Mother

Author: (Russian) Maxim Gorky
Translators: Wu Xinyong, Liu Xinyu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: Mother holds a very important position in the history of Russian and world literature, and is also one of the most influential foreign literary works in China. It was included as an excerpt in middle school Chinese textbooks after the founding of New China. Gorky was a Russian naturalist novelist and a master of the Soviet literary scene. The literary world once called him one of the "unsurpassable peaks" in the history of Russian literature, alongside Tolstoy and Chekhov. Lu Xun and Guo Moruo regarded him as their mentor. Gorky (1868–1936), a great proletarian writer and the founder of Soviet literature, was originally named Alexei Maximovich Pishevikov. He was born in Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga River in Russia (now Gorky City) in 1868. His father was a carpenter. After his father's early death, he lived with his grandmother, who ran a small dyeing business. At the age of 11, he began to earn a living independently, and his childhood and youth were spent at the bottom of the old society. Gorky's extraordinary early life was vividly recorded in his famous autobiographical trilogy. The hardships of life and the bitterness of existence tempered his will; he studied diligently in his spare time despite heavy labor. His deep experience and understanding of the suffering of the working class became an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his writing. In 1892, under the pen name Maxim Gorky (meaning "the greatest suffering"), he published his first work, Makar Chudra. Among his early works, the most famous romantic short stories, The Old Woman Izergil and The Song of the Eagle, and the representative work depicting the life of vagrants, Chelkash, were all published in 1895. In 1899, Gorky completed his first full-length novel, Foma Gordeyev. In 1901, Gorky was arrested for participating in a demonstration in St. Petersburg. The famous prose poem The Seagull was written after this demonstration, and in this passionate revolutionary manifesto, he welcomed the storm of the proletarian revolution of the 20th century. That same year, he wrote a play titled The Lower Depths, which marked his outstanding achievement in creating the image of a revolutionary proletarian (Revolutionary Worker Nil) in world literary history. In 1902, he wrote the play The Lower Depths, which summarized his 20 years of observation of the lives of vagrants and is a masterpiece of Gorky's drama. During the years of the 1905 revolution, Gorky participated in the revolutionary movement as a fighter, and his home became one of the headquarters for the armed uprising in Moscow in 1905. In 1906, his greatest masterpiece, Mother, was published. In the history of world literature, it is a landmark work that opened a new historical period for proletarian literature. That same year, in the United States, he wrote the play Enemies, one of his finest dramas, depicting a workers' uprising. From 1906 to 1913, Gorky was forced to live in Italy due to the persecution of the Tsarist government and became a political exile. In the spring of 1907, he attended the fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in London. From then on, he established close ties and a deep friendship with Lenin. Between 1911 and 1913, he wrote the collection of stories Italian Folktales. In 1913, Gorky completed the first part of his autobiographical trilogy, Childhood. In 1913, Gorky returned to his homeland and took charge of the literary column of The Truth newspaper, engaging in cultural organization work and literary activities. In 1916, he published the second part of his autobiographical trilogy, In the World, and in 1922, the third part, My University. After the October Revolution, in 1925, he published the novel The Career of Nekromonov. Between 1925 and 1936, he wrote the epic The Life of Klim Samgin, his last major work, which is one of his most outstanding artistic achievements. In 1934, under Gorky's leadership, the first All-Union Writers' Congress was held, and Gorky was elected as the chairman of the Soviet Writers' Union.