The article presents a comparative analysis of I.V. Goethe’s “The Word to Young Poets” („Ein Wort für junge Dichter,“ 1833) and the article written in connection with A.M. Gorky death by the theorist of Marxist aesthetics D. (G.) Lukács “The Liberator” („Der Befreier,“ 1936). The subject of the analysis is Lukách’s interpretation of the ‛liberator’ concept used by Goethe in relation to his own work. Lukács, who chose this keyword from Goethe’s paper as the title of his own article, tries within the framework of the theme set by Goethe about the liberating mission of the writer to prove the validity of applying the theses of the German classic in the era of proletarian art. In the course of the undertaken analysis, the author of the article comes to the conclusion about the selectivity of Lukács’s approaches to research material. That was dictated by the specificities of the functional-target settings the author of “The Liberator,” dedicated not just to a great writer per se, but to the classic of socialist realism, was guided by. Therefore, Lukács’s interpretation of Goethe’s text isn’t based on a comprehensive analysis of the German classic and the Soviet writer views on a given topic, but is limited to the juxtaposition of iconic semantic constants that are embedded in the word “liberator,” important for Lukács in terms of their relevance to Gorky’s personality and work.
The article presents evidence of A. M. Gorky’s stay in the German city of Saarov in 1922-1923. Within the framework of the historical-contextual approach, an attempt was made to show how the mechanisms for preserving and updating memory function in relation to a particular writer. We are talking about the world-famous classic of Russian / Soviet literature — A. M. Gorky. It is traced how his personality and creative heritage, which once became part of world literature, are perceived in a foreign cultural space of the 21st century (namely, a century after Gorky’s stay in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century). The analysis involves both material objects of culture (museum complexes, monuments, etc.), onomastic geolocation, and elements of memorial culture related to written sources. These are the memoirs of contemporaries, research, as well as the actualization of Gorky’s work at the level of mass consciousness (the creation of a certain citation book from Gorky’s works, etc.). It is concluded that Gorky’s personality and work continue to be an integral part of the memorial culture of Germany, and his name, despite the change of generations, ideologies and geopolitical shifts, has not been erased from the cultural map of this country.
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