Mother (Gorky novel)
어머니 (고리키 소설)
A 1906 novel by Maxim Gorky. Pelageya Nilovna, the fearful mother of a factory worker, follows her revolutionary son into carrying banned leaflets until she is seized at a railway station. It is the only one of Gorky's novels devoted directly to the labour movement; he himself called it a failure, while Lenin called it "a very timely book".
In depth
What is the story?
Russia at the start of the twentieth century, a workers' settlement whose whole life hangs on the factory. Pavel Vlasov, son of the locksmith's widow Pelageya Nilovna, stops drinking one day and starts to read. He brings books from town and gathers comrades at the house who have also given up drink. Leaflets about the workers' plight begin to circulate in the factory, and his mother is both proud of him and afraid for him.
The house is searched and Pavel's friend Andrei Nakhodka is taken away. When the factory announces a deduction from wages Pavel tries to organise a protest, but the workers do not follow, and he too is arrested. From then on his mother carries the leaflets herself. Released, Pavel and Andrei lead a May Day march, are dispersed and jailed again. She visits her son and even tries to arrange an escape, which he refuses.
At the trial all the defendants are sentenced to exile. The comrades decide to print Pavel's speech to the court, and she volunteers to take it to another town. At the railway station she notices a vaguely familiar man and remembers seeing him outside the court and the prison. She has been found out. He accuses her of theft; indignant, she answers that she is carrying the speech of her son, a political prisoner, and tries to hand the leaflets to the crowd as gendarmes seize her and stop her mouth.
Did it come from real events?
Gorky wrote the novel in 1906 during a journey to the United States, while the 1905 revolution was still going on. The plot draws on the May Day demonstration at Sormovo in 1902, and Pavel's prototype is the revolutionary worker Pyotr Zalomov. Sormovo was in Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky's home town, and Zalomov's mother was a distant relative whom he had seen as a child.
The purpose was plain from the outset: Gorky admitted that he wrote "with agitational intentions", wanting to keep revolutionary feeling alive.
Why did its author call it bad?
The harshest critic of the novel was Gorky. "Mother is really a bad book," he wrote, composed "in a state of heat and irritation"; were he to review Gorky, he said, it would be his most vicious and merciless piece. He added only that the book seemed to have reached its goal to some degree.
Russian critics were cold as well. Alexander Blok found "not one new thought and not one bright line"; Korney Chukovsky thought talent had been sacrificed to doctrine; and even in the Social Democratic press the idealisation of revolutionaries drew complaint. Yet as Gorky himself noted, the book was a great success in Germany and France, and it was popular among workers. Karl Kautsky wrote in thanks that he felt he had lived in those conditions himself, and Leonid Andreyev felt as if the people themselves had begun to speak of revolution.
Lenin's reaction survives in Gorky's memoir. When Gorky began to say that he had hurried the book, Lenin nodded and called it "a very timely book": the only compliment, Gorky wrote, but one he valued highly. According to Maria Andreyeva, Lenin too saw its idealisation of revolutionary intellectuals as a flaw.
How is it read today?
Later judgments also divide. Andrei Sinyavsky dissected its faults as an early model of Socialist Realism. The scholar Richard Freeborn, by contrast, observed that though the revolutionaries mostly voice the author's ideas, the reader can still feel for them, since we see them through Nilovna's eyes and the idealisation becomes hers. Marilyn Minto likewise thought Nilovna's transformation realistically drawn. That is what keeps the book interesting now: a woman waking from a life of fear and ignorance.
The other striking thing is its religious language. Characters are compared to angels and apostles, the May Day march is called a "procession of the cross", and Pavel's name recalls the apostle Paul. This reflects the "god-building" current of the time, and it brought Gorky a criminal case for blasphemy. Pavel Basinsky called the novel "an attempt to write a new Gospel".
What came of it?
Bertolt Brecht based a play on it in 1931, and Tikhon Khrennikov's opera reached the Bolshoi in 1957. Film versions include those of 1919, Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother of 1926, Mark Donskoy's of 1955 and Gleb Panfilov's of 1989.