About the work
Drama by Maxim Gorky, written in Russia in 1915 and first published in the original Russian in 1918 by the Ladyzhnikov publishing house in Berlin. It premiered on 1 January 1919 at the Maly Theatre in Moscow — the start of a partnership between the theatre and Gorky's dramatic work that continues today and has since produced around fourteen of his plays.
Plot
The building contractor Mastakov has built himself a respectable bourgeois life, leaving a criminal past behind him. When his former fellow inmate Anton appears, having served seven years of forced labour for a crime they once committed together, he tries to blackmail Mastakov with knowledge of that past. The confrontation escalates tragically, ending in Mastakov's suicide.
Cultural significance
In the play, Gorky draws a critical portrait of people who use suffered injustice to justify their own thirst for revenge. At the Maly Theatre, where the play premiered, it became the starting point of a Gorky tradition that continues to this day; the theatre revived the production again in 1968.