Mother

About this book

Pelageya Nilovna, a timid, devout working-class woman in a factory town, has spent her life being beaten by her drunken husband. After his death her son Pavel, a young factory worker, stops drinking, begins reading forbidden books and gathers revolutionary friends in their house. Frightened at first, his mother slowly comes to understand and share their cause, and when Pavel is arrested after a May Day march, she herself begins to carry leaflets and speak out.

Context and significance

Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), the pen name of Alexei Peshkov, who grew up in poverty and wandered across Russia doing odd jobs, wrote the novel in 1906 while in the United States, basing it on real events in the factory town of Sormovo. It became a model for Soviet 'socialist realism', and Vsevolod Pudovkin filmed it in 1926. Compare Zola's Germinal.

About the author