bluebird research

If you want to gain an understanding of what life was really like for the majority of Russian subjects before the Revolution, you can do worse than read Maxim Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy – My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities. The books are difficult to find in English, although the 1960s and 1970s translations by Ronald Wilks, published by Penguin, are sometimes to be had second-hand. 

Gorky’s reputation in the West is regarded as compromised by his association with the Soviet regime and his writings seldom figure in any major way along side those of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev in courses on Russian literature. This is a shame, as he serves as a salutary corrective to the more romantic, metaphysical and literary takes on Russia and the Russians found in the works of the more highly acclaimed writers. His trilogy depicts Russian society at the bottom rung and it is seldom attractive. His Russian labourers are not the idealised figures found in Tolstoy. They are impoverished, often ignorant and without hope, possessed of a casual brutality and a seeming enjoyment in witnessing others’ pain. Their lives are often cut short by poverty, toil, inadequate diet, alcohol abuse, violence, the extreme weather, and a failure or inability to look after themselves. But these same lives are illuminated occasionally by astonishing tenderness, or comradeship, or an ability to be engaged and greatly touched by the written and spoken word, which in itself is very moving to the reader precisely in the context of the coarseness and cheapness of their daily lives. 

The trilogy covers Gorky’s early childhood to restless late adolescence, from approximately 1871 through to 1888, as he grows up in the fractious home of his maternal grandparents, then, at aged 11 years, becomes an “apprentice” on a Volga steamboat and in an icon workshop, and finally, aged 16, enrols in the “university” of life among the urban poor. The trilogy is set in specific places such as Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Krasnovidovo, strung out along and in the hinterland of the Volga, but there is no reason to suppose that life among the lower classes elsewhere in Russia was much different in the second half on the 19th century. All three works make compelling reading and are recommended for those with family roots in Russia, or an interest in the history of late Imperial Russia, or of course a passion for great literature.