CLASSICS REVISITED
Coming of age in Russia
RAVI VYAS
LITERATURE takes a great deal of living with and living by. And all great literature is autobiographical in the last analysis, even if it becomes "experience completely transformed". Because it is essentially autobiographical, it is not about language but about life; it is not the sounds of words but about their meanings and the writers who last are those who depict humanity and its existential concerns in the most meaningful way. Maxim Gorky, often proclaimed as the father of Soviet literature, is the model and it is his autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, My Apprenticeship (also translated earlier as In the World) and My Universities (they have to be read in one go) that, as a living and memorable record of a boy's growth into a young man, is a classic for all time.
It is often said all great writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged. Suffering for Gorky is not so much the spiritual dilemma of abstract issues that it was for Dostoevsky: it is the "here and now" of animal-like existence in industrial towns of pre-Revolutionary Russia, where people go begging in the streets, taking their pickings from refuse heaps.
Remarkable panorama
The adulation that Gorky received for his portraits of tramps, beggars and social outcasts and his remarkable panorama of Russian life in all its suffering and gaiety, barbarity and deeply-affecting stoicism provoked Tolstoy into saying, "... the man seems to be all eyes. The wonderful thing is that that he saw and noted down things other people were incapable of seeing, or, if they saw were powerless to record". And what Gorky recorded in a prose close to the bone, without tricks and without cheating — with anything that would go bad afterwards — made Tolstoy go on to say: "I knew long before Gorky that tramps too have souls".
Begin with My Childhood. Gorky was five when his father died. His mother's grief repelled him. It made her look puffy and dishevelled, so unlike her normal, neat self. Standing by his father's open grave, he noticed some frogs, two of which had climbed on to the coffin's lids. When the gravediggers began shovelling in the earth, they tried to climb the sides, but the clods knocked them back. Afterwards, their fate was very much in his mind and he went around asking adults who wanted to listen whether the frogs got out. The incident is significant because there is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in — in this case Gorky's concern for the underdog.
The young impressionable Gorky is thrust into his grandfather's household, where, in his words, life is one nightmare after another. His two uncles, Mikhail and Yakov, quarrel constantly about the father's will, fight like animals and, after drinking themselves silly in town, return home to smash the furniture. For what are petty larcenaries, grandfather vents his anger on the young Gorky until he is carried unconscious to bed where he lies for weeks, listening to the winds and the wolves howling in the distant fields.
"To such music," he says, "his soul matured."
All the stories are about people being tortured, ridiculed or persecuted. Grandfather's house is a seething bedlam of uncles, aunts, cousins and resident dye makers. The foreman dye maker is almost blind and it was considered hilarious to heat the handles of his scissors red hot over a candle flame and leave it for him to pick up. Gorky's mother remarried but the stepfather was as bestial as the rest of the family. When Gorky saw him beating his mother he seized a knife and tried to kill him, which earned him the usual round of flogging.
Recalling the "vile abominations" of that time Gorky questioned whether it was wise to write about it. But he decided he must because until poverty and squalor were ruthlessly exposed they could not be rooted out. When many of us wonder why so many sensitive, intelligent young Russians supported the Revolution with its terrible human cost, Gorky's picture of life under the Czars may help us to understand why. After all, a great writer is both a psychologist and a social historian.
But another reason why Gorky decided to dredge up his childhood memories is that even in that abominable world he found someone who sustained his faith in human goodness. That was his grandmother, an illiterate peasant woman, daughter of a crippled lace maker. Meeting all the tribulations of life with a stoicism born from an unshakeable faith in God, she saw the hand of God everywhere, even in birds and bees and the devil itself and her folk religion provided her with a repertoire of stories about robbers, saints, wild animals, evil spirits and holy idiots. All these took root in the child's memories "like flowers".
Grandmother transforms the book as does Gorky's replication of a child's consciousness, in crystal clear clarity, to which is annexed a child's ardour for play and pleasure. It is typical of Gorky that for all the misery, squalor and violence that were daily features of life around him, he nevertheless showed a remarkable resilience and strength of character. In fact a vein of optimism runs throughout the whole trilogy and hope is constantly voiced that one day people will stop behaving like wild animals, sadistic bullies, drinking themselves silly, fighting and tormenting each other.
Memorable characters
At the end of My Childhood Gorky is sent out "into the world" at the age of 11 by the wily old grandfather to fend for himself — a tender age at which to fend for himself. My Apprenticeship is almost twice the length of My Childhood, although the time is shorter, and this is what we might expect from a growing boy, now much more receptive to external impressions, more aware of people and their emotions and of the many and often terrifying events rushing past. My Apprenticeship describes characters who are truly memorable — ordinary people doing daily chores but with a remarkable strength of character and his own coming of age.
"There were two persons living within me. One of them had experienced far too much that was filthy and nasty and had as a result become rather timid. This person was crushed by his knowledge of the horror of everyday life and had begun to look upon it distrustfully, suspiciously with a helpless feeling of compassion for everyone — even for himself... The other man had been baptized by the holy spirit that he had read about in books written by honest and wise men. Although he realized how terrible reality was... he still persisted in defending himself... baring his fists, and was always ready for a quarrel or a fight."
Gorky then moves on to his Universities in Kazan that are not formal places of higher learning but a vast array of living people, all drawn with his remarkable powers of observation. And of course from discussions and the reading of banned books like Chernyshevesky's What is to be Done?
"Inquisitiveness was all, a hunger to know everything and at once". The Universities is nothing more than discussions and the inculcation of a burning curiosity where one thing led on to others, as if by their accord. Gorky's trilogy of a young boy coming of age is one of the great autobiographies of the 20th Century. All parents and educationists should read it.
My Childhood; My Apprenticeship; My Universities; Maxim Gorky, first published between 1913-1923. These translations by Ronald Wilks in Penguin Classics, 1966-1974, currently priced at £6.99 each.
Other books consulted: Fragments from My Diary, Penguin and Gorky and his Contemporaries, Progress Publishers.
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