Mother

Maxim Gorky

Description

"A book of the utmost importance", in the words of Lenin, and a landmark in Russian literature, The Mother - here presented in a brilliant new version by Hugh Aplin, the first English translation in almost a century - will enchant modern readers both for its historical significance and its intrinsic value as a work of art. Inspired by real events and centring on the figure of Pelageya Vlasova - the "mother" of the title - and her son Pavel, Gorky's masterpiece describes the brutal life of ordinary Russian factory workers in the years leading to the 1905 Revolution and explores the rise of the proletariat, the role of women in society and the lower classes' struggle for self-affirmation. "A book of the utmost importance", in the words of Lenin, and a landmark in Russian literature, The Mother - here presented in a brilliant new version by Hugh Aplin, the first English translation in almost a century - will enchant modern readers both for its historical significance and its intrinsic value as a work of art.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 07 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714548203
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Mother
Maxim Gorky
Translated by Hugh Aplin


ALMA CLASSICS


Alma Classics Ltd Hogarth House 32-34 Paradise Road Richmond Surrey TW9 1SE United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
The Mother first published in Russian in 1907 This translation first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2015
Introduction, Translation and Notes © Hugh Aplin, 2015
Cover image © Hajar Khalid Al Akoor
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.


Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-564-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Introduction
The Mother
Part One
Part Two
Note on the Text
Notes


