Very briefly A boy's father dies. Together with his mother, he moves to the house of his cruel and greedy grandfather. The mother gets married and the boy is raised by his grandmother. When the mother dies, the grandfather sends the boy “to the people.”
1913 Nizhny Novgorod. The story is told on behalf of the boy Alyosha Peshkov.
I
Alyosha's first memory is the death of his father. He did not understand that his father was no more, but the cry of his mother Varvara was etched in his memory. Before this, the boy was very ill, and grandmother Akulina Ivanovna Kashirina, “round, big-headed, with huge eyes and a funny loose nose,” came to help. Grandmother sniffed tobacco and was all “black and soft”, like a bear, with very long and thick hair.
On the day of her father’s death, Varvara went into premature labor and the child was born weak. After the funeral, the grandmother took Alyosha, Varvara and the newborn to Nizhny Novgorod. They were traveling on a ship. On the way, the baby died. Grandmother, trying to distract Alyosha, told fairy tales, which she knew a great many.
In Nizhny they were met by many people. Alyosha met his grandfather Vasily Vasilich Kashirin - a small, dry old man “with a red beard like gold, a bird’s nose and green eyes.” The boy's uncles, Yakov and Mikhailo, and cousins came with him. Alyosha didn’t like grandfather; he “immediately felt an enemy in him.”
II
My grandfather’s family lived in a large house, the lower floor of which was occupied by a dyeing workshop. They didn't live together. Varvara got married without a blessing, and now her uncles demanded her dowry from her grandfather. From time to time the uncles fought.
Grandfather's house was filled with a hot fog of mutual enmity of everyone with everyone.
Alyosha's arrival with his mother only intensified this enmity. It was very difficult for the boy, who grew up in a friendly family.
On Saturdays, the grandfather whipped his grandchildren who had misbehaved during the week. Alyosha did not escape this punishment either. The boy resisted, and his grandfather beat him half to death.
Afterwards, when Alyosha was lying in bed, his grandfather came to make peace. After this, the boy realized that his grandfather was “not evil and not scary,” but he could not forget or forgive the beatings. Ivan the Tsyganok especially struck him in those days: he put his hand under the rods, and he received some of the blows.
III
Afterwards Alyosha became very friendly with this cheerful guy. Ivan the Gypsy was a foundling: his grandmother found him one winter near her house and raised him. He promised to become a good master, and his uncles often quarreled over him: after the partition, everyone wanted to take Gypsy for themselves.
Despite his seventeen years, Gypsy was kind and naive. Every Friday he was sent to the market for groceries, and Ivan spent less and brought more than he should have. It turned out that he was stealing to please his stingy grandfather. The grandmother swore - she was afraid that one day the Gypsy would be captured by the police.
Soon Ivan died. In my grandfather’s yard there was a heavy oak cross. Uncle Yakov vowed to take him to the grave of his wife, whom he himself killed. The gypsy fell to carry the butt of this huge cross. The guy overstrained himself and died from bleeding.
IV-VI
Time has passed. Life in the house was getting worse. Only grandmother's fairy tales saved Alyosha's soul. Grandmother was not afraid of anyone except cockroaches. One evening the workshop caught fire. Risking her life, the grandmother took the stallion out of the burning stable and burned her hands very badly.
“By spring, the guys split up,” and the grandfather bought big house, on the ground floor of which there was a tavern. My grandfather rented out the rest of the rooms. There was a dense, neglected garden growing around the house, sloping down into a ravine. A grandmother and her grandson settled in a cozy room in the attic.
Everyone loved their grandmother and turned to her for advice - Akulina Ivanovna knew many recipes for herbal medicines. She was originally from the Volga. Her mother was “offended” by the master, the girl jumped out of the window and was left crippled.
Since childhood, Akulina went “to people” and begged for alms. Then her mother, who was a skilled lacemaker, taught her daughter her skills, and when fame spread about her, her grandfather appeared. Grandfather, staying in good mood, also told Alyosha about his childhood, which he remembered “from a Frenchman,” and about his mother, an evil woman with a Kalashnikov.
