Jan-Maat's Reviews> My Childhood

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.

I sat at a table near the door of my English class when I was around thirteen. Hard by the door to its left was a slightly battered steel cupboard which held a modest library of books. The idea was we could borrow a book from the cupboard to broaden our reading and this book is the one I best remember, it stands out more clearly thanRogue MaleorThe Fallen Idoland numerous others whose titles I've forgotten since turning their pages.

On the one hand it is a great book to read while growing up because it concerns the process of growing up and in particular for any bookish child this is an autobiography of reading, a child formed by books as much as anything else. And in this respect it is like many other literary autobiographies -The Classic Slumleaps to mind as a British equivalent. On the other hand the young Alexei Peshkov, who later adoptedMaxim Gorky(view spoiler)[the surname means 'bitter'(hide spoiler)]as his pen name, grew up in Nizhni-Novgorod, brought up by his downwardly mobile grandparents at the end of the nineteenth century as the Russian Empire was undergoing one of its periods of rapid yet uneven economic growth, so it is also the story of a very particular childhood.

This volume is the first of an autobiographical trilogy that continues withMy Apprenticeshipand closes withMy Universities(view spoiler)[ the title of the final part is ironic(hide spoiler)].It opens with the young Gorky watching his mother crying over the dead body of his father while she goes into labour and ends some years later, barely a teenager, with his grandfather tossing him out of the house to fend for himself.

The whole trilogy builds into an impressive picture of pre-revolutionary life in a big provincial city. Its a colourful and hard existence, people don't so much struggle to avoid poverty so much as regularly see it flood over them, just as the river Volga floods the lower reaches of the city every spring. Almost the only constant are the books and the reading, the impact of that reading on the life and mind of a growing child who as the series closes has become an adult, in part an adult shaped by books they have read.

Above all there are two constant figures in this story. His grandmother(view spoiler)[ she started and ended her life as a beggar(hide spoiler)]and his grandfather(view spoiler)[ he had some success as a dyer, but the business was brought down through squabbles between his sons(hide spoiler)].The grandfather was a self made businessman(view spoiler)[ it is the Grandfather who teaches the young boy to read and write using church calendars which leaves him with unusually boxy handwriting(hide spoiler)].However this is not the cool, calm world of the corporation but rather the by the skin of the teeth world of the family business, riven by jealousies and insecurity. The grandmother by contrast inhabits the world of folk religion(view spoiler)[ when an icon of the Virgin Mary is carried around the town by monks from house to house for the residents to give a respectful kiss to the young Peshkov has been so filled with love for her by his Grandmother's stories that he can't restrain himself from kissing the Virgin full on the lips(view spoiler)[ which earns him a cuff from the monks(hide spoiler)](hide spoiler)].This is a fascinating book I am still inclined to recommend to lovers of Tolstoy and Turgenev as a corrective to a top down, rural vision of pre-revolutionary Russia. Here instead is the teeming town, the tradesman, the small business. A world in which going to school and getting a formal education can be a child's dream, while getting the kind of beating that lands them in hospital is part of the reality of their upbringing.