Book 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'.
