Maksim Gorky’s autobiographical ”My childhood” (1913) begins with what is both a death and födelsescen. On the floor in a dim, narrow chamber is the father vitklädd and lifeless, with grinning teeth and a couple of mites on the closed eyes. In front of him sits the mother half-naked and rocking, combs his hair with teary face.
The femårige the narrator, Alexei, stands apart with his grandmother in the hand. Suddenly hurl themselves modern at the back in the “birthpangs”, her hair flowing out on the floor. It is one of the world literatures more dramatic and svårförglömliga inledningsscener: ”Mother moaned and screamed, granny ran criss-cross, and the father was motionless in the middle of all the fights and as well as laughed at all of it.”
And then, suddenly, a child screams. But closely following are two jordfästelser: for the father and for the little brother who dies a few days later. These two great losses, sets the standard in the first part of the Russian writer Maksim Gorky (1868-1934), the famous autobiographical trilogy. The first sends him into a chaotic existence of a choleric and brutal grandfather, in whose home the sons beat everything to pieces, and where ”everyone’s enmity of all against all ‘ prevails.
The other will, many years later, lead him to take his brother’s first name Maksim, together with the Gorky – ”the bittre” – as a pseudonym, after he with his own words begun to address the misery that the poor Russian people lived in, the one which has both the name of the father that the brother’s life.
also come to coffee: cantata of death, violence and loss. But also her grandmother as a secure constant in the midst of all, a ömhetsnav in an existence of urgröpande poverty, which helps him to preserve a humanistic core, through the years, and not fall victim to the worst cynicism and bitterness. If her entry in his life writes Gorky: ”Before she came I had as well as been inkrupen in a dark corner and slept. But then she came and woke me up, brought me out into the light, gave context to everything around me and annexed it together into a glorious whole”.
It is in the year one hundred and fifty years ago Gorky was born, and he is to this day a controversial writer both in his homeland and abroad. He soon became a devoted supporter of the labour movement and actively participated in the first revolutionsförsöket 1905. Over the years, he became the most widely read and distributed, the author in the Soviet union, canonized and exalted by the Kremlin and at his death in 1936 celebrated with a grand state funeral, the place where Joseph Stalin himself carried his ashes on a blomsterdekorerad stretcher over the Moscow streets before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of spectators.
have in retrospect come to make Gorky to an ambivalent figure. Aleksandr Solsjenitsyn called him in the ”Gulagarkipelagen” (1973) for a ”collaborator to avrättarna”, not least because of His support for the construction of the Vitahavskanalen, carried out by the ” from the Gulag. Others argued that his literary heritage and the deed were seized in statsideologins name, as the writer Mikhail Prishvin: ”Gorky was taken from us by the state, and the funeral, the most intimate of events for a man, his funeral, approprierades”. Some have even claimed that Stalin was behind his death, because it coincided with The great purge 1934-36.
to date, it is the Gorky probably far more known and read in, for example, my parents ‘ China than in Sweden. Certainly, he was for several years nominated for the Nobel prize, which, however, was more västtillvände countryman Ivan Bunin in 1933, which was popular among anti-communist Russian emigres and western critics.
established already long before Stalin chose him to be their minion. The debut of ”Essays and tales” (1898) did with its vivid language and burning revolutionsbudskap him one of Russia’s most acclaimed and controversial author of a night. Later he was known as the poet behind the oft-quoted revolutionary poem ”the Song of stormfågeln” (1901) and the play ”Natthärbärget” (1902), about a group of poor homeless people living on the Volgaflodens beach, who not only played around in the whole of Russia, but also in Berlin – three hundred times in a row.
But the most memorable one is probably the autobiographical novel trilogy. Together constitute the ”My childhood”, ”Out in the world” (1916) and ”My universities” (1923), one of world literatures great classics. It is the story of a Russian working boy in the second half of the 1800s who leave believed that his choice to take a job on a steamboat. He then works as skeppslastare, skrotsamlare, cleaners and a long list of other professions that will bring him from place to place, while he was on night schooling in the literary classics.
On the way, he gathers a plethora of in-depth impression of the colorful characters of the Russian fattigbefolkningen – workers, tramps, mothers, prostitutes, the ‘ wind-driven existences – subscribed in the novel in a set of characters of Dickenska dimensions.
, and he was left at the realistic tradition in Tolstoy’s follower even after 1905, when most other Russian writers and artists gravitated toward the more experimental literary forms – a development that escalates after the revolution of 1917. A veritable explosion of literary movements in bloom now up side by side, far from the regimentation many people today might associate with soviet literature. This is from those who think they see the birth of a new world that requires that the art forms återuppfinns from zero (for example, Proletkult), to those who believe literature to be a free zone from the requirements of political action (for example, Russian formalism), to Gorky, socialrealism based in a förrevolutionär, bourgeois tradition.
A decade later, would this window switch again; after the first femårsplanens introduction in 1928 would be the experimental expression has increasingly come to be branded as bourgeois decadence. In the same movement, would the socialrealism Gorky represented increasingly come to be established as the only permissible expression. It may seem ironic, then Gorky for several decades been working for the Russian author’s freedom of expression and pushed the key to the magazine Letopis (Chronicle), where he published some of Russia’s foremost writers and poets, such as Aleksandr Blok, Isaak Babel, formalisten Viktor Sklovskij, imagisten Sergei Jesenin and futuristen Vladimir Mayakovsky.
was Gorky the great humanist in the Russian literature. In His world possesses, man is an inherent goodness to that of the Russian fattigbefolkningen been crushed and distorted under capitalism. In his literature, he returns again and again to the religion, the revolutionary project and the arts as forces that can bring man’s oppressed and slumbering humanity to life and open her eyes to their rich internal opportunities.
In the ”Modern” (1906) contains all these elements. The novel revolves around a poor arbetarkvinnas step-by-step political and spiritual awakening after her son begins to organise the workers in the small fabrikssamhället where they live. Graphically portrayed the daily life in the city where everything revolves around the factory or brandy, and how the socialist ideas gradually gaining a foothold all over Russia.
It is a socialpedagogisk novel written to be read by anyone and is not particularly memorable for their literary qualities, which often move in the gestiskt klichéartade (tears constantly over the mother’s face, people falling in each other’s arms ”in the deep consensus”, and so on). But it is a most interesting depiction of how a local political movement built from the bottom up and how the fight for the changes people’s inner constitution; how the connection to the workers ‘ struggle also with the invention of a future and a past.
also with a högstämd christian rhetoric. This Gorky, religious socialism, with its romantic features, like Lenin absolutely could not stand, can in the highest degree, seem distant in the day. At the same time is Gorky, a romantic who, unlike a lot of our time arbetarskildringar – never romantiserar working-class existence, never compromises in its mapping of the destructive effects of the action, its the most dirty and corrupt elements.
what makes The novel trilogy so powerful is that it is not about a class trip, unlike His own life. And this surpasses perhaps the literature of reality. There is no redemptive resolution, no edifying relief in the form of any revolutionsdröm. It is only about a boy with unusual abilities, but limited opportunities, which is trying to get ahead in the world, but because of the social class he was born into the encounter of adversity on adversity and slowly break down.
political and literary resonance: not when he writes about socialism salvation, but when he is empathetic and close to depicting it, which, in Georg the lukács’s words, ”just about to be destroyed, and how it is destroyed, during the conflict.”