Introduction
The Mother is a novel inextricably linked with politics. The events and characters it delineates were based on actual historical events and real people; it was written in the aftermath of, and as a response to, the first of Russia’s twentieth-century revolutions; and the best-known critical response to the work came from the most influential figure of the age, not a titan of the literary world, though, but a titan on a grander scale – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself. The historical and ideological significance ascribed to the book after 1917 ensured that it remained readily available throughout the years of the existence of the Soviet Union, not only in Russian, but in a host of other languages as well. The last quarter of a century has, however, seen a marked decline in interest in the work of Maxim Gorky in his native land, and this tendency has been reflected elsewhere too, affecting his novels, perhaps, in particular. Thus, while his dramatic works still appear on the Anglophone stage with some regularity, recent translations of his fiction into English are scarce. Given the quality and quantity of the Russian writing that was denied to the reading public at the time when Gorky’s was being tirelessly propagated, it is, of course, quite right and proper that a degree of balance should have been restored. And yet it would surely be wrong to allow the output of an author whose talent was highly regarded not only by men of politics, but by many great names of literature, to sink into the oblivion that was long the lot of scores of his fellow Russian writers.
The events on which the central elements of the narrative of The Mother are based took place in 1902, when a May Day parade in the small town of Sormovo, not far from Gorky’s birthplace of Nizhni Novgorod, was broken up violently by the army and its organizers arrested and put on trial. One of these, the standard-bearer for the march, was Pyotr Andreyevich Zalomov (1877–1955), a factory worker and active member of the Nizhni Novgorod branch of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, in whose activities Gorky, too, participated. The writer was already familiar with Zalomov’s mother, Anna Kirillovna Zalomova (1849–1938): the widow of a hard-drinking factory hand, she had been a visitor at the home of Gorky’s grandparents, her distant relatives, when he had lived there as a child, and in a letter of 1911 Gorky explicitly named her as the model for his eponymous heroine. Soviet scholars produced a huge amount of material on the question of the prototypes of Gorky’s characters in this novel, and Zalomov himself justifiably denied in his memoirs that he was the sole inspiration for the figure of Pavel Vlasov, but the contribution his story and his mother’s made to the creation of the fictional figures is evident nonetheless.
Gorky made his first notes for the novel as early as 1902, in the wake of the events at Sormovo, and was reading drafts to friends in 1903–4, but the full realization of his plans for a novel about proletarian revolutionaries came during a period of focused effort in 1906–7. By this time the 1905 Revolution had taken place, and Gorky had been arrested for his participation in demonstrations, as well as for his written attacks on the government. However, his global fame had ensured that a term of imprisonment had come quickly to an end, and upon his release he had gone abroad to engage in fundraising activities for the revolutionary movement. Thus it came about that Part One of the novel was written in the United States, while Part Two was completed after he had fallen foul of American society over his unconventional domestic circumstances and moved to the island of Capri in the autumn of 1906.
Rather more unconventional than a writer travelling abroad with a woman other than his wife, however, were the circumstances of The Mother ’s publishing history. The novel made its first appearance in New York, when serialized in Appleton’s Magazine between December 1906 and June 1907, not in the author’s original Russian, but in Thomas Seltzer’s English translation. Oddly, Gorky’s agreement with the publisher, D. Appleton & Co., stipulated that the English version was to be considered the original and the Russian its translation. The “translation” into Russian was published serially in St Petersburg, with big cuts made by the censor and numerous alterations to various episodes made by the author himself, in six issues of The Collection of the Society ‘Knowledge’ in 1907–8. The book had by then already been published in the United States as a separate edition in English in April 1907, before appearing in June of the same year in Berlin, in both German and Russian, also with the authorial revisions made for the St Petersburg Russian edition. The novel was shortly to make its first appearance in London under the title Comrades – with many other unauthorised alterations besides the change of title – and further translations into numerous languages soon followed; but it was published in full in Russia only in 1917 – indeed, the publication in Knowledge had led to the issues containing The Mother being sequestrated, and the prosecution in absentia of the author.
This, however, was not yet the end of The Mother ’s publishing history, for in the post-revolutionary period Gorky carried out a further major revision of the novel. The result of this work, whereby about a quarter of the previous version was cut, was the appearance in 1923 of the text of the novel that has been the standard one ever since, and which has been translated for this volume. Gorky made changes to various elements of the text, with the apparent central aim of producing a more concise narrative, in particular excluding superfluous descriptive detail and reducing the length of his characters’ discourse.
Although the first edition of The Mother predated the formulation of the Soviet Union’s officially approved aesthetic by a quarter of a century (as did even the final edition by a decade), the work has frequently been cited as the original novel of Socialist Realism. It is not hard to understand why: in brief, Socialist Realism demanded that a work of art depict life in a recognizably realistic manner and illustrate some aspect of man’s progress towards the ideals of socialism, and Gorky’s novel can be seen to fulfil each of those criteria. The ideological value of The Mother was therefore clearly recognized by one of its earliest readers, Lenin. He was lent the typescript of the second version by its Berlin publisher and, when meeting Gorky at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London in May 1907, was able to express his views to the author, who would subsequently record his memories of the encounter:
“With his amazingly lively eyes sparkling affectionately, he immediately started talking about the shortcomings of the book The Mother : it transpired that he had read it in manuscript, borrowed from I.P. Ladyzhnikov. I said I had been in a hurry to finish the book, but did not have time to explain why I had been in a hurry – Lenin gave an affirmative nod of the head and explained it himself: it was a very good thing that I’d made haste, the book was a necessary one, as many workers were participating in the revolutionary movement without political awareness, spontaneously, and now they would read The Mother with great benefit to themselves.
“‘A very timely book.’ That was his only compliment, but for me an extremely valuable one. Then he enquired in a businesslike way whether The Mother was being translated into foreign languages and to what extent the book had been damaged by Russian and American censorship…”
The haste with which Gorky had been forced to write by the terms of his initial American contract in September 1906 was undeniable: following the immediate submission of Part One, only just over three months had been allowed for the completion, translation and submission of Part Two. His plans for Part Two had been consequently much reduced in the execution, and his intention to carry the story through to October 1905 abandoned, as was the subsequent idea of writing a second, complementary novel, referred to variously in correspondence as Pavel Vlasov , The Hero or The Son .
Thus The Mother has always had a great deal to do with politics, and yet has perhaps surprisingly little detailed political content. True, various strands within the revolutionary movement are illustrated by, for example, the differences between Vlasov and his comrades and Rybin, but the novel does not concern itself at all with such vital questions for the time as, for example, the organization of revolutionary work. Yet, since the