The Distress of Gorky’s Childhood

The Distress of Gorky’s Childhood
I became acquainted with the writings of Maxim Gorky when I was in high school. I read the first book of his autobiography, “My Childhood,” and was impressed by his wonderful style of depicting people and places. His narration was characterized by bitter sarcasm and details that gave his literature honesty and realism to the point-;- you cannot forget his novels for years.
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov was born in 1868, that is, before the assassination of the Tsar of Russia at the hands of a revolutionary organization. He mentioned this incident when he was working as a servant for his grandmother’s sister. I loved Russian literature, whether in the novels of Chekhov, Gogol,´-or-Gorky, because I felt that they speak about our society as well. Gorky wrote down his childhood and youth in three volumes. This biography contained the details and conditions of Russian society, in which resentment was boiling against the Tsar and his regime, and Gorky broadcast it through characters, events, and situations. It is as if he is saying that such a situation requires such a revolution. The three parts that he wrote began with a book - My Childhood - which consists of 280 pages. The second biography exceeds 550 pages and is entitled Among the People´-or-In the World, and the last part is My Universities, the size of my childhood. He began writing his autobiography in 1913, that is, before the Russian Revolution, and finished it in 1923. When he began writing at a young age, he signed the name “Gorky” - meaning bitterness, which indicates his miserable life in Russian society. Gorky s works were translated into most of the world s languages and had a wide impact in literary circles. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize five times. But in my humble personal opinion, a person’s literature and influence are not measured by the Nobel Prize, but rather by the joy and changes he brings to the human soul and mind.
Critics dealt with Gorky s literature and wrote thousands of pages about it. The most important people who wrote about him are Mark Slonim and Dmitry Mirsky,´-or-- D. S. Mirsky - and this last critic is Ukrainian-born. He said about Gorky that he immerses himself in details and builds his narrative around a single character that he develops, unlike Tolstoy. Chekhov believes that Gorky also delves into details without control and that his dialogue lacks an internal monologue. In addition, most of the events of his novels proceed in a straight line, that is, they do not include modern techniques such as flashbacks and others, which, in my opinion, do not diminish his great and wonderful works.
When Gorky presents his characters, he does so because these characters are represented within an organic social cell that moves within moral and temporal frameworks. Perhaps this is what led some critics to classify his works as a new school of criticism, independent of others, which is socialist realism. The Russian critic and historian Dmitry Mirsky was a friend of Gorky, and he has an interesting story. He began fighting with the White army against the Bolsheviks, and when the Bolsheviks won, he fled to Europe as a refugee. He published many books on Russian history and literature. In Britain, he joined the Communist Party and contacted Gorky from his place in order to mediate his return to Russia. Stalin agreed. Mirsky returned, unaware of the danger he faced there. Stalin considered the Russian intellectual a time bomb against him. In 1937, a British writer and critic came to Russia and contacted Dmitry. Russian intelligence became suspicious that Dmitry was a British spy, so they arrested him and put him in prison. In 1939, he died in the Gulag camps, like millions of Russians whose loyalty to Russia and the party was questioned by Stalin. Even Gorky was not spared from Stalin. A rumor appeared, circulated by Western sources at that time, that Stalin s KGB had poisoned Gorky s son and then poisoned Gorky. The funny thing is that Stalin always arranged a luxurious funeral for these comrades, carrying the victim’s coffin with the bearers and drawing signs of sadness on his face after resonant speeches.
