Несколько заметок по поводу концепции Максима Горького и русской литературы в третьем томе России и Европы Т. Г. Масарика
A few notes on the conception of Maxim Gorky and the Russian literature in the third volume of T. G. Masaryk's Russia and Europe

Summary/Abstract: The author of the present article deals with Masaryk’s conception of Maxim Gorky in the third volume of his Russia and Europe. Masaryk situates Gorky between Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, presenting him as an opponent of one-sided, voluntaristic modernism with its cult of violence, irrationalism and artificial, hyperbolized plot. Though Gorky himself followed some features of modernist poetics, he opposed it from the point of view of elementary ethics going back to F. Nietzsche what Masaryk—when evaluating him—underestimated. Masaryk’s view of Gorky is part of the general Czech reception of the Russian phenomen in general and that of Russian literature in particular. For Masaryk, Gorky represented an attractive model to follow: he as an autodidact, a Russian selfmademan with a specific cultural pattern he preferred to the traditional school model of education, his love of minor Russian authors at that time, especially Nikolay Leskov, and, last but not least, his modernized realism enriched by some traces of modernist poetics tending to a new artistic synthesis. Unfortunately, Gorky’s one-sided, even hostile approach to Dostoevsky, at least to some of his works (The Demons, 1872) together with his unbalanced attitude towards the practice of Russian social democrats, later communists and to Stalin’ dictatorship, led to a tragedy: Masaryk’ presuppositions of Gorky as a creator of new literature seemed to be false. Later the Czech reception found itself under the impact of the dominating ideology which deformed Gorky’s work though only to a certain degree which depended on the creativity and independence of Czech researchers.

• Details
• Contents