MOTHER, ACCORDING TO THE JACKET and the reverent introduction by Howard Fast, is Maxim Gorky’s most notable achievement; the most beloved of his works in his native Russia, the novel most often and most widely translated, the novel most reread and treasured by people everywhere. In a word, this is Gorky’s best-seller.
And, indeed, though I have not read this book before and am scarcely likely to enter the fellowship of the faithful now that I have, the reasons for this resounding popularity are evident on each brave and bitter page. With some ideological concessions and the proper makeup Mother would make an impressive vehicle for, say, Bette Davis. It is rich in struggle, tears, courage, and good old-fashioned mother love. Reading it is a little like a rereading of the beloved, dog-eared classics of our childhood: how musty it is now, how brave it was then, what a pity we cannot believe it anymore!
Mother, as I gather a great portion of the world’s population knows by now, is that novel dealing with the Russian workers just before the October Revolution. The story is that of a Russian mother’s relationship with her revolutionary son; and we watch the mother as she becomes “step by step, a fighter for justice.” The characterization of Nilovna is, in fact, done with a great deal of skill; she is by far the most fully realized character in the book, even though, so accustomed have we become to the proletarian novel, she is entirely predictable, and her development proceeds along lines since grown monotonous. When first written and published, this novel must have had that same splendid fire and impetus characteristic of all battle hymns when people are in the midst of a struggle, and their blood, as the saying goes, is up. Much of the atmosphere of struggle is captured here—the rage, the wretchedness, the heroism—and reading it now, wise after the event, one is also aware of a terrible futility, a sensation of constriction and waste. The battle betrayed becomes, in retrospect, more terrible than the battle itself, the most especially when the betrayal of the battle can be seen to have been caused by those very elements which gave the battle purpose. In the urgency of battle barricades are set up, issues are defined, the intermediate colors disappear. We have instead the verities of our childhood, the contrast of night and day. It is no place for Hamlet.
Gorky, not in the habit of describing intermediate colors, even when he suspected their existence, has in Mother written a Russian battle hymn which history has so cruelly and summarily dated that we are almost unwilling to credit it with any reality. In spite of the monstrous sentimentality of this tale, the resolute repetition of words like “truth” and “justice,” and the romantic unreality of almost all of its people, there is an ugly, hard truth under it: this did happen, not very long ago; these people really believed in a better world and struggled to bring it about. Nilovna’s last words have a ring of doom and despair which could hardly have been intended: “You heap up only wrath against yourselves, you unwise ones! It will fall on you—you poor, sorry creatures.”
We poor, sorry creatures have not yet, for all our struggle, made this planet a fitting habitation, nor have we learned to live on it at peace with ourselves or with each other. “For us,” cries Andrey, “there are only comrades and foes.” Indeed; and this formulation, with its implicit challenge to engage in perpetual battle, is not likely to change; nor, on the other hand, is the battle likely to grow any simpler, particularly when the distinction between comrades and foes has become so faint as to reduce us all to a state of incipient schizophrenia.
Fast, in his introduction, makes a good deal of the fact that Gorky never severed himself from the people, that he was active in their cause always and was highly revered by his nation. He was the foremost exponent of the maxim that “art is the weapon of the working class.” He is also, probably, the major example of the invalidity of such a doctrine. (It is rather like saying that art is the weapon of the American housewife.) The phrase has always brought to my mind the image of a soldier rushing into battle waving a volume of Shakespeare on the point of a bayonet. Art, to be sure, has its roots in the lives of human beings: the weakness, the strength, the absurdity. I doubt that it is limited to our comrades; since we have discovered that art does not belong to what was once the aristocracy, it does not therefore follow that it has become the exclusive property of the common man—which abstraction, by the way, I have yet to meet. Rather, since it is involved with all of us, it belongs to all of us, and this includes our foes, who are as desperate and as vacuous and as blind as we are and who can only be as evil as we are ourselves.
(1947)