A figura da “Mãe” na cultura e literatura soviética: o realismo em Górki e o testemunhal em Aleksiévitch

This article aims to analyze the representations of the figure of the "Mother" in Maksim Górki's The Mother (1907) and Svetlana Aleksiévitch's Zinc Boys (1989). In both works, we see a political construction of motherhood. In the first, it is linked to the antechamber of socialist realism and the teleological announcement of the future. In the second, to the testimony as a "prayer-account"of these women who lost their children in the "colonial conflict" of the Afghan War (1979-1989).They raise their voices to criticize the impassive bureaucracy. The future is replaced by the continuous present, the perennial and therefore traumatic mark of their son's death. In the figurations, the mothers appear in the public space. Emotion is not a feeling of withdrawal, but of encountering the other. Emotion doesn't say "I". In order to carry out these discussions, we also went through, as reverberations, the historical and iconographic figurations of motherhood in the Soviet Union.