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Analysis of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths - Literary Theory and Criticism
Analysis of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths - Literary Theory and Criticism
Analysis of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths - Literary Theory and Criticism
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Na dne, meaning literally, “On the Bottom,” but translated into English as The
Lower Depths, is the single work by which Maxim Gorky is known outside
Russia. Only the second of Gorky’s 15 plays, which in total represent but a
small portion of the writer’s considerable output of novels, short stories,
memoirs, and essays, The Lower Depths, both in its themes and methods, has
exerted an oversized significance and an important legacy for subsequent
dramatists internationally. In Russian literary history The Lower Depths is
noteworthy as the first time that society’s outcasts—prostitutes, thieves, casual
laborers, and the destitute and the derelicts—took center stage in a drama.
Anton Chekhov, who served as Gorky’s mentor, provided the younger writer
with a dramatic method and technique that Gorky applied to a lower-class,
urban milieu into which Chekhov’s plays never ventured. In claiming
importance and humanity for a class that the Russians call bosyák (vagabonds,
or literally “barefoot”) and that Gorky described as “ex-people” and “creatures
who were once men,” he both opened up a new dramatic subject and moved
Russian drama into the political and social arena that would lead to revolution
and the ongoing debate over the role and purpose of literature as a reflection
of contemporary sociopolitical issues and an agent of social reform. The Lower
Depths has been variously viewed as one of the groundbreaking realistic and
naturalistic works of modern literature that gave voice and stature to the
marginalized and invisible, as a visionary and spiritual affirmation and
negation of human and social perfectibility, and as effective propaganda for
multiple (and contradictory) philosophical and social positions. Its creator is
no less contentious. Gorky’s declaration, “I came into the world in order to
disagree” can well stand as the motto of his life and works. He has been both
heralded as a crucial Russian revolutionary and dismissed as a party apologist Articles/Ebooks/Lectures
who sacrificed his genius (and conscience) for the Soviet state. Regarded by
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many of his compatriots as the greatest Russian writer of the 20th century,
Gorky was canonized by the Soviets as the Walt Whitman of Russia, its revered
proletarian bard. To honor him his place of birth was renamed for him, as was Scholarly Articles
the Moscow Arts Theatre, so crucial in the productions of Chekhov’s
groundbreaking plays. Yet Gorky’s significance beyond Russia is far less secure. Select Category
In the West he is more a mystery than a national literary force, with his
considerable opus remaining mainly unknown and untranslated. The Lower
Depths alone has sustained his reputation internationally, a play deservedly
considered a classic work of modern drama. Categories
Born Alexei Maximovich Pyeshkov in 1868 in the Volga river town of Nizhniy African Literature (3) American
Novgorod, Gorky would rechristen himself, in 1892, “Maxim the Bitter,” as Literature (41) British
commentary on his brutalized childhood and rough-and-tumble development. Literature (202) Cultural
His father, a carpenter, died of cholera when his son was four, and Gorky was Studies (20) Drama
grudgingly raised by his maternal grandparents, proprietors of a dye works, Criticism (127) Feminism
who alternately subjected their grandson to brutal beatings and pietistic (46) Linguistics (16) Literary
sermonizing. The irony did not escape him, with the disjunction between high- Criticism (66) Literary
minded idealism and reality forming one of Gorky’s persistent themes. By the Theory (64) Literature
age of 10, Gorky was largely fending for himself in a succession of menial jobs,
(1190) Modernism (38)
including work as a shopkeeper’s errand boy, a dishwasher on a Volga steamer,
and an apprentice to an icon maker, who taught him to lie about the age and
Novel Analysis (344)
Philosophy (79) Poetry
value of the religious images to enhance sales. Almost completely self-
(92) Postcolonialism (26)
educated, Gorky tried to enter the university at Kazan, without success, but
Postmodernism (28)
stayed there to work for a baker whose association with radical politics marked
Romanticism (19) Short
the beginning of Gorky’s own raised political consciousness. At the age of 19,
convinced that he had no prospects for a better life, Gorky fired a bullet into his Story (531) Theatre Studies (1)
Uncategorized (38)
left side but missed his heart. After recovering Gorky would spend the next
several years working in a fishery on the Caspian Sea and as a railway
watchman as well as tramping about Russia, contracting tuberculosis and Archives
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Trauma Studies
Structuralism
In 1898 Gorky published two volumes of sketches and stories that force-fully
Analysis of Stuart Hall’s
and intimately offered an insider’s view of the lifestyle and oppression of Encoding/Decoding
Russia’s outcasts and derelicts. They brought him immense acclaim as a cult
Ecocriticism: An Essay
figure. Imprinted on the popular imagination in his characteristic rustic
Russian blouse, worker’s boots, and walking stick, Gorky became the Feminist Literary Criticism
embodiment of his subject, setting the style for romantic individualism and Analysis of Virginia Woolf's A
disenchantment with repressive social norms. “Everywhere one could see his Room of One’s Own
picture” observes critic Alexander Kaun, “—on postal cards, cigarette- and Postmodernism
candy-boxes, and in endless cartoons. Shady characters stopped citizens in the
street and asked for, or rather demanded, ‘a bottle of vodka in the name of
Maxim Gorky.’ ” Gorky was befriended by Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov, who found
in Gorky’s works much to admire. To refine the young writer’s sometimes
ornate writing style, Chekhov sent him plays, such as August Strindberg’s Miss
Julie, to encourage a greater economy of expression. Chekhov also introduced
him to the Moscow Art Theatre company. On the basis of an outline Gorky had
described at their first meeting in 1900, its director, Konstantin Stanislavky,
solicited Gorky’s first play. This work, which would become The Lower Depths,
initially concerned an ex-waiter whose prized possession was his dress clothes,
mementos of his former respectability. The play was set in a flophouse, and, as
Stanislavsky recalled in My Life in Art,
Reworking his original conception, Gorky failed to deliver the completed play
on time. Instead, in 1901 the Moscow Art Theatre rushed into production
another Gorky play, Meshchane (variously translated as The Petty Bourgeois, The
Philistines, and The Smug Citizens). In place of Gorky’s popular lower-class
subject matter, the play was a scathing attack on middle-class complacency
that disappointed audiences. Chekhov considered the play immature but with
an important subject. “Gorky’s strength as a dramatist,” Chekhov declared, “is
not that audiences like him, but that he is the first in Russia and in the world
generally to speak out with contempt and disgust against the philistine—and
that he did so just when society was ready to hear such criticism.”
