The main issue of this lecture is the combination of social and religious motifs in The Mother by Maxim Gorky. The novel is seen as the continuation of the socio-ideological tradition (in the sense expressed by Mikhail Bakhtin). Characters' features and the principles of distinguishing them are described as well as the issues of the style (the metaphoric excessiveness). Works of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Blok, Viktor Kin (the novel Beyond), Anna Akhmatova (Requiem) are mentioned as the cultural context. A brief study of the writer's evolution from The Mother to Untimely Thoughts is done.