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Part I:
Advocacies of Gorky's Devil
Dilshan BOANGE
Renowned the world over for his outstanding contributions to the
world of literature as a writer of novels, short stories and drama
Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov better known as Maxim Gorky is probably best
known for his novel 'The Mother' which captures a significant facet of
the Soviet Russia's revolutionary ethos. As an author whose base of
socio-political criticism took a marked leftist voice in Tsarist Russia,
his political activism shaped his fiction writing as well. Regarded as
the founder of the socialist realism literary approach his fiction can
be read for its propagandist nature to espouse socialist outlooks and
imbibe the reader with leanings to pursue socialist and communist goals.
Thereby marking his fiction writings as highly political acts.
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Statue of Gorki in Art Muzeon Sculpture Park, Moscow |
This does not suggest however that this proponent of Bolshevism and
writer of propaganda pamphlets did not have a sense of 'the aesthetic'
in his literary works although the aspect of propaganda would emerge as
the more prevalent quality and focus. This article will discuss a short
work of fiction by Gorky titled "The Lords of Life" which appears in a
collection of his writings titled Articles and Pamphlets, published in
1950 in Soviet Moscow. The focus being how Gorky portrays 'the Devil'
(who with the protagonist forms the central characters).within a context
of critiquing the system in favour of socialist and communist values and
ideals, and thereby propagandizes 'the Evil one'. The piece itself
strikes as a remarkably imaginative work of propagandistic fiction which
strays from the track of 'realism' that dwells on the mundane.
The setting is a cemetery at night where the Devil invites the author
to reveal how human perceptions are built on the intellectual pursuits
of the forerunners of European knowledge founding, by calling dead
rotting carcasses of who were once great thinkers and theorists as well
as scientists, inventors and certain professionals to once again expound
their contributions to European civilization. The interlocution between
the Devil and the dead reveals how distastefully vain intellectual
hegemonies can be, and seeks to enslave human thinking to not move
beyond what was established by them, the dead whom the Devil declares
are 'The Lords of Life' since it is their mindset that prevails over how
human civilization should take shape.
The Devil explicates his views with much substantial argument and
reason that is backed by an analysis of the words of dead men called to
speak, and towards the end of the discourse encapsulates the main idea
thus-
"The true lords of life are the dead; and even though you may be
governed by the living they, too, are inspired by the dead. The graves
are the sources of worldly wisdom. I say to you: your common sense is a
flower that blooms on soil fed by the juices of dead bodies. The corpse
soon rots away in the grave, yet he desires to live forever in the souls
of the living." (p.126)
Here one can see how the 'tradition of thought' as an ever motional
repetition of views in new garb is critiqued and man's inability to free
his trajectories of thinking from foundations of existent ideology is
scorned. And it is also noteworthy that Gorky evokes a minor shade of
the aesthetic one may argue when a striking metaphor is presented in the
'flower' that blooms nourished by the remnants of the dead. Although far
from a romanticized image taken from nature, it does add some
colourfulness to the discourse which primarily seeks to present
indoctrination and not a poetic rendering of one's feelings. |
