revolution would win, the revolutionary writer considered it his duty to call on the citizens of Russia to resist the autocracy and capital, pointing out the unacceptability of Tolstoy’s views for revolutionary thought.
In the heat of polemics, Gorky made obvious exaggerations and exaggerations in his characterization of Russian social thought and literature of the 19th century. He needed this to strengthen the main thesis: what is needed is not passivism, but an active attitude towards reality. Attempts to delay her revolutionary transformation (from whomever they came) testified, according to the publicist, to her adherence to the protective principles of the “philistine structure of the soul.”
“Notes on Philistinism” caused a critical storm, showing that the publicist touched on a very pressing modern problem. The civic position required a person to directly intervene in the fight against social evil, and not to evade it. Let us recall that “Notes on Philistinism,” dedicated to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, appeared in the same issue with V. I. Lenin’s article “Party Organization and Party Literature,” which called on writers to clearly define their social position.
V.I. Lenin considered the speeches of Gorky the publicist to be a success. In the article “The Victory of the Cadets and the Tasks of the Workers’ Party,” he agreed with the assessment of the preaching of non-resistance to evil through violence as philistine. Later, inviting Gorky to work for the Proletary newspaper, Lenin wrote: “...why not continue, introduce into custom the genre that you began with “Notes on Philistinism” in “New Life” and began, in my opinion, well? "
In 1916, summing up the results of his 25 years of activity, Gorky admitted that his attitude to the social pedagogy of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky was expressed in the era of the revolution “in sharp forms,” but in essence his attitude towards passivity has not changed even now. He, as before, saw the meaning of his work in a passionate desire “to arouse in people an effective attitude towards life.”
In connection with the defeat of the revolution of 1905, the question arose with great urgency: on what forces did the reaction mainly rely, which contributed to the defeat of the revolutionary movement? Among the reasons contributing to the suppression of the revolution, Lenin noted the “terrible general backwardness of the country.” After the novel “Mother” and the story “Summer,” which showed the young heart of Russia, the object of Gorky’s artistic depiction became the bourgeois district Rus' with its conservatism, spiritual poverty, and passivity. During the years of reaction, many writers turned to the image of district Rus', which did not accept the revolutionary calls, but Gorky had his own special tasks.
Symbolist and related criticism often reproached the writer for everydayism, which meant the depiction of everyday life in its everyday realities. However, Gorky did not gravitate toward depicting everyday life as such. It has already received a variety of coverage in previous literature, which widely acquainted the reader with the living conditions of the people. The depiction of everyday life in a working-class settlement in “Mother” is extremely compressed. This is a typical generalization of the life of working people. In “The Town of Okurov” (1909), everyday life appears not so much in its immediate reality, but as a social and socio-political category. The numerous towns of Okurova, which did not see the lights of “hopes and desires” that burned inextinguishably on the earth, served as one of the pillars of the old world. The wind of revolution also reached Okurov. Responses to it indicated that fermentation had begun in the dark kingdom, which, however, took on ugly forms. Showing how petty-bourgeois inertia and poverty of mind developed into narrow-mindedness and political reaction made “Okurov Town” a significant literary phenomenon. Gorky achieved a high power of generalization here. “Okurovshchina” as the personification of Old Testament isolation and hostility to everything new quickly became a common noun.
The story “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin” (1909–1911) was initially conceived by Gorky as a continuation of “The Town of Okurov”; he wanted to expand the image of the life activities of numerous Okurovs. But soon the plan changed. The stagnant passivity of Russian society, which had long troubled Gorky, acquired a new artistic interpretation.
The writer again returns to a large canvas from the history of post-reform Russia, focusing his attention, unlike “Okurov’s Town,” on depicting its district life, which went beyond the limits of the bourgeois environment. The task was to reveal the historical background of the passive attitude to life in its various manifestations (passive anarchism, fatalism, etc.) and to identify the range of life ideas of various social strata of county society.
The theme of an active and passive attitude to life, which was the central theme of all Gorky’s work, acquires a special intensity during the years of reaction. The issue of the role of the people in the historical process and the need to strengthen their capacity was being resolved. Gorky spoke about how destructive passivism is, wherever it manifests itself - in everyday life, in thinking, in relation to modern events. In addition to works of art, this theme was reflected in articles in which Gorky reproached writers for being disconnected from the people and indifference to the fate of their homeland.
This focus on the manifestations of active and passive principles in Russian life went back to long-standing disputes about the paths of Russia in connection with its Europeanization, vigorously begun by Peter I and inhibited later. These disputes - they were waged throughout the 19th century, moving into the 20th century - left their mark on Gorky's judgments about the modern fate of Russia and on the terminology to which he resorted. In this historical dispute, Gorky acted as a “Westernizer,” advocating overcoming the Old Testament of Russia in all areas of its life.
According to Gorky, the defenders of Russia’s original development, opposing supporters of the rapid development of the advanced experience of Europe, fenced themselves off with the “picket fence of Slavophilism” from the inevitable paths of historical movement forward and isolated the historical experience of Russia “from universal human” experience, from global life. The populist faith in the peasant community also led to the isolation of the individual experience of the country.
In his dispute about the path of Russia, Gorky often resorted to the use of the concepts of West and East, borrowed from 19th-century journalism. With these ideas, he associated two different systems of thinking, two forms of life activity: “West” signified the height of European culture, developed socialist thought, democracy associated with the systematic struggle “for the expansion of human and civil rights,” organizational, “construction” role in all areas of life; “East” was associated with adherence to old forms of life, with cultural backwardness, with passivity and inactive daydreaming. The reform of 1861 did not entail an intensive overcoming of the general cultural and economic backwardness of the country, but Gorky believed in the “historical youth” of the Russian people, which was supposed to contribute to this overcoming.
The contrast between East and West in their historical development was characteristic of both fiction and modern political press. Thus, speaking about the East and the West in connection with the revolutionary events in China, V.I. Lenin wrote: “This means that the East has finally taken the path of the West, that new hundreds and hundreds of millions of people will henceforth take part in the struggle for ideals, until which the West has perfected."
The 19th century showed that, turning to European social, political, philosophical and artistic thought, advanced representatives of Russian society, including writers, mastered its spirit in the light of emerging national needs. Gorky argued that the revolution of 1905 “was a healthy turn of Russia towards the West and its influence should have a most refreshing effect on the spirit of the nation”, now integrated into more developed democratic forms of life.
Constantly emphasizing the idea that the Russian people have not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate their remarkable powers in practice (“we are still teenagers in a European family”), that the Russian people still have a lot to learn from the West, Gorky, at the same time, did not idealize modern Europe in his view , realizing that the bourgeoisie not only lost its former progressive role, but also began to threaten “the existence of culture and civilization.” This led Gorky to the assertion that the historically young and richly gifted Russian people would not stop at what had been achieved by bourgeois Europe and America, that the bourgeois-democratic republic for them was only a stage on the path to a truly popular, socialist revolution. The poetic proclamation “Message to Space” (1906), angrily spoke of those who wanted to use the power of the proletariat to achieve their own selfish goals (“They took with your strong hand a few beggarly crumbs of freedom for themselves, they took it from you, like thieves and beggars , but their weak hands cannot hold even that”), called on the proletarian to go further, “to create a temple of truth, freedom, justice!” (6, 324).
The Russian peasantry did not become a powerful ally of the proletariat in the era of 1905 - the social and cultural backwardness of the village was still too strong - but it represented enormous revolutionary energy in potential, while the peasantry of the West lost its revolutionary essence. Once in America, Gorky will come to the conclusion that, with all his darkness and ignorance, the Russian peasant is still higher in his civic potential than the well-organized American farmer. “We are far ahead of this free America, with all our misfortunes! - Gorky wrote in August 1906. “This is especially clearly seen when you compare the local farmer or worker with our peasants and workers.” This gave rise to the confidence that Russia would become the most vibrant democracy on earth. But the path to a new revolution was difficult. Having glorified the Russian revolutionaries in the novel “Mother” and the play “Enemies,” Gorky now sets himself the task of drawing attention to what hinders their victory.
