Maxim Gorky’s Critique of the Meshchanstvo as a Particular “Arrangement of the Soul”

Abstract

The author turns to Maxim Gorky’s literary–philosophical understanding of the meshchanstvo as a sociopsychological state and attitude to the world for which the main feature is the desire “to comfortably furnish the soul.” In this manifestation, the meshchanstvo instills “the poison of nihilistic individualism” in man, placing his Ego in the center of the world, an Ego devoid of social and cultural self-identification, which destroys a person from the inside. The most acute and irreconcilable of his evaluations of the meshchanstvo appeared in so called “Okurov Series”, which include The Town of Okurov, The Life of Matvei Kozhemiakin, and the unfinished Great Love. Gorky introduced a concept of “meshchanstvo” in two senses: a social/class sense and a spiritual/ethical sense, which, both individually and together, expressed a social force that was attempting to halt the passage of time. Recounting the daily worries and relationships of Okurov’s inhabitants, Gorky paints gloomy pictures of their everyday life, one colored by a state of “sleepy stupor,” which leads people toward a line behind which the original meanings of life disappear.