The Philosophy of Man in M. Gorky’s Play “The Lower Depths”

Abstract

A new approach to understanding ideological and philosophical structure of M. Gorky's play «The Lower Depths» (1902) is offered in the article. According to the analysis, it is not a dualistic opposition of the concepts of verity or compassion, truth or lie that lies at the heart of the play, but progressive synthesis of the philosophical ideas, formed by the progression from the lowest to the highest. In contrast to the customary dualism, traditional for Russian Gorky's work studies, the triad of Gorky's philosophical ideas paganism - Christianity - a new philosophy that is consistently mediated by the ideas of Platonism, the doctrine of Leo Tolstoy and nietzscheanism is studied in the article. The article studies how the system of characters in Gorky's play has disintegrates into three conventional groups, through which the gradual evolution of formation of Gorky's image of Man is traced. The analysis shows how from the wild human-animals (according to Plato), through religious acceptance of one God (Christ), the characters of the play come to the highest step of the evolutionary ladder - to the Proud Man (following Nietzsche). Each of the Gorky's drama characters embodies a certain stage of ascension: Kvashnya, Nastya and the Baron are wild Plato's human- animals, the Actor and Luka are the representatives of the humanistic ideas of Christianity, mediated by the doctrine of L. Tolstoy, Satine is a premonition of the future ideal Proud Man praised by Gorky. In the course of the play analysis an assumption about who was a real killer of the shelter's owner Kostylоff is made and the interpretation of ambiguous final words of the play is offered.