PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS : MY CHILDHOOD – MAXIM GORKY-RONALD WILKS-RONALD WILKS

Coloured 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, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, and 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. She was, in fact, 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 in part an act of exorcism. 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 .