Maxim Gorky was trumpeted as ‘the great proletarian writer’ by Soviet critics, who considered his novel The Mother one of the most significant books of the 20th century. Completed in 1906, after Gorky had already been recognised internationally, it is based on the events of 1902, when the workers of Sormovo, a factory settlement near Gorky’s native city of Nizhny Novgorod, held what we’d now call a ‘mass anti-capitalist protest’. The demonstration was brutally dispersed and, after a trial that stirred Russia, six of its organisers were sentenced to life in exile. The October Revolution was still 15 years away.
The book starts with a description of the settlement’s bleak life, filled with hard work and hard drinking. Pavel Vlasov, a young worker living with his mother, Nilovna, wants to find a way out.
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