Some time later, the grandfather undertook to teach Alyosha to read and write using church books. He turned out to be capable of this, and soon he fluently understood the church charter. The grandfather was a believer, but the God to whom he prayed aroused “fear and hostility” in Alyosha.
He did not love anyone, he watched everything with a strict eye, he, first of all, looked for and saw the bad, the evil, the sinful in a person. It was clear that he did not believe the person, always expected repentance and loved to punish
The boy was rarely allowed outside - every time the local boys beat him until he was bruised.
Soon Alyoshin’s quiet life ended. One evening Uncle Yakov came running and said that Uncle Mikhailo was going to kill his grandfather. From that evening, Uncle Mikhailo appeared every day and caused scandals, to the delight of the whole street. So he tried to lure a dowry out of grandfather Varvarino, but the old man did not give up.
VII-X
Closer to spring, my grandfather unexpectedly sold the house and bought another. The new house also had an overgrown garden with a hole - the remains of a burnt bathhouse. On his left was Colonel Ovsyannikov, and on his right was the Betlenga family.
The house was filled with interesting people. Particularly interesting to Alyosha was a parasite nicknamed Good Deed. His room was filled with strange things and he was constantly inventing things.
Soon the boy became friends with Good Deed. He taught him to correctly present events, without repeating himself and cutting off all unnecessary things. Grandmother and grandfather did not like this friendship - they considered the parasite a sorcerer, and Good Deed had to move out.
Alyosha was very interested in Ovsyannikov’s house. In a crack in the fence or from a tree branch, he saw three boys playing in the yard in harmony and without quarrels. One day, while playing hide and seek, the younger boy fell into a well. Alyosha rushed to the rescue and, together with the older children, pulled out the baby.
The children were friends until Alyosha caught the eye of the colonel. While he was kicking the boy out of the house, he managed to call him “old devil,” for which he was beaten. Since then, Alyosha communicated with the Ovsyannikovs Jr. only through a hole in the fence.
Alyosha rarely remembered his mother, who lived separately. One winter she returned, settled in the parasite’s room and began teaching her son grammar and arithmetic. Life was difficult for Alyosha in those days. Often the grandfather quarreled with his mother, trying to force her into a new marriage, but she always refused.
Russian people, due to their poverty and meagerness of life, generally love to amuse themselves with grief, play with it like children, and are rarely ashamed of being unhappy.
The grandmother stood up for her daughter, and one day the grandfather severely beat her. Alyosha took revenge on his grandfather by ruining his favorite calendar.
The mother became friends with a neighbor, a military wife, who often had guests from the Betlengs’ house. The grandfather also began to organize “evenings” and even found the groom’s mother - a crooked and bald watchmaker. Varvara, a young and beautiful woman, refused him.
XI-XII
“After this story, the mother immediately grew stronger, straightened up tightly and became the mistress of the house.” The Maksimov brothers, who migrated to her from the Betlengs, began to visit her often.
After Christmastide, Alyosha suffered from smallpox for a long time. All this time his grandmother looked after him. Instead of a fairy tale, she told the boy about his father. Maxim Peshkov was the son of a soldier who “rose to the rank of officer and was exiled to Siberia for cruelty to his subordinates.” Maxim was born in Siberia. His mother died, and he wandered for a long time.
Once in Nizhny Novgorod, Maxim began working for a carpenter and soon became a renowned cabinetmaker. Varvara married him against the will of her grandfather - he wanted to marry his beautiful daughter to a nobleman.
Soon Varvara married junior Maksimov, Evgenia. Alyosha immediately hated his stepfather. Out of frustration, my grandmother began to drink strong wine and was often drunk. In the hole left from the burnt bathhouse, the boy built himself a shelter and spent the whole summer in it.
