Children of the Sun
Children of the Sun
Maxim Gorky
Protasov, detached and idealistic, wants only to immerse himself in chemical experiments to perfect mankind. He’s more or less oblivious to the voracious advances of the half-crazed widow Melaniya and his best friend’s unrelenting pursuit of his wife, let alone the cholera epidemic and the starving mob at his gates. While Nanny fusses round, Protasov’s admiring circle, variously skeptical, romantic and lovesick, spar over culture and the cosmos. Only Liza, neurotic and patronized, feels the suffering of the peasantry and senses that their own privileged world is in jeopardy.
Written during the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905, Maxim Gorky’s darkly comic Children of the Sun depicts the new middle-class, foolish perhaps but likeable, as they flounder around, philosophizing, yearning, or scuttling between test tubes, blind to their impending annihilation.
Available
1905
978-0-571-30487-5
Drama
Faber and Faber
Maxim Gorky, whose real name was Aleksei Maximovich Peshkov, was born on March 16, 1868, Nizhny Novgorod, which in 1932 was renamed Gorky in his honor. From the age of 10 Gorky was virtually on his own, and he worked at a great variety of occupations, among them shopkeeper’s errand boy and dishwasher on a Volga steamer. At a very tender age he saw a great deal of the brutal, seamy side of life and stored up impressions and details for the earthy and starkly realistic stories, novels, plays, and memoirs which he later wrote.
Gorky began writing plays and formed close connections with the Moscow Art Theater, which in 1902 produced his most famous play, “The Lower Depths”. It shows the misery and utter hopelessness of the lives of people at the bottom of Russian society and at the same time examines the illusions by means of which many of the unfortunate people of this earth sustain themselves.