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Books

Maxim Gorky’s revolutionaries are ready for martyrdom

Gorky’s The Mother, hailed as a paean to socialist ideals when first published, is surprisingly topical a century later

23 January 2016

9:00 AM

23 January 2016

9:00 AM

The Mother Maxim Gorky, translated by Hugh Aplin

Alma Classics, pp.371, £8.99, ISBN: 9781847495648

Maxim Gorky was trumpeted as ‘the great proletarian writer’ by Soviet critics, who considered his novel The Mother one of the most significant books of the 20th century. Completed in 1906, after Gorky had already been recognised internationally, it is based on the events of 1902, when the workers of Sormovo, a factory settlement near Gorky’s native city of Nizhny Novgorod, held what we’d now call a ‘mass anti-capitalist protest’.

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