My Childhood - Maxim Gorky, Ronald Wilks (Translator)
In recalling my childhood, I like to picture myself as a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their own experience. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of knowledge was honey all the same.
Colored 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. This polecat-faced tyrant would regularly beat him unconscious. 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. 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 an exorcism act. 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."
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