Subject : communication skills

SUBMITTED BY
SAAZ SAMNANI
ENROLLMENT NO: A71308517001

AMITY SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK

AMITY UNIVERSITY, MUMBAI - PUNE EXPRESSWAY,
BHATAN- PANVEL, MAHARASHTRA 410206
BOOK REVIEW: MOTHER
--MAXIM GORKY

Maxim Gorky's Mother is a slice of the revolutionary cake

in which Russia's slaving class was munching on giddily
during the steamy years of 1905-1907, the 'dress
rehearsal' to the 1917 Revolution. But even though the
revolutionary masses were ultimately resubordinated to
tsardom, the novel preserves throughout time the spirit
that its combative participants were once stirred by.
Gorky was an organic intellectual of the working class
whose writings reflected his revolutionary devotion to the
emancipation of the oppressed. The novel is plain and
straightforward, but punctuated by strong revolutionary
thought and feeling. It is painted in grey, bleak and
sombre colors, but Gorky's revolutionary spirit
illuminates the greyness with a radiant revolutionary
optimism. This light pours out from the souls of the
characters, who are mostly incessantly devoted and yet
life-like revolutionaries whose drives for justice and
liberation is charged with what is essentially a utopian
desire, particularly the mother's.
Tsarist Russia is an ideal setting for a revolutionary
novel because in its brutal reality the nature of class
irreconcilability is laid bare for precisely what it is.
The rule of tsars has not passed, but has merely
transformed according to the shapeshifting dictates of
capital. Life under capitalism has become less severe, and
more comfortable, but the fundamental brutality of
exploitation and subjugation still remains, and the tsars
of capital still live sumptuously while humankind, the
great majority, is still tied to a rack, living without
enough bread in their stomachs let alone pudding or, god
forbid, cake.

In Gorky's novel Mother we are reminded of the courageous

struggle that has preceded us and laid the foundation for
our struggle today, that of the revolutionary proletariat
and peasantry who fought and won what bits in the way of
freedom we hold now. It is an inspirational novel that
suggests a utopian vision of a better society that lays
dormant in the heart of the revolutionary working class.
“'Reason doesn't give him strength,' insisted Rybin
loudly. 'It's his heart gives him strength, not his
head!'” It is quite possible that the revolutionary will
to conquer all tyrannical chains derives its energy from
that part of the worker which dreams for a beautiful
tomorrow; and it is also quite possible that the working
class is won over to socialism not through the well-
intentioned persuasion of enlightened communists, nor even
the historical necessity to abolish all classes, but
rather through a radiant utopian vision and the animating
and liberating spirit of freedom- which empowers whether
or not it is coupled with iron-clad reason, and perhaps
even, sometimes, in spite of it. The system is too
sophisticated, too entrenched, to be cast off through mere
reasoning, mere polemics, even in the face of intensified
class domination and historical necessity and exploding
contradictions in the capitalist edifice. What it requires
is dreams to be injected into every fight for the better
world, dreams which can pervade the collective
consciousness, and seize it by the roots in order to
propel us towards a freer and more wonderful society.
But even in Mother the utopian spirit often gives way to
the hard reality of daily life under the tsarist empire.
The situation is bleak and promises no immediate change;
only through a long uphill struggle will oppression be
overcome. But a faith, one not unlike that of primitive
Christianity, is what ushers the characters in this novel,
the mother especially, to go onwards and fight and
believe, and pour nearly every ounce of hope and joy into
the struggle as it persists from day to day. The beauty of
the future society, a society based on the sharing of the
world's wealth in common, brightens the revolutionary
mission the characters have taken upon themselves, at a
great amount of risk. The once submissive and meek mother
is absorbed into this great activity and, inspired by the
promise of the struggle, she endangers her own safety as
well, following right in the footsteps of her indomitable
son.
And so it is vision which suffuses the ideal communist's
activity with a quasi-holy light and propels them onwards
to not only fight for a new world but create one in the
midst of the inevitably long process towards a communist
future. Gorky's Mother is a story of a typically
downtrodden woman being enamored and transformed by the
life-giving practice of revolutionary activity. She is
empowered by the passion of her son and his comrades, and
she too becomes a valuable comrade in the struggle, one
inebriated with an ecstatic utopian vision: “Our children
are treading the path of truth and reason, bringing love
to the hearts of men, showing them a new heaven and
lighting up the earth with a new fire- the unquenchable
fire of the spirit. From its flames a new life is
springing, born of our children's love for all mankind.
Who can extinguish this love? Who? What force can destroy
it? What for can opposite it? The earth has given it
birth, and life itself longs for its victory. Life
itself!” The cake which she eats is the cake of an
eternal communist paradise- a heaven on earth which is not
ruled over by a great cosmic tsar, but free human beings
who live and labor for no one but themselves.