- Essays
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- Romanticism in Gorky's works
At the turn of the 18th – 19th centuries, a new direction in literature appeared in Europe, which was called romanticism. Its main feature is the vivid transmission of emotions. The main representatives of this trend in Russia were Lermontov, Pushkin and Gorky.
Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov took the pseudonym Maxim Gorky; he was one of the brightest authors of world culture.
He was born in 1868 on March 28 in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. In 1879 he became an orphan. His relatives took him to Kazan. In 1888 he began to engage in literary activities. He passed away in June 1936 in the village of Gorki.
He was often criticized, and his mental abilities were generally questioned. But only he was able to tell the history of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century on such a grand scale. He wrote the work “Notes from a Diary”, in which he described a Russian man with a capital “R”.
But the romanticism movement is present only in his early books. During this period, he describes his characters as fearless and principled people. His heroes live in order to achieve a great goal.
This is clearly seen in the example of Danko or the old woman Izergil. They are brave and courageous. “Song of the Petrel” also belongs to romantic works. In the image of a bird, Gorky wanted to show strength and confidence. The petrel dreams of “soaring high” and seeing the bright sun through the clouds. The mood of the revolutionary upsurge, seething among the masses, set the writer in a romantic mood. Due to the ongoing processes in society, the writer began to appear images of heroes who can save people and take them out of the darkness.
This period of the writer’s creativity coincides with the flourishing of the revolutionary movement in Russia. And the writer glorifies the image of a desperate and honest revolutionary who pursues romantic goals of changing the world for the better.
A special focus of Gorky’s romanticism was the equal division of characters into negative and positive, there are no complex personal relationships, no half-hearted characters, the writer has either positive qualities or negative qualities. This technique helps the writer convey his attitude towards the hero and note those from whom he should take an example.
In addition, the writer used the technique of describing love for nature in his works of a romantic nature. She plays an important role in all his works; all romantic scenes take place in the lap of nature. The author loved to describe the mountains and forests. Nature has always influenced all the heroes of stories. Its individual parts were symbols.
The basis of the writer’s romanticism was the image of a hero who must save people. The hero does not go anywhere, but rather tries to show everyone the right path. The core values are freedom and self-sacrifice..
Reasons for Gorky's turn to romantic poetics
Gorky called “The Old Woman Izergil” (until he wrote “The Birth of Man”) his best story. Such a high rating is surprising from a writer who was mercilessly critical of almost everything he created, who considered many of his wonderful early stories, “Foma Gordeev,” “At the Lower Depths,” “Mother,” etc., unsuccessful. This means that there was something especially important for Gorky in the story “Old Woman Izergil”. This story has a surprisingly harmonious composition. The three parts of the work illuminate the three paths possible for each person. The author, as it were, turns the reader into the hero of a fairy tale or epic, leading him to the crossroads of three roads and warning him about the obstacles and dangers that each of them conceals (he will do the same thing later in the story “Three”).
The content of the first part of the triptych is the legend of Larra (as the old woman Izergil explains, Larra means “outcast, thrown out”). Once V.G. Belinsky said that in the future society there will be no death penalty, and the most serious crimes will be punished with immortality: eternal rejection. The same punishment was mentioned in Shchedrin’s brilliant fairy tale “Christ’s Night.” Considering death to be insufficient retribution for the executed traitor, Christ resurrects him, and the traitor begins to seek death, but does not find it: he is condemned to eternal life, which means eternal execution for him. The same idea is embodied in the legend of Larra, only it acquired a new meaning for Gorky: he entered into a struggle with that system of ideas that was destined to become perhaps the main spiritual support of the most reactionary forces, the most dangerous for humanity. Larra descends from the mountains to the inhabitants of the valleys. He, the son of the eagle king of birds, despises ordinary people and does not want to take into account their desires and laws. “Everyone even became scared when 449 everyone realized what kind of loneliness he was dooming himself to,” but Larra himself was not at all scared at first. He laughed when the tribe began to drive him away, and he laughed even louder when he was condemned to immortality. He remained “... alone, free, like his father... But his father was not a man... And this one was a man.”
Man, unlike an animal, a beast, cannot live outside of society, and Larra begins to be drawn to people: “... for a long time he, lonely, hung around people like that...” And then retribution comes to him: “there is no place for him among people ", "there is no life, and death does not smile on him."
Larra’s fate teaches: there is no more terrible misfortune than loneliness. And the legend about Danko’s burning heart, which forms the content of the final part of the triptych, tells about another immortality, which comes not as the “highest punishment”, but as the highest reward - comes to the hero who sacrifices his life in the fight for the freedom of the people. What does the central part of the triptych, dedicated to the fate of Izergil herself, tell about? About the fact that you cannot perform feats and at the same time live only for yourself, only for personal happiness, that you cannot be Danko and Larra at the same time.
Retribution also comes to Izergil: a “fearful, slavish note” begins to sound in the soul of this strong and proud woman. Therefore, Izergil evokes neither admiration, like Danko, nor hatred, like Larra, but only pity.
N.K. Mikhailovsky assured that M. Gorky treats Larra and Danko equally, that both of them are equally bearers of “master morality.” He also called Makar Chudra a “supertramp” (by analogy with a “superman”) and, in essence, brought all Gorky’s tramps under this. In this he was close (extremes meet!) to the decadents he hated. In the same 1898, responding to the same Gorky “Essays and Stories,” N. Minsky called Makar Chudra “the steppe Nietzsche” and declared the ideal of Gorky’s heroes (“and, perhaps, himself”) to be the desire to “live without thinking about life , to live not to the best of your understanding, but to the best of your strength; love strength, no matter how it manifests itself, and despise weakness, no matter what words it hides under.” True, the populists spoke of Gorky’s inclination towards the “cult of power” as a vice that brought him closer to the decadents, and the decadents - as a virtue that allowed them to hope for his liberation from the “fetters of citizenship.”
N. Minsky with satisfaction Fr. However, populists, decadents, modernists, and bourgeois-liberal critics equally attributed to Gorky himself the anarchic worldview of his heroes. And although all these critics soon became convinced that the writer’s consciousness was developing in a direction that had nothing to do with anarchism, preconceived notions about his early work lived for a very long time, and partly (if we talk about modern foreign bourgeois literary criticism) still live.
The hero-storyteller, who appeared already in M. Gorky’s first story “Makar Chudra”, then went through many of his early works: “Emelyan Pilyai”, “My Companion”, “One Day in the Autumn”, “Konovalov”, “Rogue” and others. In almost each of these stories, this hero enters into an argument with his vagabond interlocutors, similar to the one that broke out between him and Makar Chudra.
Gorky dealt a particularly strong blow to the philistinism, exposing its “structure of the soul”, the foundations of philistine psychology and ideology. He dealt such blows by glorifying - in contrast to the bourgeois inertia and cowardice - the “madness of the brave” (this side of his work was underestimated by Chekhov) and painting - in contrast to the bourgeoisie striving for peace - “not so much rejected as rejected” - “those who rejected” this peace people who even preferred the “bottom” to the bourgeois well-being.
Their fates were tragic, but this tragedy also turned against the philistinism, becoming a harsh indictment. And the amazing pictures of the steppe and sea expanses, all the colors and all the music of Gorky’s stories, all the poetry of freedom, uninhibitedness, freedom that permeates them - all this increased the contempt for those to whom such poetry is inaccessible and alien, to whom it fears the most.
