Gorky: My Universities

Gorky: My Universities
We have previously discussed the first two parts of Maxim Gorky s autobiography (My Childhood) and (Among the People´-or-In the World). This part (My Universities) was written after the Russian Revolution and was finished in 1923. It is fewer in number of pages than the first two parts, and you feel that Gorky is trying to finish it quickly. The number of pages does not exceed 200 pages. Gorky is known for his extensive de-script-ion of characters and nature.
Gorky begins when a friend advises him to study at university because he is psychologically and prepared intellectually for it. He is a person who did not attend elementary school for more than a few months due to homelessness and poverty. He learned to write and read from his grandfather when he used to sit with him in the evenings and read to him from the Book of Psalms, which created in him a passion for reading and knowledge. We can say that an orphan suffers from a complex during his childhood, either -dir-ect him towards construction and positivity´-or-towards corruption of the soul and evils, and this is what Gorky mentions in his biography: the orphan either becomes a thief´-or-a troublemaker and thus becomes a man of evil and corruption considering that orphan has no one to deter him´-or-guide him to goodness.. This is the case of Gorky who lost his father and mother while he was still a child and faced all kinds of homelessness and harsh life. He sometimes stole to eat and joined revolutionary groups that stirred up trouble in Kazan.

He went to Kazan to study at the university, but he discovered after a short period that he was unable to spend on himself´-or-the costs of the university, so he left it and was satisfied with studying at the universities of life that gave him lessons much more important than the university subjects. That is why he called this part (My Universities). In short, the university does not make you an intellectual, but it helps you to be so.

Gorky excelled in describing nature, when it is calm´-or-turmoil, the night of it´-or-day. In this part, there is a de-script-ion of the rain, the night, and the stars:
(.. I remained alone in the room listening to the sound of the storm that was hitting and scratching the window, and a small lake of water had gathered on the floor. He moves on to describe the poor room that was open to the winter rains, as he said. On another page, there is a de-script-ion of the sky: The sky was clear except for one golden cloud... And at night: There were black clouds moving parallel above my head, and the moon strutted among them like a golden ball, casting its shadows over the earth. ... And about the stars of the night: the sparkling stars pierced the dark night, and they seemed close to the earth despite their extreme distance.

When he failed to enter the university, he lived with a young man named Gory Pletnov in a house full of people. That young man is described as intelligent and teaches mathematics, but bites his nails in his free time. In that house, he also saw a man wandering here and there aimlessly, with two oblong legs and a huge mouth full of yellow teeth like a horse. They had a student who was followed by a woman in her forties like a spy´-or-a stubborn creditor, and he hated her but did not reveal his hatred to her. Among the people, there was a young man from the university who once asked him to lend him a book (Proverbs and Sayings) and described the young man as having a Negro head, curly hair, thick lips and shiny white teeth. Meanwhile, he met a group of young men working in secret, forming a revolutionary organization. One of these young men was Andrew Derenkov, and this young man owned a library in Kazan that contained many books, especially forbidden political ones. Through the biography, we learn the style carried by these intellectuals who were searching for solutions for their country, as if the French Revolution had affected them to the point that they hated the clergy and religion itself because the Tsar had made the clergy his left arm in his rule, and therefore most of them developed hostility, as we said, towards religion and the clergies. The name of the organization was (People s Happiness First). Of course, with the spread of organizations affiliated with the novelist Tolstoy, which were a mixture of religiosity and awareness. Gorky mentions an important phrase when he says that intellectuals revolt for the sake of a utopian city, the idealist revolts, and with him the parasites, the wretched and the scoundrels revolt because they feel empty.

In the winter, he found work in a bakery among a large group of poor workers and this period affected him to the point that he was inspired by stories such as - (The Boss) .. (Konovalov) .. and (Twenty-six Men and a Girl). The bakery was underground and rats were rustling in the extremities and he worked there fourteen hours a day. He got to know many types of people whose characters would be repeated in his stories and novels later. He describes the baker as a man who loves ---sleep--- and he is lazy.
He tells us a funny story when he went to the mental hospital taking bread with him in a basket: When I entered, the doctor was lecturing the students about the types of mental illnesses, and he put in front of him a tall man wearing a white robe who suddenly stood up and stared at me, so I retreated in fear, so the doctor calmed him down and stroked his beard gently. During that period, Dernikov opened a bakery and Gorky worked with him for 10 rubles a month.
One day, he received a letter from his cousin who lived with his grandmother, saying that she had died after slipping down the stairs and breaking her leg, which became inflamed and she died as a result. In the letter, he narrates that his hard-hearted grandfather had cried at her grave.
Gorky suffered from isolation because he could not build a strong friendship with those around him. In addition, he missed the dearest person to his heart, his grandmother, so his life became more empty and meaningless. So he bought a gun and decided to commit suicide. He loaded it with four bullets and shot himself in the chest, intending to hit the heart, but he did not die because the bullet hit the lung and did not penetrate the heart. He stayed in the hospital for a long time and then returned to work in the bakery. However, he wrote a story based on this incident entitled (An Incident in the Life of Makar).
Sitting in a small, bare room with closed windows, he recalls those isolated evenings, comparing the city to the village: “The advantages of the city appeared to me in comparison with the stagnant, one-sided village. In the city there is a yearning desire for happiness, a bold mentality, and a diversity of goals and hopes. This is demonstrated by [three families quarreling over a jug worth only a few kopecks. An old woman’s arm was broken and a boy’s head was injured. A quarrel between these people never ceased.
He comments on a religious young man named Izot sitting next to him, lost in thought. He believes that God is love, not fear. He, the young man, sees God as an old, handsome, kind ruler on earth who does not pursue evil because he does not have enough time for that. But his faith does not save him from the brutality and aggression of the villagers who saw these young men as a threat to their morals and lives because of their opposition to the Tsar. One day, one of them follows Izot and kills him while he is driving a boat on the river. The hostility does not stop there, but the villagers try to get rid of them all by putting gunpowder in one of the stove woods so that it explodes, but no one is harmed. Then they burn their storage house with the intention of killing them. All this because they are accused of establishing cooperatives.

When Gorky found all this hostility, he decided to travel at dawn, as he describes: At night, the moon was hanging over the fields beyond the river like a wheel of a cart. After that, dawn crept cautiously, making its way through the clouds. We left the village, and when the boat from Samara reached the shores of the Caspian Sea, we found work with a small group of fishermen in a -dir-ty fishery in Kabankul.

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