Luís's Reviews> My Childhood

That's the first volume of a trilogy recounting the author's childhood and youthful memories. Fatherless, abandoned by his mother, he tells about his miserable childhood with his grandparents. His grandfather is a brutal, tyrannical, often drunk man who terrorizes those around him even if we feel he loves his grandson. Her grandmother is a good but weak woman, passive, fatalistic, bigoted, of great tenderness, of immense love for her little Alyosha. The daily life of all these poor people is made up of misery, misfortune, and violence. They suffer so much that each new casualty is a "distraction"! Alyosha grows up and becomes resourceful, naughty, and cheerful, but there is deep sadness in his heart. When his mother dies, he has to earn a living as a rag picker, which he tells in "By winning my bread."
Lenin and Stalin made Gorky the favorite writer of the new regime while not appreciating his work, for several reasons, in my opinion. First of all, there is undoubtedly a misguided bourgeois. Still, the popular class is far from being idealized as among the Communists (and Christians, too, for that matter); the misery which overwhelms them develops common passions (savagery, avarice.) It also drives away from the "positive proletarian." Then, Gorky has faith in man but believes more in progress due to an internal struggle, culture, and ideology. If he collaborated with the Soviet regime in the cultural field, the Communists had a dual attitude toward culture.
On the one hand, they disseminated it and tried to liberate the people. Still, they were also wary of it because, according to them, they were associating with the bourgeoisie. Finally, its novels are Russian, bathed in religiosity; they refer to "Eternal Russia," far from building a new world, and "from the past, let's make a clean sweep."