Mother - Softcover

Gorky, Maksim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1406833266 ISBN 13: 9781406833263

Publisher: Echo Library, 2006

Synopsis

1907. Maxim Gorky, pseudonym of Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov, Soviet novelist, playwright and essayist, who was a founder of social realism. Although known principally as a writer, he was closely associated with the tumultuous revolutionary period of his own country. The Mother, one of his best-known works, is the story of the radicalization of an uneducated woman that was later taken as a model for the Socialist Realist novel, and his autobiographical masterpiece Childhood. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

About this title

Review:

Dark, invigoratingly sardonic...Constance Congdon s MOTHER is as uncompromisingly savvy as it is bitingly funny.... MOTHER is an exhilarating blend of one of Chekhov s dysfunctional provincial families run through the wringer of Joe Orton s iconoclastic comedy. It s also Maxim Gorky through and through, providing a canny look at Gorky as a dramatic bridge between Chekhov and Brecht. Congdon s A MOTHER is adapted from Gorky s play VASSA ZHELEZNOVA.... MOTHER [is] as much an enlightening rediscovery as an exciting new play. Vassa, a kind of proto-Mother Courage, is the head of a family one generation removed from serfdom and facing a crisis. The husband with whom she s built a fairly successful peat-mining and tile-making business is dying upstairs. Without a will, all their possessions will pass to their two sons the uselessly self-pitying Pavel and the slothful, self-indulgent Semyon, a man who can no longer fit into any of his clothes except pajamas. Congdon s dialogue is crisp, her Gorky-derived characters captivating and her wit devilishly sharp. --Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Echo Library
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1406833266
• ISBN 13: 9781406833263
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 285