From the classics, Gorky inherited a high understanding of the writer’s mission. For him, he is “the herald of his people, their war trumpet and first sword.” The work on the story “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin,” which characterizes passivity as a historical mutilation of the people that must be stubbornly fought, was perceived by the writer as a nationally necessary matter, as the fulfillment of his civic duty. Everything personal - and at that time it was very complex - was pushed aside by him.
During these years, Gorky turned to the experience of the everyday life writer of district Rus' - N. Leskov, whom he considered, along with Pomyalovsky, one of his teachers. Among the features of Leskov the writer, the author of “Mother” was especially attracted by the image of a person as a link “in a chain of people, in a chain of generations.” “In every story by Leskov,” Gorky wrote, “you feel that his main thought is not about the fate of a person, but about the fate of Russia.” The destinies of people reproduced in “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin”, in turn, made us think about the destinies of our homeland. As always with Gorky, there are many of these people. Before the writer’s gaze, dozens of people of different classes, professions and worldviews, resurrected by memory, passed by, and each of them asked: “... sign me up! He was also a good person and also lived his whole life in vain. I persuade you: back off, brothers, I’m not your historian! And they: who else, besides, should be our historian?” (10, 721).
Gorky had an inalienable right to call himself an artist-historian. Only he, among the new generation of writers, was characterized by a wide scale in the depiction of Russian reality, only he possessed such extensive knowledge of Russian life, “piercing,” like Leskov, all of Rus'. In “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin” we see restless Russian people trying to find meaning in the “turmoil” of life, and evil preachers of fatalism and mysticism who believe in the inviolability of the foundations of the dark kingdom (Gorky especially valued the image of Markushi, which was so successful for him), and contemplators deprived of the will , and “newcomers” who make you think about a different, rational and spiritually rich life.
The character of each of the people “recorded” by Gorky had sharply defined individual characteristics, but at the same time, each bore the imprint of a close circle of “ideas, traditions, prejudices” of his social environment. At the same time, Gorky, like Leskov, was interested in both what went beyond such conditioning and what turned out to be ingrained in a person.
The story is a complex fusion of the Kozhemyakins’ life story with a chronicle of the life of a county town, shown mainly through the prism of the protagonist’s perception. In this regard, “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin” precedes the latter Gorky’s novel “The Life of Klim Samgin”. Gorky was not alone in striving for such an image. Many writers sought, as it were, to obscure their presence, giving way to their hero. Let us remember “The Man from the Restaurant” by I. Shmelev. L. Tolstoy’s statement in 1909 is very noteworthy: “What is not good in fiction is description on behalf of the author. It is necessary to describe how this or that is reflected on the characters,” that is, the perception of these persons should be reproduced. Such artistic searches were already characteristic of the literature of the late 19th century, but now they are becoming more obvious.
Matvey Kozhemyakin chronicles remarkable city events, and they speak of the wretchedness of life, limited by the petty-bourgeois understanding of its possibilities. Deprived of a sense of acquisitiveness, Kozhemyakin is not satisfied with the inert environment and reaches out to a different, meaningful life. This sets him apart in the world of the philistines, he is a black sheep in the dark kingdom of Okurov, but the poverty of knowledge and lack of will prevent him from breaking with this world. The tragedy of the rebel Foma Gordeev was caused by a lack of understanding of the ways to combat social evil; Kozhemyakin’s tragedy lies in his passive contemplative attitude towards life, in his avoidance of any kind of struggle, although people appeared on his path (Mansurova, Uncle Mark) who encouraged those around him to overcome the limitations of their life ideas.
When considering the history of Russian literature, Gorky usually paid great attention to the evolution of literary types, which does not arise at the whim of artists, but is a reflection of the movement of life itself. Matvey Kozhemyakin is a new variety of Oblomov. The image of a passive contemplator, who was never able to break his ties with the familiar world, although he felt this need, was a great creative success for the writer. Finishing the chronicle of his life, the failed rebel will say: “But I did not understand the instructive and loving efforts of life in time and resisted them, a lazy slave, but when this beneficent power nevertheless imperceptibly took possession of me, it was too late” (10, 126–127); “...it came to me, it was good, but I didn’t take it, I didn’t know how, I renounced!” (10, 597).
Drawing terrible pictures of Okurov's existence and human souls twisted by it, Gorky did not change his basic artistic principle - to show a person disturbed by time and the movement of time itself. The problem of the ordinary person in his correlation with history, posed in the novel “Mother,” will find its artistic embodiment in the story about Kozhemyakin. Gorky’s works said that a person, even being a typical resident of sleepy Okurov, is no longer able to escape from the course of history, which was beginning to take place with the active participation of the masses. Everyone had to determine their position in life in accordance with new historical conditions; no one could no longer ignore them. The patriarchal man was replaced by a man who began to understand that he himself must take on the restructuring of the social system. In the pre-October works of Gorky, an image of time arises that will become one of the “heroes” of the epic “The Life of Klim Samgin”, and then will be comprehensively mastered by Soviet writers, and among the first - K. Fedin.
Firmly believing that the revolution, which is already close, will destroy the old world (“difficult time<…>will soon end, culminating in a bright, creative explosion of popular forces"), the writer recreated the appearance of this world as he found it at the turn of the century. For him, this is both an acutely modern and historical task: patriarchal Rus' is shown by him as a Rus' doomed to fade into the past, while other authors saw it as unshakable. In “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin” there is already much evidence of changes in the Okurovs. The words of the revolutionary Mark about the need for action that transforms life resonate in young hearts. Lyuba Matushkina wants to “fight for good” and “whip time with some kind of whip so that it passes faster” (10, 593).
“People must be taught resistance, and not patience without any meaning; we must instill in them a love for work, for action!” - the “Okurov sage” Tiunov will come to this conclusion (10, 496). There are many old layers in Tiunov’s consciousness; he does not understand and does not accept the events of 1905 - and yet, like others, he feels that the old order is coming to an end. “It’s as if people are becoming more alive! Everyone’s voice is louder” - this is what clearly begins to sound in district Rus' (10, 579).
Gorky created the epic of Russian life. The novel "Mother" showed the struggle of the workers; "Summer" was about the penetration of revolutionary ideas into the countryside; “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin” depicts district Rus', which was one of the obstacles on the path of revolutionary Russia.
In the last story, Gorky remains a sociological writer, but his artistic style changes. He now avoids direct journalisticism; the social and philosophical coloring of the work comes to the fore. The pathos of the story receives its direct expression in the depiction of the life of the Okurovites, in the subtle psychological modeling of contradictory characters, in pictures of nature, which, as in “Foma Gordeev,” echo the author’s thoughts about sleepy life and the urgent need for its awakening. Thus, a vivid image of a sunset (in the landscape Gorky was a sun worshiper) is concluded with a typical allegory for the writer: “A wonderful fiery tale of struggle and victory lives in the skies of the west, a fierce battle of light and darkness burns, and in the east, beyond Okurov, the hills are shrouded in black a chain of forests, cold and dark, cut by the steel bends and loops of the Confusion River, the purple fog of autumn smokes above it, gray shadows are coming towards the city, it shrinks in their tight ring, seeming to become smaller, fearfully silent, holding its breath, and - it’s as if he’s been erased from the earth, thrown into a pool of cold, eerie darkness” (10, 227).
