2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25
Maxim Gorky's play "At the Bottom" was created in a very turbulent time, when people were in power, sometimes they did not understand anything about it. That is why in the work there are two parallel lines at once, one of them is philosophical, the other is social and everyday. Their development is carried out in parallel, they do not intersect anywhere. As a result of such an unusual layout of the play, two plans appeared at once: internal and external. Summary "At the bottom" will help to reveal the work from different angles.
The action of the play takes place in a doss house owned by Mikhail Ivanovich Kostylev and his wife Vasilisa Karlovna, while the husband is 25 years older than his wife. “Former people” live in this building, as the author himself calls them. This category includes those who do not have a certain social status, as well as the poor, forced to work hard for a pittance.
In addition to the owners of the rooming house, the play contains the following characters: Actor, Satin, Andrey Dmitrievich Kleshch (all three are 40 years old), wife of the locksmith Kleshch Anna (30 years old), 24-year-old prostitute Nastya, hookers Krivoy Zob andTartar, Alyoshka twenty years old, thief Vaska Pepel and 33-year-old Baron. The secondary characters of the work are the policeman Medvedev, who is Vasilisa's uncle, and also the dumpling merchant Kvashnya. Summary "At the Bottom" demonstrates a huge number of characters in the play, each of which hides a difficult fate.
Difficult relationships develop between the characters, scandals often occur in the house. Vasilisa loves Vaska Ash and persuades him to kill Kostylev. She wants to be the sole owner of the rooming house. The thief loves Vasilisa's younger sister Natalia. Kostylev's wife finds out about this and beats her.
The actor and Satin have long sunk to the bottom, they lead a wild life. The most miserable character in the play is the Baron, who only yesterday held the position of a nobleman, and today is left penniless and forced to live in a rooming house. The hard worker Tick tries to feed himself and his wife with the help of plumbing skills, but he cannot even buy medicine for his sick wife. After her death, the locksmith finally loses faith in himself and begins to drink. Summary "At the bottom", alas, is not able to show all the pain that the hero feels after the loss of his wife.
The Wanderer Luke, appearing in the middle of the play, symbolizes an unrealizable bright future. However, having inspired hope in suffering people, he simply disappears. The actor can't stand it and commits suicide.
The play "At the Bottom" became a reflection of the collision of two philosophical "truths" at once, a summarywhich once again emphasizes this. The doss house in this context plays the role of humanity, which found itself in a dead end, having lost hope in a higher mind and not finding faith in its own strength. This is what causes the general feeling of hopelessness and hopeless darkness. Summary "At the bottom" allows you to feel this feeling without delving into the small details of the work.
Satin is honest and prefers not to hide the truth from everyone. In his conversation with Klesch, the theme of the lack of meaning in life takes on a completely new sound. Satin plays the role of a radical who accepts the whole absurdity of the world, where God has disappeared and emptiness has appeared. Luke, on the contrary, believes that if a person needs to lie to maintain his own life, then he cannot do without lying, otherwise he will not be able to withstand the harsh truth and will perish.
The conflict between Luke and Sateen plays the role of a catalyst for action for everyone around. To some extent, the second understands the philosophy of the first and even partly agrees with it. According to both, a person should feel his own importance and begin to act only for his own good. In this work, M. Gorky (the play "At the Bottom") most clearly reflects the ups and downs of life of people who lived in the early twentieth century.
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