My Childhood

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''.>

About the author

Maxim Gorky

Product details

• Authors: Maxim Gorky, Gorky M, Ronald Wilks
• Assisted by: Ronald Wilks (Introduction), Wilks Ronald (Introduction), Ronald Wilks (Translation), Wilks Ronald (Translation)
• Publisher: Penguin Books Uk
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 27.09.1990
• EAN: 9780140182859
• ISBN: 978-0-14-018285-9
• No. of pages: 240
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 14 mm
• Series: Penguin Modern Classics; Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin; Penguin Modern Classics; Penguin Classics; Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Russian, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, LITERARY CRITICISM / Russian & Soviet, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form