Setna rocznica urodzin Maksyma Gorkiego (uwagi na marginesie jubileuszu)

Abstract

The article deals with several interesting papers and studies published in Soviet press periodicals in 1968 for the centenary of Maxim Gorky’s birth. All these works have a synthetic, summing-up character, their respective authors trying to determine the contribution of this prominent Soviet writer to twentieth-century literature as well as to show how "up-to-date" his general outlook appears to be at the present stage of the evolution of world literature. The author has taken into special consideration the articles which try to supply a new interpretation of some of the complex and always controversial works of this writer, to find there problems which continue to be crucial and vital till the present day, and to depart from erroneous readings of the text. This refers, above all, to the play "At the Bottom". The author discusses the works of Y. Yuzovski and B. Kostelanetz which have permitted to vindicate one of the play’s main characters - Luke; in fact, a great many literary critics have ceased to consider him a bad character and treat him instead as an active humanist. While supporting these new conceptions set forth by the Soviet scholars concerned with Gorky and his work, the author contends on his part that Gorky’s play is distinguished by an ideological polyphony, since it has, instead of one monopolistic truth, several verities on equal rights. He goes on to state that this phenomenon should be attributed to the influence exerted by the work of Dostoyevsky upon the author of "At the Bottom". The author further states that in a number of studies published in the Jubilee year one can observe a departure from the traditional simplified interpretation of Gorky as a decisive force in Russian literature at the turn of the twentieth century, since it has been found that apart from the great influence he had exerted upon his contemporaries (as, e.g. Andreyev, Bunin, Kuprin), he was equally an object of literary influences. The author then proceeds to analyse the question - touched upon in a great many publications - of Gorky’s impact upon the present-day artistic search for reality. The leading idea of the discussed articles by A. Ovcharenko, R. Samarin, and L. Yuryeva is founded on the statement that the contemporary, twentieth-century world literature has been, as it were, shaped by the founder of the "Socialist Realism" trend. Their theory of "The Age of Gorky" is, however, based on no solid premises, since it is not so much the perusal of Gorky’s works as a definite sociopolitical situation in the native countries of many writers from the West, which has prompted them to social activity. The "Age o f Gorky" conception as applied to contemporary world literature is, in the author’s opinion, a result of an a priori attitude, incompatible with Marxian methodology in the study of literature. The author concludes his article with a statement that as regards artistic form Gorky’s work was of traditional character. This should be attributed to the fact that as a writer he was educated on the model of nineteenth- century classical realism, and that in his work he remained faithful to the aesthetic rules of that trend. On the other hand, Gorky’s humanism continues to be real and up-to-date. His work was a constant search for a human ideal and an impassioned protest against anything that brought about the humiliation or degradation of man.