“Hero” or “Anti-hero”? (The Problem of the Hero in the Works of M. Gorky in the Early 1920s)

Abstract

The article considers one of the key elements of Gorky’s philosophical-ethical system – the concept of a “hero”, noting a profound difference between, on the one hand, the writer’s treatment of a “Person”, capitalized (Chelovek s bol’shoi bukvy), and meaning a full-fledged, creatively gifted and spiritually rich human being, and on the one hand, a “hero”, who was forced to recourse to violence and even murder under conditions of war and revolution. The article draws on Gorky’s works, all of which appeared in the summer of 1923: the essay “Hero” and two short stories – “The Story of the Hero” and “Caramora”. There, a heroic figure, being afraid of life and of other people, due to his egoism and existential loneliness, turns into an “antihero”, a traitor and a murderer. Our analysis of the poetics of these works makes it possible to align it to the poetics of modernism and the avant-garde. The notorious Gorky humanism, writ large during the revolutionary years and immediately after, brought to life works, where the writer protested against the “heroism” of soldiers and revolutionaries ready to kill their own people like enemies. In the 1930s, supporting the class ideology of Bolshevism, Gorky tried to “streamline” his works and wrote a series of “Stories about Heroes”, in which he celebrated the heroes of the Revolution and of the (Russian) Civil War. However, the stories turned out to be uncompelling and unmemorable; the images of the characters – schematic. Despite all his efforts, Gorky has never managed to create any significant works in which the valiant heroic type would be glorified.