Feminist View Of Gorkys Mother And Brecht's Mother Courage And Her Children
3830 Words16 Pages
A Marxist-Feminist view of Gorky’s Mother and Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children
There are books in every language that are landmarks, even turning points, in the history of the literature in that language. Such a book for Russians is Maxim Gorky’s Mother while, for Germans is Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. “Mothers are hardly ever pitied,” wrote Maxim Gorky in his landmark novel. The novel is about the pre-revolution proletariat of Russia and focuses on the role women played in the struggle of the Russian working class on the eve of the revolution of 1905. Gorky’s Mother was written ten years before the establishment of Soviet power in Russia, it the first stone laid in the foundations of Soviet literature.
Maxim Gorky, who was persecuted by the tsarist government and forced to live abroad for his ties with the Bolshevik Party, was moved by the brutal social and economic disparity that existed in Russian society during the tsarist government. Mother was written at the end of 1906 and the beginning of 1907 when Gorky was living abroad, part one was written in the United States, and part two in Italy. Mother was first published in Russia in 1907.
Even before the emergence of Maxim Gorky in the literary arena of Russia, the Russian literature of the 19th century was, as Gorky himself has written, “ever strong in its democratic feeling, its passionate striving to find a solution for our social problems, its advocacy of humanity, its praise of liberty,