Twenty-Six Men and a Girl by Gorky

Show Notes: 

This week Matt and Cameron read “Twenty-Six Men and a Girl,” by Maxim Gorky. Born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, it was only when he had begun publishing fiction in his early twenties that Gorky would adopt his later-famous pseudonym, likely as a reflection of the critical lens he took in his analysis of the then-Russian Empire (‘Gorky,’ in Russian, means bitter). This story, published in 1899, serves as the prototype of a genre which would later be named “social realism, “ which focused on the struggles of working-class people to expose the structures of power which caused their conditions. 

Major themes: the alienation of labor, idealization/fetishization, pretzels. 

17:00 - In fact, by 1871, every work by Karl Marx was banned with the exception of Das Kapital. In the words of one of the official readers in the office of Censors of Domestic Publications, Das Kapital was “a colossal mass of abstruse, somewhat obscure politico-economic argumentation.” He would go on to say that “[i]t can be confidently stated that in Russia few will read it and fewer will understand it.” As cited in “Das Kapital comes to Russia,” by Albert Resis. https://doi.org/10.2307/2493377

The music used in this episode was “soviet march,” by Toasted Tomatoes. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and YouTube. 

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