The innovation of the writer’s ideological and artistic position became increasingly evident. Gorky himself will say about his opposition to modern literature: “Without exaggerating either my strengths or my importance in Russian literature, I know that my line is closer to the truth than others, and is more necessary for our country. This is quite enough to feel in place and in business.”
After reading “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin,” M. Kotsyubinsky wrote: “The epic of the Russian city, of county life unfolded both in breadth and depth. It became creepy and scary from the everyday life that Kozhemyakin so calmly recorded. It’s as if a page in the history of the people’s life has unfolded, beginning with the dark past and ending with yesterday’s, close, familiar, but poorly understood. The background is so good that it's hard to wish for anything better. And what wonderful people against this background, marble everywhere, chisel everywhere!<…>And behind everything you feel some kind of penetration, a thoroughly thought-out synthesis<…>There is nothing to say about the beauty of the language: this is a school for Russian fiction writers” (10, 730). The story was highly appreciated by other writers, who also noted Gorky’s artistic skill.
In the literature about Gorky one can often find judgments about the writer’s negative attitude towards the village, towards the Russian peasant.
In the first years of the socialist revolution, Gorky, indeed, said many harsh and unfair words about the peasantry, in which he did not see a direct ally of the proletariat. Harsh statements about the passivity of the Russian people, and especially the peasantry, can be found during the First World War. That was what Gorky the publicist said, submitting to the pressure of the motley and complex political situation and sometimes losing “his understanding of the meaning of history.” But Gorky the artist, who always gravitated towards depicting new trends in life, what was supposed to receive progressive development in the future, clearly opposed the undifferentiated negative attitude towards the village. He did not forget that Russia is a peasant country, and he followed the social processes in it with great interest.
While writers who paid primary attention to the capitalization of the village and its de-peasantization showed in the 90s. downtroddenness, darkness and inertia of a village resident, Gorky - due to the peculiarities of his talent - sought to identify features in her that indicated the beginning of overcoming age-old inertia. His work rejected the perception of the Russian peasant as an unrequited being, frozen in his spiritual development. In the story “Kirilka” (1899) we see an outwardly humble, but in fact mischievous and mocking man who knows the “worth” of masters. “If you go get the mail, bring me some bread, hear?” - he shouts after the boats leaving with bars. “Gentlemen, while waiting for the way, they ate the edge from me, but there was only one…” (4, 140). Kirilka still did not clearly understand the benefits of literacy for himself, but many already felt its power. “Varenka Olesova” (1898) talks about the emergence of a new generation of peasants who greedily reach for books, trying to understand why the life of the people is so difficult. Young people are already clearly aware of social injustice and think that soon only firebrands will remain from the lordly estates.
Gorky’s personal clashes with the village in his youth were tragic (“Conclusion”, “My Universities”). He knew how dark, terrible and stagnant village life was, but his artist's eye always sought to catch in it the beginnings of social ferment.
The novel "Mother" shows the awakening of the village on the eve of the 1905 revolution and creates an impressive image of the village agitator. Rybin is connected in his worldview with the patriarchal peasantry, but is already beginning to believe in the truth of the working class. And he is not alone, he has followers. Revolutionary thought penetrated the village.
Gorky's dispute with modern literature was a dispute about the potential capabilities of the Russian person, including the peasant. During the years of reaction, many writers tried to prove that the events of the revolutionary years were alien to the village and awakened only destructive instincts in it. The increased negativity in the depiction of the peasant’s psyche evoked the following response in Gorky’s article “Destruction of Personality” (1908): “As far as the peasant is depicted in magazine and almanac literature of our days, he is an old, familiar peasant of Reshetnikov, a dark personality, something beast-like. And if something new is noted in his soul, then this new thing is so far only a tendency towards pogroms, arson, and robbery.” Gorky has an idea - to write the history of the village of Kuznichikha, within the framework of which he wants to put everything he knows about the movement of the village in time: “... everything that I can guess and that I can invent without violating the inner truth. I take all this from the inside as a cultural process and illuminate it over the course of 50 years.” The story “Summer” (1909), in which this plan was partially realized, argued that 1905 was not a fruitless year for the village.
The writer wanted to show and showed that the village is “a cauldron ready to boil,” however, liberal-bourgeois criticism greeted the story with distrust, accusing its author of ignorance of the modern village and a party-biased portrayal of it. Reactionary criticism subjected both the story and Gorky himself to vicious attacks. She was especially irritated by the final lines of “Summer” (“Happy holiday, great Russian people! Happy resurrection to your loved ones, dear!”), reminiscent of the impending explosion of indignation of the people. For Marxist criticism, the story “Summer” is one of the evidence that “the new peasantry already exists, is already making itself known.”
The Russian Revolution was a manifestation of the powerful spirit of the people. Its bloody suppression and the terror unleashed by the government did not humble the masses; the awakened revolutionary thought continued to work intensively. A new latent accumulation of forces took place, the people began to realize their power and their lack of rights. This was felt both by those who believed in the love of freedom, perseverance and courage of the people, and by those who were afraid of their manifestation. An urgent need arose to find out: have the recent terrible events enriched the Russian people and is a new, even more powerful explosion of popular indignation possible?
Russian national character is again attracting the attention of writers. Not everyone speaks directly about the revolution; the events they depict often refer to an earlier time, and yet at the heart of most works of the pre-October decade lies a restless thought: what is the Russian person like? Is he ready for revolutionary action? Is the country's social and economic soil ripe for this? Thoughts about the fate of the homeland and its future path were organically included in the passionate debates of those years about the revolution of 1905 and its significance for Russia.
The answers given by Gorky did not coincide with the answers of other authors. Many of them are looking for a humble person among the peasants or in the world of sectarians they have recently discovered. The manifestation of will is often perceived by writers as an act of self-will. The people seem to them to be capable only of spontaneous action, and “connections” of what happened with the past “troublemaker” are established. Unlike other realists, the author of “Summer” perceived the Russian character in the light of his concept of a vitally active, strong-willed person.
Gorky's letters and articles of 1905–1910s. are full of statements about the Russian people and his historical fate. The writer recalls the courage and perseverance that the people needed in their struggle against unkind nature and in the development of vast territorial spaces. For Gorky, he is a pioneer in the broadest sense of the word. The creation of the Novgorod and Pskov feudal republics and numerous uprisings, right up to the peasant riots of the 19th century, testified to the love of freedom of the people. “The people have done a lot, they have a great history,” says Gorky.
The difficult and harsh Russian history could not kill the strong-willed principle in the Russian psyche, could not eradicate the love of freedom and dreams of human happiness, but it distorted the people's character and developed many negative traits in it. A close study of Russian history was prompted by Gorky’s desire to find out “what they used to beat us and how they drove us to passivism, preaching “inaction,” anarchism and other ailments.” Unexpected twists of the psyche, a bizarre interweaving of opposing traits (including passivism and activity) in the popular consciousness made, according to Gorky, the Russian character one of the most complex national characters in the world. What other authors considered organic properties of the Russian character, Gorky often attributed to historical strata that must be overcome.
Other writers also gravitated towards the historical justification of the Russian character, but they sought first of all to identify the connection between the present and the past, while Gorky, who never forgot about the contradictions and negativity of Russian life, gravitated towards depicting what foreshadowed the emergence of people creating a new reality . The potential capabilities of the Russian person are important to him.
In 1911–1913 the writer creates three cycles of stories, between which, despite the difference in issues and style, there is an undoubted connection.
The cycle “Across Rus'” revealed the features of folk psychology, and this brought it closer to “Tales of Italy”, which set a similar goal. Both cycles were also related by the lyrical and philosophical richness of the works included in them, their thematic overlap and romantically elevated tone.
