On innovativeness of Maksim Gorky

In Soviet literary criticism, Gorky's innovation was usually associated with his revolutionary activity, calling him “the first proletarian writer in time and rank” and “the founder of socialist realism”. The cliches of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics were so tightly attached to the writer that they survived to this day. The paper considers the work of Gorky from new methodological standpoint, since the writer from the very beginning of his activity sought to create his own method of depicting life from the perspective of the future. Analyzing the novel “Mother”, which was considered the first work of socialist realism, the author shows that this novel was inextricably connected with a philosophical and aesthetic system of the Silver Age, and its genre (utopia novel) is consonant with the novels by A. Bogdanov “Red Star” and F. Sologub “Legend in the making”. The organic connection of Nietzscheanism with Marxism, and God-building with a realistic description of the revolutionary movement in the working settlement, was truly innovative. Gorky's sincere faith in socialism, which could become a new religion of the working person, was first expressed in an art work as a utopian dream of a happy future for Russia. Socialist mythology, combined with realism and romanticism, created an innovative method of depicting reality, which is characteristic of “Tales of Italy”, an autobiographical trilogy and “The Life of Klim Samgin”. Gorky's work came to be a link between the culture of the Silver Age and Soviet literature.