Maxim Gorky and the Capitalist Aesthetics of Late Imperial Russia

• In Event: New Perspectives on Russian Theater and Performing Arts IV: The Aesthetics and Politics of Capitalism: People, Money, and Labor in Russian Theater

Abstract

This paper will examine Maxim Gorky’s turn to theater as a means to explore and challenge imperial Russia’s aesthetics of industrial capitalism. Focusing on Gorky’s journalistic reports on the All-Russia Industrial and Artistic Exhibition of 1896 and his play The Petty Bourgeois (1901), I will argue that theater allowed Gorky to articulate the shortcomings of the capitalist aesthetics, as envisioned by the imperial government, and propose dramatic solutions. In his plays, Gorky reinstated the political and economic centrality of embodied labor power, argued for the economic autonomy of the worker, and outlined new perspectives on depicting the literary subjectivity of the laborer.

Author

• Valeria Mutc, UC Davis