At the same time, “Tales of Italy,” in revealing the “fabulousness” of modern life, echoed “Russian Fairy Tales,” which castigated the era of reaction and its leaders. This “fabulousness”, reflecting the beautiful and the terrible, was dissimilar, but by including the “Russian theme” in the cycle of Italian stories, Gorky thereby brought both cycles closer together, showing that life gave birth in abundance to both the beautiful and the terrible.
“Russian Fairy Tales” were also dissimilar from the “Across Rus'” cycle, but the common Russian theme involuntarily connected them, showing the dark and light sides of Russian life.
In his wanderings “Across Rus'”, young Peshkov meets representatives of various social circles - merchants, townspeople, seasonal workers, peasants. The latter are given special attention. The cycle opens with the story “The Birth of Man,” in which the author gave this farewell to a child born to a peasant woman in the majestic Caucasus mountains: “Make noise, Orlovsky! Shout at the top of your lungs..."; “Be strong, brother, or your neighbors will immediately tear your head off...” (14, 149). Other works in the cycle were also perceived in the light of these testaments. Their main leitmotif - “It is an excellent position to be a man on earth” - echoes the famous aphorism “A man sounds proudly.”
The concept of Rus' does not arise immediately, but in the process of depicting the “variegated” thoughts and feelings of its inhabitants. Gorky speaks of the great talent of the people, which still could not manifest itself in Russian life and often, because of this, took on ugly forms. The lyrical thoughts of the autobiographical hero and colorful sketches of nature, intertwined with stories about absurd human destinies, emphasized the idea of a “desecrated” earth. The author will come to the conclusion that “the little people failed... Of course, there are many good ones, but they need to be repaired or, better yet, remade again” (14, 144). Wanderings around Rus' convinced young Peshkov that there were prerequisites for such a change.
Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the story “Ice Drift,” which echoes V. Korolenko’s story “The River Is Playing.” To celebrate the Easter holiday, the carpenter's team has to cross to the other side during the onset of ice drift. And the lazy, passive elder Osip turns into a man-voivode who “smartly and powerfully” leads people. But, like Tyulin, he is still a hero for an hour; something extraordinary is needed to awaken him, and then he wilts again. And yet Osip made it felt that “the human soul is winged,” that its finest hour would come and the awakened Osip would play a significant role in Russian life. “I don’t know whether I like Osip or not,” says the young narrator, “but I’m ready to walk next to him wherever I need to go, even across the river, on the ice slipping from under my feet” (14, 178) . Gorky considered his Osip unusually typical of Russian life; we will meet this character in his other works (in the autobiographical trilogy, in versions of the fourth volume of “The Life of Klim Samgin”). M. Prishvin wrote about the story “The Ice Breaker”: “All of Gorky spoke out there.” In the depths of patriarchal Rus', a still little visible, but encouraging opposition to the old way of life began to mature.
The story “The Dead Man,” which originally completed the cycle “Across Rus',” is also noteworthy. The ring frame (birth - death), in turn, helped to reveal the ideological orientation of the cycle. Both stories poetically combined the harsh truths of life with a romantic perception of its creative possibilities. The works of the modernists showed the impoverishment of the human soul, Gorky’s work is dedicated to depicting the soul that is waiting - it is already ready for - its awakening.
The little Orlov resident still has to gain a foothold in life. The hero of the last story is a deceased peasant who was a stubborn “opponent” of evil. This is a true hero of everyday life, who carried through his entire life the belief in the victory of the bright. “Do not give in to people, live simply, they are theirs, and you are yours” - this is the main commandment of his life (14, 371). Even now, dead, he seems angry and rebellious.
Throughout the entire cycle (as in “Tales of Italy”) there runs the idea of the greatness of the “small”, ordinary person, whose labor adorned the earth (this was especially clearly manifested in the polemical story “The Cemetery”). The deceased in the story “Dead Man” is one of these great people. The writer creates a picture-symbol, embodying in the image of a peasant, “the feeder of all,” a man who revives the dead steppe and sows “living things, his own, human things” everywhere. The image of the sower in Russian literature, starting with Nekrasov, denoted figures who introduced the people to social knowledge and culture. In Gorky's story, the traditional image receives new light: the people themselves now act as the sower, enriching and beautifying the earth.
The psychology of the Russian person as portrayed by Gorky is complex and contradictory; it contains many dark traits that have been established for centuries, “but this is not given forever” (14, 144). Gorky as an artist was attracted primarily by features that foreshadowed the formation of the psyche of a new person, allowing us to say that the people can - now, and not in the distant future - become the creator of their own history. This was the fundamental difference between Gorky and the writers of his contemporaries.
In the cycle “Across Rus'”, as well as in “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin”, Gorky refuses direct journalisticism, it manifests itself here indirectly - in the formulation of problems, in identifying the passive and active principles in the Russian psyche, in the lyrical reflections of the “passing”, in sharpness aphorisms of heroes.
In his early work, Gorky resorted to direct comparisons of natural phenomena and social life (“Foma Gordeev”, “My Companion”). The mature Gorky avoids such parallels. The landscape in the cycle “Across Rus'” gravitates toward symbolism and often conceals social and philosophical overtones. The writer often resorts to contrasting sad everyday pictures with romantically colored pictures of nature. Thus, in the story “Woman,” the majestic picture of the cosmic landscape, which makes you feel the “running of the earth,” is contrasted with a well-fed Cossack village, indifferent to the misfortune of others, where even “the church seems to be molded from meat, abundantly layered with fat, its shadow is fat and heavy: the temple , created by well-fed people for a large, calm god” (14, 266).
Characterizing the features of Gorky’s style, one of his first researchers, S.D. Balukhaty, rightly wrote: “Gorky came to a bold combination in his work of realistic and romantic forms, understanding them not as mutually exclusive literary styles, but as outwardly different figurative systems of expression ultimately the same internal stimuli of the artist.”
After the appearance of the “Across Rus'” series, the press started talking about Gorky as a great master. With the exception of the period of the 90s, this was one of the few cases of almost unanimity in assessing his talent. However, neither the idea of the cycle, nor its social orientation and obvious polemical nature in a number of cases (“Cemetery”, “Nilushka”) were revealed by modern critics.
The path of Gorky the writer was a difficult one. He had his own ideological and artistic breakdowns (“Confession”), passionate judgments about modern literature, unclear and sometimes erroneous journalistic statements (“Two Souls”). Later, looking back on his path, he saw himself as a man who raged and made mistakes, but did not give up in his search for the truth. The source of these furies was the warm heart of the writer and the temperament of the fighter. He longed to see a free people, involved in culture, in building a new life. In “The Life of Klim Samgin,” one of the supporters of the Bolshevik Kutuzov speaks out about Andreev and Gorky as writers who shout a lot. Both of them, indeed, strove for a nakedly sharpened disclosure of their vision of the world. The new century was a century of social upheavals, and Gorky acted as their singer, tirelessly turning at the same time to depicting the terrible life of the “stupid tribe” and that close, stuffy circle of “terrible impressions in which the “simple Russian man” lived and continued to live ( 15, 20). After the appearance of “The Town of Okurov” and “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin,” criticism sometimes reproached Gorky for exaggerating dark colors. The autobiographical stories “Childhood” and “In People,” which completed Gorky’s pre-October work, showed that what the writer portrayed was based on genuine knowledge of Russian reality.
Gorky highly valued autobiographies. They helped to understand the formation of personality in a certain era and to see what social, moral and ethical conclusions were drawn from the lessons life taught. Shortly before writing the story “Childhood,” Gorky re-read the autobiographical books of major Russian writers and the just published “The History of My Contemporary” by V. Korolenko. This strengthened the writer’s desire to talk about the development of a person raised in a different environment. S. Aksakov and L. Tolstoy depicted the childhood years of nobles, V. Korolenko introduced them to the life of young intellectuals, stories about Alyosha Peshkov told about the life of the urban lower classes.
