Product Description

Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian. After his father, a paperhanger and upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, and with his grandmother, a tender mountain of a woman and a wonderful storyteller, who would kneel beside their bed (with Gorky inside it pretending to be asleep) and give God her views on the day's happenings, down to the last fascinating details. She was, in fact, Gorky's closest friend and the epic heroine of a book swarming with characters and with the sensations of a curious and often frightened little boy. My Childhood, the first volume of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, was in part an act of exorcism. It describes a life begun in the raw, remembered with extraordinary charm and poignancy and without bitterness. Of all Gorky's books this is the one that made him 'the father of Russian literature'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46066 in Books
• Published on: 1990-09-27
• Original language: Russian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

socailist realism by the master
This has to be the most moving of books as a diatribe on the stark brutality of life in pre-revolutionary Russia. Gorky has the ability to entwine, through his own experience, a sense of child-like wonder and adult cynicism into his work, making the reader feel genuine sympathy if not empathy through the authors gentle prose. He is an obvious "lover of mankind", with the ability to draw careful insight and allusions to his contempories and predecessors, whilst losing none of the driving force of this work. This book should be considered first and foremost as a brilliantly structured, in both diction and prose, heart-wrenching story and only afterwards should it be considered for it's political nature which caused the ludicrous censor of this text.

An superb coverage of a seemingly bleak Russian childhood.
Gorky writes this chronicle of his childhood using the language and experience of adulthood, but with a vivid memory of how it appeared to him as a child, rather than as a adult. This allows us an appreciation of how he ggrows up and sees the world as he relates his childhood experiences.

The contrast to the life of Tolstoy is striking, how ever the same straight forward writing and sensitivity are clear. The story is so bleak however that an appreciation of what good parts of his life there are is essential.

A barbarous life where suffering is a diversion
Gorky's childhood memories brush a very outspoken picture of `that close-knit, suffocating little world of pain and suffering, where the Russian man of the street used to live.'
It is a world full of brutal violence: husbands beating savagely their wives, severely and intensively flogging of children, gamblers becoming totally destitute, alcoholism, dangerous diseases (smallpox, ulcers) and cruel street games (cock and dog fighting, cat torturing, making fun of drunken beggars). Socially, there is a big chasm between the haves and have-nots: their children cannot play together. The poor cannot feed all their new born babies and expose them.
On the other hand, this bunch of `wild animals' is deeply, but primitively religious. They ask God constantly to forgive their sins.

Despite this barbarous environment, Gorky considers his childhood as `a beehive to which various single obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life; often their honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of knowledge was honey all the same.'
There is also another reason why he put these painful memories on paper: `It is the truth and the truth must be known. The Russian man in the street is sufficiently healthy and young in spirit to overcome the horrors.'

Although he lost his love for his family and was thrown out of their home, he remains highly optimistic for mankind: `Life is always surprising us by the bright, healthy and creative human powers of goodness. It is those powers that awaken our indestructible hope that a better and more human life will once again be reborn.'

Gorky was received with open arms by the communists, but that love story ended in total personal disaster.

This brutal picture of the man in the street should remind us from where we all come from.
Not to be missed.