It was one of the finest experiences that I ever had in my life. I was thrilled to read works by Aleksei Maximovich Pyeskov (Maxim Gorky). The most of all I love his Autobiography.
Gorky means bitter in Russian & is the pseudonym he adopted in his early teens. This name described both his young life & the way he often felt.
He lost his parents at an early age & experienced the deprivations of a poverty-stricken childhood. Five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious. His grandmother was infact Gorky's closest friend & the epic heroine of a book swarming with characters & with the sensations of a curious & often frightened little boy. She was a kind, tender woman and a wonderful storyteller, who would kneel beside their bed and give God her views on the day's happenings, down to the last fascinating details. He was deeply influenced by her fondness for literature & compassion for the downtrodden.
He was turned out of the house when his mother died & followed from one profession to another.He was often beaten by his employers & half starved. To escape the misery of his own life, Gorky became an avid reader. He, though received little education.
Anton Chekhov described Gorky's rough, socially conscious naturalism as a destroyer bound to destroy everything that deserved destruction.
He also started analyzing more deeply the plight of these people in a broad, social context. In these early stories
Gorky skillfully mixed romantic exoticism and realism. Occasionally he glorified the rebels among his outcasts of
Russian society. Later Gorky used everyday experiences from his wandering years in his books. During the period of conformity, Gorky was busy working on his greatest masterpiece. In fact, this work is considered to be the finest Russian autobiography.
From 1913-1923, Gorky wrote his autobiographical trilogy;
MY CHILDHOOD (1913-14) followed by MY APPRENTICESHIP (1916)and MY UNIVERSITIES (1922), which was written in a different style. In these works the author looked through the eyes of Alyosha Peshkov, his observations, his development and life in a Volga River town.
MY CHILDHOOD, was in part an act of exorcism. It describes a life begun in the raw, remembered with extraordinary
charm & poignancy without bitterness. This book is the one that made him 'the father of Russian literature'.
His book of memoir opens with the scene of his mother, wailing & mourning over her dead husband:
All her clothes were torn. Her hair, which was usually neatly combined into place like a large gray hat, was scattered over her bare shoulders and hung over her face and some of it, in the form of a large plait,
dangled about, touching Father's sleeping face. For all the time I'd been standing in that room, not once did she so
much as look at me, but just went on combing Father's hair, choking with tears and howling continually.'
First few lines:
'Father lay on the floor, by the window of a small,darkened room, dressed in white, and looking terribly long. His feet
were bare and his toes were strangely splayed out. His gentle fingers, now peacefully resting on his chest, were also distorted, and the black disks of copper coins firmly sealed his once shining eyes. His kind face had darkened and its nastily bared teeth frightened me.'
Even though these books are autobiographical, mostly he deals with the characters and people who were a part of Gorky's childhood & early adult years. Specific references to himself are brief, at best. He tells the story of his life and the people in it with little attempt to analyze or explain it. Gorky continued to stress the importance of
personal fortitude and contemptible nature of human cruelty.
They simply do not give the varied life of Gorky from childhood through youth, but they also provide us with an unforgettable picture of one of the most crucial generations in Russian life & history-the late 19th & early 20th centuries.
It is as if the autobiography begins at the age of five and ends with Gorky secure in his position as one of the leading Russian writers. From the beginning, the story is organized as a quest for knowledge and understanding, of oneself & the world around.
This quest brings Gorky into contact with the harsh realities of life in late 19th century Russia-the life that was to constitute his “universities”. The reader follows him as he turns from one job to another in an effort to make a living for himself-rag picker, errand & stock boy, junior clerk, bird catcher, cabin boy on a Volga steamer, apprentice in an icon factory, baker, watchman & freight handler at railroad stations. We move with Gorky in his life of wandering from one part of Russia to the next. And in the course of the journey, we meet some of the most
extraordinary characters in literature.
All the people that crowd the pages of his life history are as interesting as they are varied. Be it Peasants,artisans,
scholars, writers, teachers, policemen, govt'officials- they passed in & out of Gorky's strange, sad life, leaving each one of them a vivid imprint on his keen mind. he learned to build for himself a philosophy of life through them & with the memory of them he painted for us those stark, vital pictures which make the unforgettable
character of his book.
Each character is fascinating, alive and sharply individualized. The most striking character is Gorky's grandmother with her strength & idealism, her superstition & sympathy. Herself a folk bard, she passed on to Gorky the impulse to hearten others & a rich store of folk song & folk story. There is Smoury, the chef of the Volga steamer, whom Gorky later called one of his outstanding teachers. There is also Olga, the woman with whom Gorky had his first love affair, eccentric, irresponsible, flirtatious but charming and kind.
The fact that his literary style is less polished than other, more educated writers, is of little consequence. Yet it lends more realism to his subject matter. Historically, Gorky's works are extremely important as they offer the single most comprehensive account of the lives of the common folk during the period of turmoil, revolution and early Soviet control in Russia.
Russian short story writer, novelist, autobiographer & essayist, whose life was deeply interwoven with the tumultuous revolutionary period of his own country. Gorky ended his long career as the preeminent spokesman for culture under the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin. Gorky formulated the central principles of Socialist Realism,
which became doctrine in Soviet literature.
Well, I don't dare to compare Gorky's trilogy with others as His is the Masterpiece telling his everyday experiences
since childhood in the most natural way using the simplest lang' with the Local Dialects. But definitely besides Gorky's Trilogy, I like autobiographies by
John Steinbeck,Fyodor Dostoevsky,Mahatma Gandhi,
Leo Tolstoy,Ivan Turgenev,Rabindranath Tagore etc.
Other Works by Gorky
Gorky's Plays:
Children of the Sun, Summerfolk, The Summer People.
Short Stories:
Chelkash,Twenty-Six Men and a Girl,Decadence,The Life of a Useless Man,Mother, The Confession,Untimely Thoughts, Fragments from My Diary, Selected Letters & many more.