Considering his biography a typical biography of a Russian genius, Gorky, like Korolenko, talked not only about his own adolescence, but also about the youth of his generation. “If people in Europe were more familiar with the Russian people,” he wrote to German writers in 1928, “they would know that Gorky’s story is not an isolated case and does not represent a special exception.”
“Childhood” and “In People” immediately captivated readers. People lived, suffered and rioted on the pages of these books, gaining vital conviction. Gorky once again showed himself to be a great master in sculpting characters. Social and everyday pictures occupy more space in him than in the autobiographical stories of other authors, but all these pictures are closely “linked” to the development of the thoughts and feelings of the main character. The stories convinced us that smoking could not kill healthy, living souls and that in the depths of the old world its future deniers had already begun to form.
In “The History of My Contemporary,” Korolenko strove not to go beyond the framework of pure biography, beyond the framework of what he himself witnessed. In contrast, Gorky sought to typify pictures of everyday life and individual figures. The stories reveal Gorky's understanding of the Russian character, bringing them closer to “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin” and the “Across Rus'” cycle. Gorky's grandmother embodies the true features of Akulina Ivanovna Kashirina, and at the same time it is an enlarged image of a Russian woman, embodying the typical features of the national character. The words of A. Blok are noteworthy: “Now the whole falsity of the end of Goncharov’s “Cliff” is clear to me. That’s where the real grandmother is – Russia.” This bright artistic image was also perceived by M. Prishvin. For him, he is the embodiment of “our homeland.” The figure of the grandfather is no less expressive, recalling that the family environment formed sharply different characters. In the Kashirins' house, the child encounters mercy and hardness of heart, ineradicable kindness and equally ineradicable severity and despotism, with the manifestation of will and self-will.
Bunin saw humility as the basis of the Russian character, and he usually opposed it not to will, but to self-will, which was expressed in the desire to rule or to emphasize one’s unusualness (“Sukhodol”, “Vesely Dvor”, etc.). Gorky often depicted the self-will of his heroes, but for him it was primarily echoes of mischief, close to rebellion, or a dark, still unconscious protest against a meager - spiritually and materially - life.
The writer, who considered passivism a historical ailment of the Russian people, wanted to show, using the example of his own life, how the widespread everyday preaching of patience was overcome, how the will and desire to resist the world of evil and violence were tempered.
The grandmother appears in the story as the bearer of the aesthetic and ethical ideas of the people. It was she who gave her grandson a drink from the inexhaustible source of folk art, introducing him to an understanding of the beauty and inner significance of the word. Grandmother was the first mentor in the field of morality. It was she who gave Alyosha the order: “I would not obey an evil order, I would not hide behind someone else’s conscience!” (15, 105). Grandmother admired her for her optimism, her tenacity in defending her attitude towards the world, her kindness, her fearlessness in difficult moments of life. But for the lovingly portrayed Akulina Ivanovna, patience and meekness are also characteristic. And as her grandson grows up, he begins to move away from her. The teenager now worries about other thoughts and dreams. “I was poorly adapted to patience,” writes Gorky, “and if sometimes I showed this virtue of cattle, wood, stone, I showed it for the sake of self-testing, in order to know the reserve of my strength, the degree of stability on earth<…>For nothing disfigures a person so terribly as his patience and submission to the force of external conditions disfigures him” (15, 456). The generation to which the writer belonged wanted to see their life differently.
The boy went “into the public eye” early. This is the term that marked the beginning of his working life, and at the same time the beginning of a broad knowledge of life among a motley stream of people.
The life of the lower classes is revealed in the story through the prism of Alyosha Peshkov’s perception. It predetermines the selection of phenomena, their coloring, and the nature of the associations that arise. But the young hero is not yet able to formulate the essence of his thoughts and aspirations, and then the author himself comes to the rescue, marking significant milestones in the development of a child and adolescent.
The writer subtly traces Alyosha’s rebellions, showing how spontaneous “I don’t want!” begin to take on social-volitional outlines, as the boy’s romantic desire to become a defender of the oppressed becomes more and more strengthened. Dissatisfaction with the world around us was still unconscious, spontaneous, but it already contained the guarantee of a new worldview.
The Volga flows lazily in Foma Gordeev, as if sleep were holding it down. The great Russian river also moves half asleep in the story “In People.” And the teenager, still vaguely aware of this drowsiness, reaches out to a different, “beautiful, cheerful, honest” life (15, 530). The “lead abominations” that surround man appear in “Childhood” and “In People” in the light of a premonition of a battle that will destroy them. Behind the irony of K. Chukovsky, who wrote that Gorky created in his stories “a comfort for little people,” hidden was an involuntary recognition of the author’s special ideological position. One of the tasks of the stories is to show how “healthy and young at heart” the Russian people are, how many hopes are connected with their future (15, 193).
The stories “Childhood” and “In People” were not limited, however, only to depicting the early formation of the character of the future revolutionary. They also showed the maturation of artistic talent. Both stories tenderly capture the world of emotions of young Peshkov, caused by his communication with interesting people, nature, art and literature. The development of talent is one of the main themes of the writer’s autobiography. But this “individual” topic is also given universal significance. It was a reminder of the rich creative talent of the people, which they managed to demonstrate with such difficulty. In an effort to emphasize this talent, Gorky in the same 1910s. helped write an autobiographical book for Fyodor Chaliapin and contributed to the appearance of an autobiographical story by Ivan Volnov.
Gorky's autobiographical trilogy (the last part of it, “My Universities,” appeared in 1923) became the beginning of the “story of a young man” who took an active part in the events of 1905 and the Great October Revolution.
In 1909, Gorky wrote about L. Tolstoy: “... he told us almost as much about Russian life as all the rest of our literature. The historical significance of Tolstoy’s work is already understood as the result of everything that Russian society experienced throughout the entire 19th century.<…>Without knowing Tolstoy, you cannot consider yourself to know your country, you cannot consider yourself a cultured person.”
Acting as an exponent of the worldview of the patriarchal peasantry, Tolstoy captured in his work the life of Russia before the revolution of 1905. Gorky, being an exponent of the worldview of the proletariat, showed Russia in the period of preparation for the revolution of 1905 and in its movement towards the socialist revolution. Without knowing Gorky, it is difficult to understand the life of Russian society and the historical turning point in the consciousness of Russian people of this time.
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Romanticism and realism in the works of M. Gorky
Maxim Gorky entered Russian literature as a herald of a renewal of life. Despite the fact that Gorky’s early work dates back to a period when realism as a creative method had already emerged in Russian literature, his first stories can safely be called romantic in style, in the character of the characters, and in the situation reproduced in these works.
Romanticism presupposes the affirmation of an exceptional individual who enters into a one-on-one struggle with the world, approaches reality from the position of his ideal, and makes exceptional demands on the environment. The romantic hero is head and shoulders above the people around him; their society is rejected by him. This is the reason for the loneliness so typical of the romantic, which he most often thinks of as a natural state, because people do not understand it and reject his ideal. Therefore, the romantic hero finds an equal beginning only in communication with the elements, with the world of nature, the ocean, sea, mountains, coastal rocks. These are the heroes of Gorky’s early stories: Danko, Larra, Radda and others.
