[2] Gorky was personally connected to the novel as it is based on real life events, revolving around Anna Zalomova and her son Pyotr Zalomov.

In his novel, Gorky portrays the life of a woman who works in a Russian factory doing hard manual labour and combating poverty and hunger, among other hardships.

Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova is the real protagonist; her husband, a heavy drunkard, physically assaults her and leaves all the responsibility for raising their son, Pavel Vlasov, to her, but unexpectedly dies.

Nevertheless Nilovna, moved by her maternal feelings and, though uneducated, overcoming her political ignorance to become involved in revolution, is considered the true protagonist of the novel.

[2] Modern critics consider it Gorky's most important pre-revolutionary novel as it is his only long work devoted to the Russian revolutionary movement[4] and because of the vivid image of his "God-Builder" ideas.

Nevertheless, Gorky himself was highly critical of Mother, saying that it was "an unsuccessful thing, not only in its external appearance, because it is long, boring and carelessly written, but chiefly because it is insufficiently democratic.

"[6] Numerous artistic flaws of Mother and Gorky's other novels, written before 1910 have been widely described in reviews and critical essays by Korney Chukovsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, Ilya Serman, Marylin Minto and many others.

It is full of Biblical allusions: the revolutionaries are portrayed as saints, ready for martyrdom; Pavel speaks with 'the ardour of a disciple'; the Gospels are quoted to convey ideas about truth-searching.