A Scene in Act I The Lower Depths, at the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavsky in the
role of Satine sits on the table
By the 1902 season Gorky had completed The Lower Depths, and the company
of the Moscow Art Theatre, to achieve authenticity in their depiction of
Russia’s criminal and indigent subculture, visited the foul-smelling shelters
where beggars, thieves, and tramps lived. When asked by the actors what effect
he wanted the play to have on his audience, Gorky answered: “I’ll be satisfied if
you can shake the audience so much that they can’t sit comfortably in their
seats.” Cleared by the censor largely because Gorky’s first play had failed and
officials expected no more for this second effort, The Lower Depths proved to be
a triumphant success, with its formerly unseen lower-class underworld brought
to vivid and violent life onstage. Acclaim for the play and its creator brought
government censure, with one establishment newspaper condemning the
“mob” that “wildly applauds the stench, filth, and vice of revolutionary
propaganda . . . while the leader of the derelicts, Maxim Gorky, using his pen as
a lever, shakes the ground on which that society was built. What a dangerous
writer! How wretched and blind are his admirers, readers, and spectators!”
Banned in working-class theaters and prohibited from being translated into
other languages of the empire, the play still managed to be performed and read
widely. When it was published, the first edition of 40,000 copies sold out in two
weeks; a second edition of 35,000 was gone in under a year. Productions were
mounted in Berlin, London, and New York that would establish Gorky’s
reputation internationally and influence subsequent dramatists such as Bertolt
Brecht and Eugene O’Neill, who called The Lower Depths “the great proletarian
revolutionary play” and whose The Iceman Cometh directly imitates.
Chekhov on Writing
The old man is not a faker. What’s truth? Man—that’s the truth! He understood
this. . . . Certainly he lied—but it was out of pity for you, the devil take you!
There are lots of people who lie out of pity for others—I know it—I’ve read
about it. They lie beautifully, excitingly, with a kind of inspiration. There are
lies that soothe, that reconcile one to his lot. There are lies that justify the load
that crushed a worker’s arm—and hold a man to blame for dying of starvation—
I know lies! People weak in spirit—and those who live on the sweat of others—
these need lies—the weak find support in them, the exploiters use them as a
screen. But a man who is his own master, who is independent and doesn’t
batten on others—he can get along without lies. Lies are the religion of slaves
and bosses. Truth is the god of the free man.
The truth that Satin offers recognizes the necessity of hope and its delusions as
an ultimate affirmation of humanity. In one of Gorky’s most quoted passages,
Satin, clear eyed but confident, declares:
What is man? It’s not you, nor I, nor they—No, it’s you, I,
they, the old man, Napoleon, Mohammed—all in one. You
understand? It’s tremendous! In this are all the beginnings
and all the ends. Everything in man, everything for man.
Only man exists, the rest is the work of his hands and his
brain. Man! It’s magnificent; it has a proud ring to it! A man
has to be respected! Not pitied . . . don’t degrade him with
pity. . . . You’ve got to respect him!
The final test of pity and respect comes with the revelation that closes the
play: The Actor, in despair of gaining a cure for his drunkenness, has hung
himself. The news interrupts the lodgers’ drunken revelry and prompts Satin’s
final comment: “Ah, spoiled the song—the fool!”
Gorky’s existential drama shocks with the vividness of its characters and the
world it portrays, in allowing the marginalized and misfits of society to supply
an often profound critique on human possibilities and motives. The play’s
strengths—its graphic realism and daring mixture of sociology, psychology, and
philosophy—do not come without flaws. One of the plays earliest critics of
these was Chekhov. After receiving a copy just after Gorky finished the play,
Chekhov praised it but noted: “You have excluded the most interesting
characters (except for the Actor) from the fourth act, and now mind lest
nothing comes of it. That act could seem boring and unnecessary, especially if
with the departure of the stronger and more interesting actors only the so-so
remain.” Chekhov’s criticism has been repeated by others, who have similarly
complained of Gorky’s odd dramatic structure in which act 4 seems more an
afterthought as well as of the ideological positions of Luka and Satin that at
times seem contradicted by the play’s action. Gorky himself later decided he
had failed to embody fully his conception of his characters, particularly Luka’s
selfishness and the destructiveness of his philosophy. Ultimately The Lower
Depths works neither as a social message nor as a satisfying philosophy but as a
powerful psychological drama of life at the bottom. The Lower Depths presents,
in King Lear terms, “unaccommodated man” in which we are instructed, like
Lear, “to feel what wretches feel.”
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