The Mother (1906 novel)

The Mother (Russian Мать / Matj ) is a semi-documentary novel by Maxim Gorky from the year 1906/1907; it deals with the revolutionary struggle of the young worker Pawel and his mother's associated proletarian awareness. The work is considered the first and one of the most important novels of socialist realism. The novel was made ​​into a film under the same title in 1926 by Vsevolod Pudovkin Illarionovich. Bertolt Brecht wrote in the context of his " teaching pieces " a stage adaptation, which was premiered in 1932.

Content

In the first part of the hard life of the working woman Pelageja Nilownas is described, in which she has to suffer greatly from her violent husband. In the following chapters the development of her son Pawel is towards the local leader of the Social Democratic Party, the suburb in which they live, portrayed. When he is arrested for a leaflet campaign, it performs its action on, so he is relieved. Later he becomes eventually been permanently in court, she continues his work until it is also arrested, not without first can still distribute a revolutionary pamphlet of her son to the proletarian masses.

Interpretation

Gorky processed in the novel his experiences during the pre-Revolutionary May Day demonstration in Nizhny Novgorod in 1902 and calls with the description of a simple working-class woman, who then acquires the activities and the arrest of her son revolutionary consciousness, the struggle of the working class against Tsarist rule and exploitation on.

The plant is, despite its importance as an early work of his style as a strong agitational literature rather weak, the artistic realization as a " stepchild of the didactic pathos ". However, the novel was due to its agitational attitude a great success in the pre-revolutionary readership of the working class, and during the Soviet era, it was considered the flagship socialist novel par excellence.

The huge number of conditions, both in German and in other languages ​​, is manageable only for professionals.