A large role in romantic works is played by landscape - devoid of halftones, based on bright colors, expressing the most indomitable essence of the element and its beauty and exclusivity. It is through the landscape that the original character of the hero is expressed (remember the unique landscape sketches, for example, in “Old Woman Izergil”; in the romantic landscape the old gypsy Makar Chudra appears before the reader: he is surrounded by “the darkness of the autumn night,” which “shuddered and, fearfully moving away, revealed for a moment on the left - the boundless steppe, on the left - the endless sea"). However, the loneliness of a romantic hero can be interpreted both as rejection of his ideal by people, and as a drama of incomprehension and lack of recognition. But even in this case, attempts to get closer to the real world are most often futile: reality does not accept the romantic ideal of the hero due to its exclusivity. Evidence of this is that the main feature of the romantic artistic world is the principle of romantic dual worlds. The romantic, and therefore ideal, world of the hero is opposed to the real world, contradictory and far from the romantic ideal. This is exactly how we see the heroes of Gorky’s early stories, opposing reality. Larra's exceptional individualism, for example, is due to the fact that he is the son of an eagle, who embodies the ideal of strength and will. Nevertheless, people saw “that he was no better than them, only his eyes were cold and proud, like those of the king of birds.” Pride and contempt for others are the two principles that Larra carries within herself. Naturally, this dooms him to loneliness, but this is a desired loneliness for a romantic, resulting from the impossibility of finding someone on earth equal to himself in some way. The hero, in splendid isolation, confronts people and is not afraid of their judgment, since he does not understand it and despises judges. They wanted to sentence him to death, but they are condemning him to immortality, because by killing him, they would only confirm his exclusivity, his right to command and speak to them as slaves - and their powerlessness and fear of him. There is simply no need to talk about the conditionality of Danko’s character - he is like that from the very beginning, in essence.
The composition of the narrative in romantic stories is entirely subordinated to one goal: to recreate the image of the main character as completely as possible. By telling the legends of their people, the heroes give the author ideas about their value system, about the ideal and anti-ideal in human character, as they themselves understand it, and show which personality traits are worthy of respect or contempt. In other words, they thus, as it were, create a coordinate system based on which they can be judged themselves.
A romantic legend is the most important means of creating the image of the main character. Makar Chudra is absolutely sure that pride and love, two beautiful feelings brought by romantics to their highest expression, cannot be reconciled, because compromise is generally unthinkable for the romantic consciousness. The conflict between the feeling of love and the feeling of pride that Rada and Loiko Zobar experience can only be resolved by the death of both: a romantic cannot sacrifice either love that knows no boundaries or absolute pride. But love presupposes humility and the mutual ability to submit to the beloved. This is something neither Loiko nor the Rada can do. But the most interesting thing is how Makar Chudra evaluates this position. He believes that this is exactly how a real person worthy of imitation should perceive life, and that only in such a position in life can one preserve one’s own freedom. The conclusion he made long ago from the story of Rada and Loiko is significant: “Well, falcon, do you want me to tell you a true story? And you remember it and, as you remember it, you will be a free bird throughout your life.” In other words, a truly free person could only realize himself in love, as the heroes “were” did.
The ways of expressing the author’s position are also special in Gorky’s early stories: Gorky’s early romantic stories are characterized by the presence of an image of the narrator. In fact, this is one of the most inconspicuous images, it almost does not manifest itself directly, but the gaze of this particular person is very important for the writer. Gorky calls the narrator not a passer-by, but a passer-by, emphasizing his caring attitude towards everything that falls within the sphere of his perception and comprehension. The fate and worldview of this “passing man” reveal the features of Gorky himself; the fate of his hero largely reflected the fate of the writer, who in his youth experienced Russia in his travels. This gives many researchers the right to talk about Gorky’s narrator in these stories as an autobiographical hero.
Makar Chudra only skeptically listens to the objection of the autobiographical hero - what exactly is their disagreement remains, as it were, behind the scenes of the narrative. But the end of the story, where the narrator, looking into the darkness, sees how the handsome gypsy Loiko Zobar and Rada, the daughter of the old soldier Danila, “were spinning in the darkness of the night smoothly and silently, and the handsome Loiko could not catch up with the proud Rada,” reveals his position . In these words there is admiration for their beauty and uncompromisingness, the strength and irresistibility of their feelings, an understanding of the impossibility of any other resolution to the conflict for the romantic consciousness - but also an awareness of the futility of such a position: after all, even after death, Loiko will not be on par with the proud Rada in his pursuit.
The position of the autobiographical hero in “Old Woman Izergil” is more complexly expressed. By creating the image of the main character using compositional means, Gorky gives her the opportunity to present a romantic ideal that expresses the highest degree of love for people (Danko), and a romantic anti-ideal that embodies individualism and contempt and dislike for people brought to its apogee (Larra). The ideal and the anti-ideal, the two romantic poles of the narrative, expressed in legends, set the coordinate system within which the old woman Izergil herself wants to place herself. The composition of the story is such that two legends seem to frame the narrative of her own life, which constitutes the ideological center of the narrative. Despite Izergil’s confidence that all her life she rather strived for Danko’s pole, the reader immediately draws attention to how easily she forgot her former love for the sake of a new one, how simply she left the people she once loved. In everything - in the portrait, in the author's comments - we see a different point of view on the heroine. A young girl or a young woman full of strength should be talking about beautiful sensual love; Before us is a very old woman, “time has bent her in half, her once black eyes were dull and watery. Her dry voice sounded strange, it crunched, as if the old woman was speaking with bones.” Izergil is sure that her life, full of love, was completely different from the life of the individualist Larra. But everything in the image of Izergil reminds the reader of his - first of all, her individualism, which is approaching Larra’s individualism, her nervousness, her stories about people who have long ago passed their own circle of life: “And they are all just shadows.”
The fundamental distance between the position of the heroine and the narrator forms the ideological center of the story and determines its problematics. The romantic position, for all its beauty and sublimity, is denied by the autobiographical hero. In fact, the autobiographical hero is the only realistic image in Gorky's early romantic stories.
But is Gorky’s work connected only with romanticism? When the writer brought the story “Old Woman Izergil” to Korolenko, he said: “Some strange thing. This is romanticism, and it died long ago. I very much doubt that this Lazarus is worthy of resurrection. It seems to me that you are not singing in your own voice. You are a realist, not a romantic, a realist!” But after the story “Chelkash,” Korolenko was forced to recognize both a realist and a romantic in the young author.
If for realism of the 19th century the main thing was to explain character by those life circumstances of the social, everyday, ethical, aesthetic plane that influence it, then in the new type of realism, the appearance of which is associated precisely with the name of Gorky, the principles of typification change. The influence becomes, as it were, bidirectional: now not only the character is influenced by the environment, but the possibility and even necessity of the individual’s influence on the environment is also affirmed. A new concept of personality is being formed: a person who is not reflective, but creative, realizing himself not in the sphere of private intrigue, but in the public arena. The artist's trust in his hero was evident in the literature of this period.
Gorky's heroes, thanks to the magical power of realistic creativity, seem to be endowed with their own will, so they are able to argue with the author - and win this dispute. In general, realistic literature knows amazing facts about the dispute between a literary hero and his creator. Pushkin also spoke about the heroine’s ability to act as if against the author’s will: his Tatyana got married without the author’s knowledge and unexpectedly for him. In this famous joke by Pushkin, the law of realistic literature was formed: the artistic world becomes the real world, the characters come to life and dictate their will to the author, often contrary to his plan, disagree with him, and are capable of arguing and resisting the author’s dictate, which violates the logic of character. Gorky often experienced this opposition, perhaps without even noticing it.
The revolution gave rise to problems associated with the relationship and interaction of the individual and historical time. The moment of a radical reorganization of existence put each person in a direct relationship with history, which was literally unfolding before everyone’s eyes, and demanded active action in relation to it. The scale of historical and private time turned out to be fundamentally correlated, which was manifested most clearly in Gorky’s work.
