On the music of the fat

Translation by Érika da Silveira Batista

Abstract

Maxim Gorky (1868 – 1936), whose real name was Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov, was a Russian naturalist writer, a communist and a precursor of the Soviet Realism. Gorky’s works gave origin to what the so-called Proletarian Literature, and he helped to remodel culture in the Soviet Union. He did so not only through his works of fiction but also through literary criticism and opinion journalism, as it can be seen in this article, published by the newspaper Pravda, n. 90, April 18th, 1928. In it, Gorky spits harsh invectives against jazz music and some moral phenomena that he considers proper of the decadent capitalist society, juxtaposing them to the exaltation of work and the scientific and cultural progress of men, especially the proletarian men. The article reflects not only Gorky’s opinion, but a point-of-view that was adopted by the Soviet government organs concerning jazz, and thus it serves as research material to help comprehend the cultural ideology of the Stalinist time.