The Lower Depths and Other Plays

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written, sometimes heavy-handed
Review: Before reading this play, I'd been avoiding Gorky for a long time, because I too had fallen prey to the notion that Communist authors are always boring. I'm glad I finally picked up "The Lower Depths," because it's really well done. Gorky has an incredible command of idiomatic Russian, and the play advances its ideology in a fairly subtle fashion. (As a note, it was written around the turn of the century, so it predates the formation of the Soviet Union.)

The play is set in a flophouse filled with degenerates -- drunken actors, a dying woman and her husband, a former baron, and so forth. From these unlikely people, Gorky builds a tale of the realities of human nature, what it means to trust, to contribute to society, even to kill. The play is also worthwhile reading for students of pre-Revolutionary Russia -- the struggles leading up to that watershed event in Russian history are clearly evident.