my account is constantly getting shadowbanned, like once in a few days
is there anything i can do? i wanted to sumbit a form to the support, but they don't have a form for shadowbans; if one tries to fill the "suspended account" form, they don't let fill it and write "You are not currently logged into a suspended X account."
This painting is by no means related to the book or its author, but I think it could fit for the cover
there are no longreads in this sub idk if i should write that
One of the relatively known 20th century Russian writers is Maxim Gorky; however, while the name is known, his best books clearly aren't. I used to be really interested in all that, so I wrote all of that to Wikipedia (both to the English and the Russian ones) - you can read stuff there if you want to - but English Wiki prefers Eng-lang sources, so I'll put more here than in English Wikipedia - both about his last novels and his political career - and why he wasn't really a Stalinist. If you don't know: in the 1900s, he was the most famous Russian writer, but now his reputation is compromised by the two things: by his political career, secondly, due to not all of his books being equally worthy by their quality.
His political career: in the 1900s he was an anti-Tsarist activist tied to Marxism, a friend of Lenin; he condemned the Bolsheviks in their first year in power, mostly for the political violence, and finally emigrated; after living in Fascist Italy for some time, he gradually became an admirer of the Soviet Union, and in 1930s he fully returned to Russia. In public, he became a mouthpiece for the Stalin regime, promoting the collectivization and the GULAG camps. Behind the scenes, there were various intrigues: he maintained friendships with Kamenev and Bukharin who opposed Stalin, he asked Stalin to "not close the doors to the Party" to Zinoviev, also an oppositionist, despite the hatred for him since the Civil War; he also hoped to "ease" Stalin's literary policy, sort of patroned the non-regime writers and arranged Bukharin's speech where he called Pasternak "the greatest Soviet poet", pledged to allow some political dissidents to leave the USSR. It's hard to tell to what extent Gorky "understood something" in the last months of his life, but the memoirs tell he sort of did - for example, they mention his notes in a book on the English Revolution which subtly compared its outcome to the one in Russia. Gorky's major works didn't really fit the regime needs, even though the regime didn't admit it - while the official writers praised the heroism of the Revolution, the Industrialisation and the Five Year Plans, Gorky served the regime only in his political speeches and rare short wrtitings which were instantly forgotten - the portrayal of the revolution in the major works is not heroic, and he hadn't written almost anything about the life in the USSR. His life ended with a sort of a house arrest.
Now to his books: his best-known novel is "Mother" (1906), which is still republished in English, but of which Gorky himself said that it's his worst books and which he admittedly wrote solely for maintaining the revolutionary agenda. I would recommend the novel "The Artamonov Business", it's pretty short and got positively assessed by the critics and scholars, but it's not republished in English. A bit more interesting is the cycle of short stories "Stories of 1922-1924" ("Рассказы 1922-1924 годов") - sadly, it's unknown even in Russia. Throughout his life, Gorky was known as a realist; the late stories, however, are not realist. For example, "Blue Life" ("Голубая жизнь") is a grotesque nightmare of a closed speechless person with an artistic worldview whose idill of the life of contemplation and listening to music is ruined by a demonic stranger. "The Story about the Unusual" from the same cycle has one of the ugliest portrayals of the Russian Revolution/Civil War in fiction: it's main character, a peasant who joins the Red Army and later deserts [?], is driven by obsession with "simplification" of the human kind and the reality itself and exterminating everything "unusual".
He wrote these stories and "The Artamonov Business" to "train" himself for his final work.
"The Life of Klim Samgin" it's a very complicated work and seemingly a very hard read. Gorky himself wanted it to be a thing which he would be remembered for. By its length, it's about two "War and Peaces" I think. The first volume is divided only in five chapters; the rest is just uninterrupted stream. It's written as a biography of Klim Samgin, a mediocrity with no value surrounded by characters freaky in their own ways. In his childhood, he was praised by his parents as the smartest kid, but was bullied by peers - he clings to "the smartest" label given by the parents to suppress the inferiority complex. Samgin goes through circles of various educated people of Russia, and those often has anti-regime sentiments. People around him discuss what educated people did - literature, philosophy and politics - Samgin is mostly silent to look smarter. The characters chattering about these high matters plays not the last role in the book - what makes it harder to read. Against his will, he gets into the revolutionary circles; he iternally opposes the revolution, he's afraid of losing his comfortable social status, but due to being committed to his reputation he can't simply leave. Samgin is opposed to everything around him and despises it - and since everything is presented through his POV, the revolution doesn't look heroic, and there are almost no Bolshevik characters. This is what the regime Soviet critics didn't like about the novel, but Gorky became defended by the highest authorities. The novel was supposed to end with Samgin dying in 1918, but the author didn't really know how to end it and died, leaving the book unfinished.
I really hope that Gorky's late works will be republished in English in some time - "The Life of Klim Samgin" wasn't republished since it's first and only edition in English in the 1930s, and that translation doesn't seem credible; "The Artamonov Business" was last issued last time like in the 1980s or even earlier, and not by some well known publishers like Penguin; "The Stories of 1922-1924" were never published as a book in the West, in Russia they were printed only in the academic Complete Works set. I believe that republishing late Gorky is something the NYRB Classics could do.
- You are given a responsible task: in Berlin, you have to gather the precise size stats of the truly Roman nose and the truly Roman forehead.
The book in the background is titled: "RACIAL THEORY. Translated from German". The cartoon mocks the introduction of racial (including antisemitic) laws and the Charter of Race in Italy in 1938, largely influenced by Nazi Germany. Prior to that, the Italian Jews had full citizen rights.
a bit afraid of drawing humans digitally so it's on paper + a doodle
sunny is a bit cursed
feel free to criticise me or express negative opinions i will appreciate it
