I’ve been putting off Maxim Gorky’s most famous play, The Lower Depths (Russian, English) — probably the most famous thing he ever wrote — for decades; it’s one of the few Famous Works of Russian Literature I had never read, even in translation. I didn’t have high regard for Gorky as a writer, and I was afraid it would just be a slush of socially significant characters saying socially significant things, and who needs that (except the Party, comrade)? But I noticed that Criterion Channel had filmed versions by two of my favorite directors, Jean Renoir (Les Bas-fonds) and Akira Kurosawa (どん底, Donzoko), and I didn’t want to see them without first becoming acquainted with the source material, so I plunged in.
As those of you familiar with the play will have expected, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, it’s chock full of social significance, but it’s also got well-drawn characters and good meaty language, so I enjoyed it; one of the characters, Satin, is fond of randomly spouting impressive words he ran across (Органон [organon]… Сикамбр [one of the Sicambri]… Макробиотика [macrobiotics]… транс-сцедентальный [transcendental]…), which of course gave me extra pleasure. (Incidentally, I hadn’t realized that macrobiotic goes back to the 18th century in the now obsolete sense “Inclined or tending to prolong life; relating to the prolongation of life”: 1797 “Hence arises a particular science, the Macrobiotic, or the Art of prolonging it [sc. life], which forms the subject of the present work… The object of the medical art is health; that of the macrobiotic, long life.”) You can read a clumsy but reasonably accurate plot summary at the Wikipedia page; what I want to focus on here is the argument that goes on throughout much of the play about lies and truth, a theme that’s come up here more than once (in Crime and Punishment, in The Devils, in Rasputin’s Downstream). I’ll quote the (archaic but online) 1922 English version by Jenny Covan (from the introduction: “Here for the first time, the vigor, the virility, the humanity and the humor of the original survive the transfer from the Russian tongue to our own, without mysterious and vaguely symbolic ‘meanings’ gratuitously appended”) and provide a bit of the Russian for those who want to search the above-linked text for the original.
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