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Description
Maxim Gorky’s Culture and the People is a series of polemics by the socialist literary classic and founder of socialist realism, oriented towards combatting the remnants of the exploiting classes in the Stalin period of the USSR and the external exploiting elements. Through these articles, one obtains a sense that culture, literature and art, are not something benign, for simple enjoyment, but in fact, it finds its concrete expression in the society, its inspiration and methods confined within what it allows. Thus, the artist imbued with bourgeois ideology, may have created what he considers a masterpiece confined in his room, full of corruption, scandal, murder, intrigue and the like, but such a depiction of reality is in fact aimed against the creation of a new society. In particular, degeneration in the imperialist stage of capitalism drags down culture to its most base forms, to philistine and anti-people desires, and plays its role as part and parcel of the ruling ideology which is telling the people that it is the final stage of human development. Many of these artists claim to hate ideology, but in fact, they only hate one definite ideology, Marxism-Leninism, descendants of the ancient parasite whose motto was “let others work, we want to enjoy ourselves.” On the other hand, Gorky’s depiction of reality, life-like and true to what is coming into being, serving the progress of humanity and fostering proletarian social love, is most modern.