Information about the author:
Natalia N. Primochkina
Natalia N. Primochkina, DSc in Philology, Director of Research, Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5536-7657
E-mail:
Acknowledgements:
This article was prepared in A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences as part of the Russian Science Foundation grant (RSF, project № 21-18-00131, “A.M. Gorky in Germany: the Writer and his Environment in the Socioсultural and Literary-Media Space”).
Abstract:
Based on archival documents and materials of M. Gorky’s personal library, the article examines the question of the writer’s attitude to German expressionism, the brightest trend in German art of the early twentieth century. The facts of Gorky’s creative and personal contacts with leading German theater directors M. Reinhardt and E. Piscator, with revolutionary expressionist writers I. Becher, E. Toller, etc. are considered, the interest of the Russian writer in various types of German expressionist art is revealed: literature, theater and cinema. The analysis of Gorky’s works in the context of the work of the German Expressionists reveals a certain similarity in their ideological and aesthetic views, reveals their common anti-war, protest and humanistic pathos aimed at protecting the human person suffering in the world deformed by wars and revolutions.