Mother

By Maxim Gorky

I have been fascinated by Russian stories since childhood. Then by Russian Revolution and their technology. I have read some technical books of Russia and admired them. This was my first chance to read rich Russian Literature – Mother.It was simply beautiful. It is the story of how revolution – ‘The Russian Revolution’ was deep rooted inside the masses which forced these so called workers to come up and carry the onus of forming new world of their own where every member is ‘comrade’ and no exploitation because everything is common – nobody says ‘mine’. It was a wonderful process.In this story our hero Pavel Vlassov is first among comrades who with his conviction and reasoning pulls his downtrodden soul out and see how deteriorated their lives are and think that ‘Did God really made man in his own self ?’ . With this he decided better die with the cause as noble as liberation than die for a dog’s life. He was a brave boy. Brave as he was to the extent that he became leader of the movement, influenced his friends, relatives and above all his mother.The title of the story ‘Mother’ is very apt because it is from a mother’s eyes that we see the revolution, from her heart we felt the pain of loosing her only son to the movement. If Pavel was brave then his mother was braver because she couldn’t think but she felt for the movement, for her son and his comrades. It is mother which brings the force to this novel which touches every heart that comes across in the same way as it touched in 1907 when it was first published. Napoleon very rightly said ‘Give me good mothers. I will give you a good nation.’ And his words were indeed materialized in the form of a model nation Russia was immediately after the revolution.