Mother Paperback – 15 Oct. 2018

I read a lot of Gorky in my youth. Forty five years on I found this slow and laboured. It was a struggle to finish it.

I first read 'Mother' back in the late 1960's. The title has lodged in my mind although not the context.I now know why I found it so gripping.

'Mother' (1907) captures well the simmering resentment of the lower-classes in pre-Revolution Tsarist Russia. But the plot is linear and the Quixotic, humanistic sermonising repetitious and irritating. The sense of naivety is exacerbated by Gorky's failure to anticipate the dangers of a power vacuum emerging in such a corrupt, toxic and unimaginably vast country. Though the final third of his book has momentum, the pacing falls flat in the middle of an overlong story that could have been told with more impact in far fewer words.

This has the distinction of being the only major Russian literary work written in the USA, being written when the author was in exile there in 1906. It is a tale of the purity of the revolutionary soul opposed to the infinitely corrupt and historically wrong soul of the capitalist oppressor. As such, it is populated by characters who are really ciphers who don't come across as real, living, breathing people, except (up to a point) the eponymous mother. The benefit of the hindsight of the Soviet experience also sharply reduces the impact of this novel. That said, it flows mostly very smoothly and is a easy read for a Russian novel.

This book tells the story of a woman living in the tsarist Russia of the early XX century that is drawn into social activism by her son.Gorky is a very good storyteller, and the whole plot really moves you.It might became a bit dull if one is not really into Socialism or Communism, since popular heroes is what this is all about.Even so, I think everyone should give it a try.This is the book that inspired Bertolt Brecht to writing his acclaimed play «Mother Courage and her Children».