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Abstract:

The problem of intellectuals, through in the works of M. Gorky, still causes controversy in criticism and literary criticism, unfounded accusations. Meanwhile, Gorky’s deep vision of the role of intellectuals in the life of the country is determined by biographical, ideological, historical and literary factors. The attraction that arose in adolescence to the  intelligentsia as a source of knowledge and real power in resolving painful life issues (“In People”, “My Universities”, etc.), it did not lose its magnetism in the 1890s (“MAAlenka!”, Foma Gordeev), and in the 1900s. when with special sharpness there was for it a problem of formation of democratic intellectuals (“Man”, “Three”, “Petty Bourgeois”, “Summer Residents”, “Children of the Sun”, Mother), remaining conceptual to the last days of the author of Untimely Thoughts and The Life of Klim Samgin. The disintegration of the intelligentsia into the polar groups after the defeat of the first Russian revolution caused, on the one hand, a sharply negative attitude of Gorky-a publicist to «teachers of life», various confusions, guilty of increasing the gap between the people and the intelligentsia (From Afar, “Untimely”, etc.), on the other, — to talk about the unification of the advanced forces of the country, to strive for the image of sane people who are not indifferent to the people’s troubles: Nikolai Ivanovich, Sophia, Egor Ivanovich (Mother), Mansurov (“The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin”), engineer Mitya Longinov (Artamonov’s Case), Makarov, Turoboev, Dmitry Samgin and others (The Life of Klim Samgin), fully protecting the intelligentsia as a valuable cultural layer on the way of society to a new world.

Keywords: M. Gorky, intellectuals, early prose, “Man”, journalism of the 1910s, The Life of Klim Samgin.