2 - The Novel of Consciousness: Gorky, Díaz Fernàndez, Arderíus and Benavides

Summary

Gorki ha encontrado en la clase obrera un arquitecto de la vida nueva, y mucho tiempo antes de la victoria de la Revolución de octubre se hizo mensajero de la revolución proletaria.

(“El 60° aniversario” 16)

[Gorky has found an architect of new life in the working class, and long before the victory of the October Revolution he became a messenger of the proletarian revolution.]

A prolific source of political literature in the Soviet Union and Spain, “novels of conscience” are a sort of Bildungsroman, in which the hero becomes a “new man” as he achieves a social or political awakening. This model, particularly in its revolutionary application found in early twentieth-century Russian literature, was a productive source for narratives in Spain for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the lengthy religious history of the country, which was conducive to appropriating religious models, even in the face of the anticlericalism of their authors. Perhaps the author who figured most prominently in the establishment of the Russian tradition is Maksim Gorky (Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, 1868–1936), who wrote what has been called the first prototype of Socialist Realism, Mother (Mamь, 1906). In Spain a number of works that contributed to the rehumanization of Spanish literature during the late 1920s and 1930s – in fact the majority of narratives of Nuevo Romanticismo – might also be considered novelas de conciencia, including José Díaz Fernàndez's La Venus mecànica, Joaquín Arderíus' La espuela and Manuel D. Benavides's Un hombre de treinta años.