Summary "At the bottom" of Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky's play "At the bottom" was created in a very turbulent time, when people were in power, sometimes nothing that did not understand it. That is why there are two parallel lines in the work, 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 this unusual arrangement of the play, two plans appeared at once: internal and external. The summary "At the bottom" will help to open the work from different sides.

The play takes place in a doss house, owned by Mikhail Ivanovich Kostylev and his wife Vasilisa Karlovna, while the husband is older than his wife for 25 years. In this building there are "former people", this is how the author himself calls them. This category includes those who do not have a certain social status, as well as poor people forced to work for pennies.

In addition to the owners of the doss house, the play includes the following actors: Actor, Satin, Andrei Dmitrievich Kleshch (all three for 40 years), wife of locksmith Anna (30 years old), 24-year-old prostitute Nastya, Krivoy Zob and Tatarin hookers, Alyoshka, twenty years old From the family, the thief Vaska Asp and the 33-year-old Baron. Minor characters of the work are police officer Medvedev, Vasilisa's uncle, as well as a dumpling trader Kvashnya. Summary "At the bottom" shows a huge number of characters in the play, each of which hides a difficult fate.

Between the characters are complicated relationships, often enough in the house there are scandals. Vasilisa loves Vaska Ashes and persuades him to kill Kostylev. She wants to be the sole owner of the doss 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 since descended to the very bottom, they are waging a wild life. The most miserable character of the play is the Baron, who yesterday was a nobleman, but today he was left without a penny in his pocket and forced to live in a doss house. The worker Ticks tries to feed himself and his wife with locksmith skills, but he can not even buy medicines for the 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.

Wanderer Luke, appearing in the middle of the play, symbolizes an unrealizable bright future. However, inspiring hope to the suffering people, it simply disappears. The actor does not stand it and commits suicide.

Reflector of the collision of two philosophical "truths" at once became the play "At the bottom", the brief content of which once again emphasizes this. The lodging house in this context plays the role of humanity, which found itself at a dead end, losing hope for a higher intelligence and not finding faith in one's own strength. This is what causes the general feeling of hopelessness and hopeless darkness. The summary "At the bottom" allows you to feel this feeling without going into the small details of the work.

Satin is honest and prefers not to hide the truth from everyone. In his conversation with Mites, the theme of the lack of meaning in life acquires a completely new sound. Satin plays the role of a radical who accepts the whole absurdity of the world where God disappeared, and emptiness appeared. Luka, on the other hand, believes that if a person needs to lie to maintain his own life, then he can not do without lying, otherwise he will not be able to withstand the harsh truth and die.

The conflict between Luka and Satin plays the role of a catalyst for all others. To some extent, the latter understands the philosophy of the former and even partially agrees with it. In the opinion of both, a person must feel his own importance and act only for the good of himself. In this work M. Gorky (the play "At the bottom") most clearly reflects the life vicissitudes of people who lived in the early twentieth century.