In the book “My Childhood,” he begins by writing about his father’s body in the bedroom, lying with a smile on his face. He was five years old at the time. His father worked in the upholstery craft and was an agent in maritime transportation, but he got cholera. This cholera struck the child Alexis before him and he recovered from it, but the infection was transmitted to the father and he did not survive it, and this is one of the reasons that his mother looked at him with condemnation as the one who caused her husband’s death. When he stood at the open grave with the people, he saw rainwater flowing into the grave’s opening, and at the moment the coffin was lowered into the grave, he saw frogs jumping, trying to escape from the piles of -dir-t thrown on top of the coffin. He moves with his mother to the house of his grandfather Vasily Kacharin and his grandmother Akulina Kashirina. His grandfather owned a small dyeing factory and employed a number of workers. In the evenings they gather at a table in the guest room to eat and sing. Gorky tells us how his grandfather exploited these people and did not give them their due rights. Among them was a man who worked for him for many years and was blinded by chemicals in dyeing, and the grandfather did not have mercy on him. In the house of his grandfather, uncle Mikhail and Yakov were living there also, and they quarreled over trivial reasons. They were addicted to alcohol, and were always demanding their shares from the factory, so that they could go about their own business. The grandfather was a violent person who hits everyone and does not spare anyone from his evil. Even the poor grandmother sometimes gets her share of the beatings. A house is full of selfishness and quarrels. Gorky mentions how the grandfather used to flog Sasha, his cousin, and he also flogged him until his body swelled from the intensity of the beating. Here he asks in one of these texts: - Am I right in writing down such Russian events! and the answer is that you must understand the truth before you start erasing it and replacing it with a better reality - He had a famous saying that the world is made of a hammer and a ruble, meaning work and money are the engines of human activities. His mother did not stay at home for long. Rather, she would leave him with his grandmother and be absent for a period of time, and the last time she came she brought her new husband with her. This event made him feel very sad.
There is an American critic and historian named Irwin Weil who gave a wonderful lecture on Gorky, which is available on YouTube for those who want to follow along. Weil says that Russian literature in general and Gorky in particular is the key to understanding Russia historically, culturally and socially and understanding the causes of the revolutionary transformations that began with the assassination of the Tsar in the late nineteenth century. He continues, addressing the audience: Imagine that the United States faced a civil war in the middle of the nineteenth century, the percentage of slaves was 10 percent, let alone a society like Tsarist Russia, where slavery constituted about 90 percent of the population. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that made Russia a backward country in Western Europe, and it looked at the West with envy to the point that Tsarina Catherine made the French language an official language in the Russian judiciary and courts during her reign.
The characters in his novel are from the Russian reality of that time. They are mostly thieves, peasants, workers, and vagabonds, all of whom combine poverty and destitution. These characters were the obsession that Gorky lived with and based his philosophy of life on. He emphasized that the decline of morals in Russia is a result of these abnormal conditions in which the Russian people live.
He once depicted himself sitting on the grass, watching the silent sky, and how flocks of birds were flying and hovering around the church domes.
After his grandfather s dyeing business went bad and a fire broke out at the outskirts of the factory, he sold everything and bought a two-story house with a winery below. When little Gorky went out into the street in the new neighborhood, the neighborhood children chased him and shouted, “This is Grandpa Kashirin’s miserly grandson. Beat him.” They beat him until blood flowed from him. These children were extremely aggressive against every stranger.
- Important figures in - My childhood - This is wonderful and grandma:
In the new house there was a pleasant tenant whom Gorky described as tall, stooped, with a forked beard and large glasses. He was introverted, and whenever his grandmother would invite him to dinner, he would always say: This is wonderful. From this standpoint, everyone called him, “This is wonderful.” They say, “This is wonderful,” left´-or-“This is wonderful” came back. He was very silent and read books of all kinds, and he was conducting chemical experiments in the room, so the grandfather became annoyed by this and kicked him out of the house. This person will influence Gorky s life until his death because of his knowledge and kindness in dealing with others
As for the character who im-print-ed in him happiness, tenderness, and signs of the arts of storytelling, it is without a doubt his grandmother Akulinya, who used to sit next to his bed and tell him dozens of stories in an intelligent and attractive way, as it was the first seed for developing his talent in narrative literature. She was an illiterate, uneducated person, but she was very intelligent, as he described her. She was raised as an orphan with her sister, and she was a beggar in the streets before her marriage, and she continued to do so when her husband lost everything. She was roaming the alleys begging people, hoping that they would give her what would satisfy her needs and that of her cruel husband. Despite all his oppression and violence towards her, she was always kind to him, especially when he began to lose his memory in his old age. He described her in - my childhood - book as a fat, round woman who sniffed and sneezed to relieve her stress in that house. Sometimes she drinks some vodka to forget her worries and misery.
- His mother s death:
He says at the end of the first autobiography that his mother was ill and gave birth to a brother from her second husband, whom she called Nicholas. Due to extreme poverty, she fell ill with tuberculosis. On Sunday, she died while she and her husband were at their grandmother s house. All this happened before his eyes. He says in the last lines after his mother died while he was still a child:
(Days after my mother’s death, my grandfather said to me: Well, Alexei, I cannot keep you like a medal hanging around my neck. You have no place here. It is time for you to go out and work among the people... And so I went out into the big world.

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