My Universities

By -
My Universities, by Maxim Gorky

I've finished Gorky's trilogy of memoirs!  (Earlier posts: My Childhood and My Apprenticeship)  And indeed they are bitter, just like his name.  Gorky is usually miserable, and I was pretty surprised when he was happy for a while, but that was soon remedied.

This volume covers four years of late adolescence.  Young Gorky reads as much as he can, but he has never been to school and has nothing resembling a real education.  When he meets a student who invites him to come to Kazan and try to get into the university there.  Gorky eagerly heads off, but is only disappointed; he's not qualified.  He continues to read as much as he can--now with a little more system--and finds various jobs.

He's now starting to get into political issues, and works at a bakery that is a secret meeting place for revolutionaries.  Much of Gorky's "universities" are his talks and arguments with the people he meets.  However, life continues so unrelentingly grim that he eventually loses heart and attempts suicide.

Things improve from there, after recovery.  Gorky heads out to a village with some friends who are starting a sort of cooperative fruit-growing enterprise and store.  Their prices are lower, but the local peasants are hostile and suspicious; this eventually culminates in the biggest disaster of the book and Gorky's near-death.  Afterwards he finds work on the Caspian Sea.

I expected more about revolutionary philosophy than I found in this book.  What I did find was a real hostility to "Tolstoyans" and their belief in the simple wisdom and beneficence of the Russian worker or peasant.  "For them the people were the living embodiment of wisdom, spiritual beauty and kindness...But I had never known any people who were really like this."  All his experience, after all, has been of cruelty and violence.   He goes on to call the workers miserable specimens and finds admirable virtue in the humanist, idealist students, rather than in the poor he has always lived among.  All this romanticism about the simple peasant just drives Gorky crazy!

Comments

  1. Amateur Reader (Tom)February 10, 2017 at 7:49 PM

    The title is ironic! I had not known that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TarissaFebruary 22, 2017 at 6:47 PM

    I haven't read many Russian books myself, but this could be interesting to try. Thanks for sharing!

    Tarissa
    http://InTheBookcase.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more