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Abstract:

This article explores a complex period in Gorky’s creative and ideological evolution, spanning the second half of the 1900s. After the defeat of the 1905–1907 revolution, romantic revolutionary sentiments regarding the prospects of Russian life revealed their illusory nature, and Gorky reacted sharply. He abandoned the idea of writing the novel “Son”, a continuation to “Mother”, and discovered entirely different types of Russian life: no longer Nilovna, not Pavel Vlasov and his supporters and friends, but the decadent poet Smertyashkin, the hero of the “Russian Fairy Tales” cycle, or the characters of the “Complaints” cycle. This cycle recounts Gorky’s autobiographical protagonist’s encounters during his first exile (1906–1913) with people representing a wide range of Russian life types, driven abroad by the revolution: a former officer, a merchant setting up his own small business in Italy, a police officer pouring out his hopeless melancholy to a lawyer. The article demonstrates that the story “Summer” was a unique reassessment of the romantic revolutionary spirit of the novel “Mother”, exploring the causes of the passivity that had gripped people’s consciousness and turned them into philistines. As a result, Gorky develops a pessimistic view of Russian reality after the defeat of the first Russian revolution, reflected in the cycle “Russian Fairy Tales”, particularly in the story “Fat Faced Passions”. A review of the cycles “Russian Fairy Tales” and “Complaints” reveals the reasons why the concept of the novel “Son” could not be realized. Such sentiments, reflected in Gorky’s work of this period, are directly related to the skepticism regarding the results of the 1917 revolution in the journalistic cycle “Untimely Thoughts”.

Keywords: M. Gorky, “Russian Fairy Tales”, “Complaints”, Smertyashkin, “Fat Faced Passions”, the short story “Summer”, the collection “Milestones”, the novel “Mother”, the idea of the novel “Son”.