From the Labyrinth of the Self to the Road of Revolution: Ideological Transformation in Gorky’s Fiction

Abstract

Maxim Gorky, born Maxim Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, occupies a special place in modern Russian literature because he writes his fiction with an unusual intensity about the transition from private suffering into historical and political consciousness. His early stories are populated by losers, tramps, workers and extremely wounded characters living lives of extreme isolation or poverty, even being disgraced; they touch on subjects of starvation, degradation, and sexual subjectivity. They are not only social victims but also the genesis of Gorky's wider humanity. With the development of his literary career, though, Gorky's fiction steadily grew more influenced by revolutionary ideology and predicated on the possibility of collective transformation. This transformation is readily demonstrated in the cultural and domestic drama of a working-class family which, alongside this novel, becomes Mother, the narrative of political consciousness and mass struggle that is palpable in their work, an autobiographical trilogy, and the self shown as one with labour, science, education and condition. The paper argues that the perusal of Gorky's fiction developed in three principal stages. The first shows the individual in crisis, cut off from society and in a state of isolation and despair. Second, it synecdoches that suffering into a critique of society, tracing private agony back to material oppression and inter-class violence. Third, it converts the solitary subject into a collective revolutionary agent and claims that revolutionary consciousness is the greatest form of human development. Gorky's centrality isn't just because he depicted the oppressed; it's his literary effort to envision a new kind of person, one forged from solidarity and discipline and historical purpose instead of resignation or individualism. Thus, his fiction serves as a hyphen between nineteenth-century realism and the ideological literature of the Soviet epoch.