Children of the Sun (play)

Maxim Gorky reading in the Penates his drama Children of the Sun. Drawing by Ilya Repin (1905).

Children of the Sun (Russian: Дети солнца Deti solntsa) is a 1905 play by Maxim Gorky, written while he was briefly imprisoned in Saint Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress during the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905. It was nominally set during an 1862 cholera epidemic, but universally understood to relate to contemporary events.

Gorky appears to have largely written the play in the last eight days of his imprisonment, before his February 2, 1905 release, which came in response to massive international protests over the imprisonment of such a prominent writer. The play was initially banned, but was allowed to premiere October 24, 1905 at the Moscow Art Theater, with Vasili Kachalov as Professor Protassoff and Olga Knipper (wife of Anton Chekhov) as Lisa. The atmosphere was so tense that the audience began to panic in response to the mob noises in Act III. Kachalov had to stop the play to assure them that, while his character might be in danger from a mob, the audience was not.

The title refers to the privileged intellectual elite of Russia, epitomised by Protassoff, high-minded and idealistic, but basically unaware of what is going on around them in the lower depths. Lisa, in contrast, is sickly, nervous, and prophetically aware of impending crisis.

Protassoff's detachment leaves him oblivious to the nearly mad Lisa's love for him, to his wife's drifting away, to the brutality of his assistant Yegor, and ultimately to the danger of the armed mob that comes to attack him.

References

• Adler, Jacob (1999). A Life on the Stage: A Memoir, translated and with commentary by Lulla Rosenfeld. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-679-41351-0, 333-336 (commentary).