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Bitter Picture Of Middle-class: Plays. Gorky wrote 15 plays, many of which were produced by the Moscow Art Theater and all of which are considered classics in the Soviet Union. His first play, The Petty Bourgeois (1901), is a bitter picture of middle-class family life. The work for which he is most celebrated in the West is The Lower Depths (1902), a play about the loneliness and futility of the lives of "leftover" people.
The lower middle class is made up of clerks, junior civil servants, small merchants and shopkeepers, craftsmen, and skilled workers. Finally, there is the lower class of unskilled, factory workers, drivers, and domestic servants.
Each social class has its own life-style. At least the educated and second-generation members of the upper class generally speak English or French fluently. They possess a cosmopolitan culture and indulge in conspicuous consumption. The middle classes tend to be thrifty and account for the remarkable growth of bank savings in Greece since World War II.
Meanwhile, the upward-climbing poor are adopting the opposite philosophy. They are aspiring to middle-class positions and demanding that work afford dignity as well as income. The poor face a cruel psychological dilemma when the prevailing view of the middle class is one of contempt for the very things that persons emerging from a culture of poverty are trying to achieve. |
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