Gorky outlines two possible types of relationships between the individual and historical time: contact with it and alienation from it. These polar positions, presented in the writer’s work, seem to form a field of enormous ideological tension between themselves. On the one hand, we see the understanding of life from the angle of a positive, creative consciousness (Alyosha Peshkov in the autobiographical trilogy, the narrator in the cycle of stories “Across Rus'”); on the other hand, as the subject of the image, a negative consciousness arises, as if destroying reality (“The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin”, “The Life of Klim Samgin”). In the latter case, the hero is alienated from time, hostile to it; in the first, he overcomes alienation and becomes on par with time. The writer in his novels seemed to have created two poles, two giant differently charged magnets, between which Gorky’s concept of human personality is formed, which largely determines the ideas about man that were proposed by the Russian realistic novel of the 20th century.
In “The Life of Klin Samgin,” Gorky’s main book, which became his testament, there are two subjects of depiction: historical time and negative, denying consciousness, striving to isolate itself from its “pernicious influences.” Thus, a deep aesthetic contradiction is created in the novel: between historical time and the time of the hero. In fact, we have before us forty years of Russian history, which included several eras, two revolutions, the Khodynka Field, the rise of Russian capitalism, January 9... A chronicle image of time, the continuity of its flow, the absence of retrospections is a way to convey with maximum completeness the objectivity of historical time, its insubordination to the will of a person who would like to slow down its progress, to remain outside its flow. The contradiction between the objective nature of historical time and its subjective perception by Klim Samgin determines the conflict of the novel - the conflict between the hero and his era.
The traditional proportions of the relationship between man and time in Gorky's novel are shifted. Now any person, even someone like Samghin, is cramped within the narrow confines of his environment, and he finds himself face to face with his era, whether he wants it or not. Therefore, an insoluble internal conflict arises in the hero’s mind: on the one hand, he wants to avoid direct contact, on the other, he feels the impossibility of doing this. A hitherto unknown force draws the hero into its turn: “Events, like people during an ice drift, are piled on top of each other. They not only demanded explanations, but also forced Samghin to take physical part in their process.” Physical, active participation emphasizes the real and limitless power of this force, which, against his will, forces him to come into contact with himself. Sometimes this force appears as something irrational, almost like a rock pressing over Samgin: “All his life, this cursed, fantastic reality prevented him from finding himself, sucking into him, forcing him to think about it, but not allowing him to rise above it as a person free from her violence." Samghin can understand and very accurately characterize the reasons for the internal drama that befell him: “The truth is with those,” he argues, “who claim that reality depersonalizes a person, rapes him. There is something... unacceptable in my connection with reality. Communication presupposes interaction, but how can I... or rather, do I want to influence the environment other than for the purpose of self-defense against its restrictive and pernicious influences?
The subject of depiction in Gorky’s drama “At the Bottom” is not only and not so much the social contradictions of reality or possible ways to solve them; For the writer, the consciousness of the night shelters, people thrown out as a result of deep social processes occurring in Russian society at the turn of the century, to the bottom of life, consciousness in all its contradictions, is of much greater interest. Philosophical issues force the author to transform traditional forms of drama: the plot is manifested not in the actions of the characters, but in their dialogues. In the exhibition we see people who, in essence, have come to terms with their tragic situation at the bottom of their lives. Everyone, with the exception of the Tick, does not think about the possibility of getting out of here, but is busy only with thoughts about today or, like the Baron, are turned to nostalgic memories of the past. The beginning of the conflict is the appearance of Luka, who does not want to see swindlers in the flophouses: “I respect swindlers too, in my opinion, not a single flea is bad: they are all black, they all jump,” he says, justifying his right to call his own new neighbors “honest people” and rejecting Bubnov’s objection: “I was honest, but the spring before last.” The origins of this position are in the naive anthropologism of Luke, who believes that a person is initially good and only social circumstances make him bad and imperfect. Luke's position in the drama appears to be very complex, and the author's attitude towards him seems ambiguous. On the one hand, Luke is absolutely unselfish in his preaching and in his desire to awaken in people the best hidden sides of their nature, which they did not even suspect - they contrast so strikingly with their position at the bottom of society. He sincerely wishes the best to his interlocutors and shows real ways to achieve a new, better life. And under the influence of his words, the heroes really experience a metamorphosis. But his true position is revealed by the dispute about what the truth is that he had with Bubnov and Baron, when he mercilessly exposes Nati’s baseless dreams about Raul: “Here... you say - the truth... It’s true - not always due to illness to a person... you can’t always heal a soul with truth...” In other words, it affirms the life-giving nature of a comforting lie for a person.
The concept according to which Gorky unequivocally rejects Luke’s comforting sermon has long dominated in Russian literary criticism. But the writer’s view of this problem is more complex. The author's position is expressed primarily in the development of the plot. After Luke leaves, everything happens completely differently from what the heroes expected and what Luke convinced them of. Vaska Pepel will indeed go to Siberia, but not as a free settler, but as a convict accused of murdering Kostylev. The actor, who has lost faith in his own abilities, will exactly repeat the fate of the hero of the parable about the righteous land, told by Luke. Trusting the hero to tell this plot, Gorky himself will beat him in the fourth act, drawing exactly the opposite conclusions. Luke, having told a parable about a man who, having lost faith in the existence of a righteous land, hanged himself, believes that a person should not be deprived of hope, even illusory. Gorky, showing the fate of the Actor, assures the reader and viewer that it is false hope that can lead a person to a noose, polemicizing with Luke. In the drama “At the Bottom,” Gorky tries to determine what the social circumstances were that influenced the characters’ characters. To do this, he shows the backstory of the characters, which becomes clear to the viewer from the characters' dialogues. But it is more important for him to recreate those social conditions, the circumstances of the “bottom” in which the heroes now find themselves. It is this position that equates the former aristocrat Baron with the sharper Bubnov and the thief Vaska Pepl and forms the common features of consciousness for all: rejection of reality and at the same time a passive attitude towards it. Within Russian realism of the 40s of the 19th century, with the emergence of the natural school and the Gogol movement in literature, a direction emerged that characterizes the pathos of social criticism in relation to reality. It is this direction, which is represented by the names of Gogol, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, that is called critical realism. Gorky in the drama “At the Bottom” continues these traditions, which is manifested in his critical attitude towards the social aspects of life and, in many respects, towards the heroes immersed in this life and shaped by it.
The complexity of Gorky's works from the point of view of method and style is due to the complexity of the time itself and the ideological position of the author, associated with the vicissitudes of his creative fate.
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The work of young Gorky is imbued with the thunderous breath of the era. Revolutionary situation
The 90-900s gave it special significance, strengthened its impact on the democratic strata of society, and revealed the revolutionary charge in the works of the young writer.
From his first steps in literature, Gorky tirelessly searched for forces capable of liberating the people. That is why at the heart of his aesthetic program was a passionate desire to arouse in people an effective attitude towards life.
Gorky's early heroic romance awakened bold, strong, free feelings and thoughts that inevitably accompany any revolutionary upheaval.
Constantly emphasizing his desire to “arouse in the reader a more active attitude towards reality,” Gorky also worked hard “in the direction of criticizing Russian reality.”
This is excellent evidence that at the heart of both romantic and realistic works there is a palpable, fundamentally common orientation towards the struggle against the bourgeois order in the name of human freedom. In realistic stories, Gorky showed specific carriers of social evil and their victims, revealed the vices of a social system based on exploitation, and in romantic legends and tales he expressed aspirations for a bright future, created images of selfless fighters for the ideals of freedom.
The similarity and difference between the romantic and realistic cycles in Gorky's early works are associated with the search for a new positive hero and the formation of a new method in literature.
Critical and creative about the traditions of Russian literature, Gorky also used in his work the experience of world classics, in which the images of heroic freedom fighters, restless, rebellious Protestants were especially close to him. In this regard, Gorky’s increased interest in Pushkin, Lermontov, Byron, and Schiller is very significant.
