French Literature Reviews - 2026

Valérie Pozner, Gorki au cinématographe
History, Politics and Society

This volume offers a complete translation of two articles in which the author describes his first impressions of the Lumière cinematograph, discovered in Nizhny Novgorod in the summer of 1896. At the time, Gorki was primarily known as an opposition journalist, and these pieces were written for two liberal dailies (one in Nizhny, the other in Odessa) covering the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition. His reaction to the future of this innovation was highly circumspect; he associated it, on the one hand, with the fair's prevailing trend toward cheap "entertainment," and on the other, with the musical and pictorial works presented to the exhibition's visitors—both aspects of modernity that he viewed as pernicious. The accompanying commentary sheds light on this political and cultural context, and the translation is supplemented by several other texts by Gorki published during the same period.

Maxim Gorki's early essays on the nascent medium of film capture a moment at the intersection of journalism, technology, and cultural critique in late nineteenth-century Russia. Written during the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition, these responses reflect intellectual debates about mass entertainment, industrialization, and the shifting boundaries of art and modern visual culture. Readers interested in the early reception of cinema and the journalistic writings of Maxim Gorki may find this volume relevant to their studies of Russian literary and cultural history.