Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother, written in 1906, when the Russian revolutionary infection was bringing on a high fever, states explicitly as its theme and also demonstrates as an object lesson the importance of books in making socialist revolution. Mikhail Rybin, an old factory hand and a perfervid latecomer to political enlightenment, can barely contain himself as he asks a comrade for forbidden books to distribute among the workers. “Give me your help! Let me have books — such books that when a man has read them he will not be able to rest. Put a prickly hedgehog to his brains. Tell those city folks who write for you to write for the villagers also. Let them write such hot truth that it will scald the village, that the people will even rush to their death.”