Naturally, such an attraction to poets who glorified the freedom-loving aspirations of man arose in Gorky under the influence of the trends of the social upsurge that began in the country. But still, it would be wrong to say that already in those years Gorky actually found prototypes for his positive heroes. In the 90s, he did not yet have a real opportunity to embody in a generalized realistic type the traits of a person who was just entering the arena of the struggle for freedom. “Gorky at the dawn of his literary activity,” B. Mikhailovsky rightly writes, “saw only positive principles making their way in one environment or another, he found only relatively, limited positive heroes.”
In this context, we have to consider other stories of Gorky about people from the people, some stories about tramps. The lumpen proletariat, taken as a social group, was never a positive hero of Gorky and could not express his revolutionary hopes.
But, listening to the roar of growing protest among the people’s “lower classes,” Gorky found its manifestations in some people from the world of “outcasts,” “renegades,” and willingly poeticized them (Chelkash, Malva).”
The premonition of a human fighter took the form of a romantic affirmation in Gorky's early work. A.V. Lunacharsky defined the essence of Gorky’s romanticism, opposing a dark and difficult life: “Gorky began to build bridges from the horrors of reality to a bright future. Protest and struggle are such a bridge for him, and he began early and greedily to look around for people who are exponents of this active force and who can, in the words of Nile (“The Philistines”), “knead life in their own way.” B During the first period of his work, Gorky created especially many legends and tales. These are “Makar Chudra”, “The Girl and Death”, “About the Little Fairy and the Young Shepherd”, “Old Woman Izergil”, “Khan and His Son”, “About Chizhe, who lied, and about the Woodpecker - Lover of Truth”. Not all heroic-romantic images of legends and tales carry a revolutionary charge, but they are all contrasted with images of humble and respectable philistines.
Already in the first story, “Makar Chudra,” its hero, an old gypsy, denies the very foundations of such an existence, which dooms a person to a slavish existence. “Well, was he born then, perhaps, to dig up the earth and die, without even having time to dig out his own grave? Does he know his will? Is the expanse of the steppe clear? Does the sound of the sea wave make his heart happy? He is a slave - as soon as he was born, he is a slave all his life, and the weight is here! What can he do with himself? Only he’ll hang himself if he gets a little wiser.”
The old gypsy professes a life-loving philosophy of freedom and happiness; An active nature, he does not accept the preaching of humble Christian morality.
Freedom is most precious to him. To confirm his views, Makar Chudra talks about the love of two young gypsies. Pre red Radda and courageous Zobar love each other very much, but strive to preserve their freedom.
In his early stories, Gorky does not give a portrait of his heroes, but tries to emphasize their bright appearance as a whole, deliberately exaggerating it.
Here Chudra describes Loika:
“The mustache lay on the shoulders and mixed with the curls, the eyes glow like clear stars, and the smile is the whole sun, by God! It’s as if he was forged from one piece of iron along with the horse.”
Such colors are akin to a folk epic, rich in comparisons.
Sometimes Gorky uses a different artistic technique. He seems to interrupt the narrative, fascinated by the beauty of the heroine, expressing his attitude towards her. For example, about Radda’s appearance, old Chudra says this: “You can’t describe anything about her, this Radda, in words. Perhaps its beauty could be played on a violin, and even then to someone who knows this violin like his own soul.”
The story “Makar Chudra” reflected the main features of the writer’s artistic style - emotional intensity of the action, bright contrasting painting, romantic elation in the description of the characters.
"The Wallachian Tale" continues the theme of sublime romantic love. The fairy and the shepherd love each other passionately, but the fairy completely surrenders to her feeling, while the shepherd cannot sacrifice freedom to love, the powerful voice of which calls him.
Death is better than slavery, Gorky’s romantic heroes say. Thus, the young man Marco dies (“The Legend of Marco” was an integral part of the fairy tale “About the Little Fairy and the Young Shepherd”). However, these tragic endings are essentially optimistic, because they affirm the strength of the human will, faith in man, in his mind, and an ineradicable thirst for freedom. Man here is shown not as defeated, crushed by life, having given up struggle, action; he is the creator of life, and the strength of his sublime, great feelings is such that life must triumph over death.
In 1892, Gorky created the poem “The Girl and Death,” which in allegorical form speaks of the all-conquering power of human love.
Gorky said that he was unlikely to write anything as harmonious and beautiful as the story “The Old Woman Izergil.” In terms of artistic perfection, this story is one of the best works of the writer. In terms of poetic sound and artistic coloring, it is closest to the story “Makar Chudra”. However, both artistically and ideologically, the story “Old Woman Izergil” is more significant and allows us to talk about the subsequent creative development of the writer.
Composition
All of M. Gorky's early work was aimed at searching for a positive hero, on the one hand, and at mercilessly denouncing existing reality, on the other. Therefore, in the work of the young writer, two artistic methods are uniquely intertwined - romanticism and realism. This is confirmed by M. Gorky himself in the article “On how I learned to write”: “So, to the question: why did I start writing? - I answer: due to the force of pressure on me from a “languorously poor life” and because I had so many impressions that “I could not help but write.” The first reason forced me to try to introduce fiction, inventions into the “poor life” ... and due to the strength of the second reason, I began to write stories of a “realistic” nature ... "
At the center of the writer’s early works is the conflict between a strong personality and the rest of the world, which cannot but be considered typically romantic. In this conflict, the author is, of course, on the side of the strong personality and gives her all the basic attributes of a romantic character: pride, loneliness, an unquenchable desire for freedom. This is, for example, Makar Chudra in the story of the same name. He is a free gypsy, independent and proud. The ideal person for Makar is a wanderer who experiences the world on his travels: “Is this how you walk? This is good! You have chosen a glorious fate for yourself, falcon. That’s how it should be: go and look, you’ve seen enough, lie down and die - that’s all!”
The ideal romantic hero is always in conflict with the world, with the existing order of things. In the legend of Loiko and Radda, which is told by Makar Chudra, two strong personalities collide. Their independence and pride delight and attract, but also condemn them to loneliness and the impossibility of happiness. They become slaves to their own pride, they are ready to give their lives for freedom, they will not sacrifice it even for the sake of the people they love. In his early stories, M. Gorky portrayed tramps - “former people”, rejected by society, who have lost everything. There are certainly realistic tendencies in these stories. They manifest themselves, firstly, in the merciless exposure of the social order that pushes far from the worst people out of life. Thus, Chelkash in the story of the same name has a “vibrant nervous nature,” but she does not find any other manifestation in this world other than theft and drunkenness. Secondly, in these stories the “former people” are depicted as truly people. Here Gorky follows one of the most important canons of realism: to look for and find Man in any person, even the most “small” and downtrodden. In this regard, the early prose of M. Gorky certainly opposes pessimism, despair, cynicism, and shows that every person harbors a huge reserve of strength.
Romantic and realistic tendencies are intertwined in Gorky's perception of nature. On the one hand, as often happens in realistic works, nature expresses the essence of the hero’s character. It is no coincidence, for example, that Chelkash feels free only at sea, and the dying Larra looks up at the sky. This emphasizes the pride and loneliness of the heroes. On the other hand, as in the works of the romantics, nature is closely connected with the mental state of the heroes. The sea in the story “Chelkash”, the forest in the legend of Danko, the steppe in the story “Grandfather Arkhip and Lenka” change as the plot develops: if at the beginning of the work nature is calm, then during the collision of the heroes a thunderstorm or storm begins.
The point of intersection of romantic and realistic tendencies in the early works of M. Gorky is the writer’s thought about Man. A man whose calling, as M. Gorky writes, is “to create something new on the unshakable foundations of freedom, beauty, and respect for people forged by thought!”