In the fall, my grandfather sold the house and told my grandmother that he would no longer feed her. “Grandfather rented two dark rooms in the basement of an old house.” Soon after the move, my mother and stepfather showed up. They said that their house burned down with all its belongings, but the grandfather knew that the stepfather had lost and came to ask for money.
Mother and stepfather rented poor housing and took Alyosha with them. Varvara was pregnant, and her stepfather was deceiving the workers, buying credit notes for products at half price, which were used to pay at the factory instead of money.
Alyosha was sent to school, where he really didn’t like it. The children laughed at his poor clothes, but the teachers did not like him. At that time, the boy often misbehaved and annoyed his mother. Meanwhile, life became more and more difficult. Mom gave birth to a son, a strange big-headed boy, who died quickly and quietly. My stepfather has a mistress.
Soon Varvara became pregnant again One day Alyosha saw his stepfather hitting his pregnant mother in the chest with his thin and long leg. He swung a knife at Evgeniy. Varvara managed to push him away - the knife only cut his clothes and slid along his ribs.
XIII
Alyosha returned to his grandfather. The old man became stingy. He divided the farm into two parts. Now she and her grandmother even took turns brewing tea.
To earn money for bread, the grandmother took up embroidery and weaving lace, and Alyosha and a group of guys collected rags and bones, robbed drunks and stole firewood and planks “in lumberyards along the banks of the Oka.” His classmates knew what he was doing and mocked him even more.
When Alyosha entered third grade, Varvara and her newborn Nikolai moved in with them. The stepfather disappeared somewhere again. Mom was seriously ill. The grandmother went to the house of a rich merchant to embroider a cover, and the grandfather fussed with Nikolai, often underfeeding the child out of greed. Alyosha also loved to play with his brother. The mother died a few months later in the boy’s arms, without ever seeing her husband.
After the funeral, the grandfather said that he was not going to feed Alyosha, and sent him "".
", "In People" (1913-1916) and "My Universities" (1925) M. Gorky portrays a hero capable of spiritual self-development. The process of human formation was new in literature. IN famous works about the childhood years of S. Aksakov, L.N. Tolstoy, A.N. Tolstoy, the main attention was paid to the image inner world child. Researchers of Gorky's work believe that the social nature of the hero of the trilogy, the commonality of fate with the people, distinguish it from other examples of the autobiographical genre. Childhood, depicted by Gorky, is far from a wonderful period of life. This is not only the story of a child’s soul, but also Russian life in a certain era.
The hero of “Childhood” peers into this life, at the people around him, tries to understand the origins of evil and hostility, and reaches out to the bright. The writer himself saw and experienced a lot in childhood. He wrote: “Remembering these lead abominations wild Russian life, I ask myself for minutes: is it worth talking about this? And, with renewed confidence, I answer myself: it’s worth it; for it is tenacious, vile, it has not died to this day. This is the truth that needs to be known to the roots, in order to tear it out from the roots, from the memory, from the human soul, from our entire life, difficult and shameful. And there is another, more positive reason that prompts me to draw these abominations. Although they are disgusting, although they crush us, crushing many beautiful souls to death, the Russian person is still so healthy and young at heart that he overcomes and will overcome them.”
Despite the fact that these statements are given by the writer only in the 12th chapter, they are the leading thread of the story. Not in chronological order, the narrative moves consistently and calmly: the pictures drawn by the writer arise as a result of the most powerful impressions left in the child’s mind from encounters with reality.
Knowing the characteristics of the child’s psyche, Gorky shows the dark and tragic in contrast with the bright and joyful, which makes the strongest impression on the child. So, instead of the heavy impression from the paintings tragic death father comes a feeling of happiness from closeness with an extraordinary person- grandmother; the picture of the grandfather’s inhuman cruelty during the punishment of children is adjacent to the description of the grandfather’s intimate conversation with Alyosha; The inquisitorial entertainments of the uncles are contrasted with the kind and witty amusements of the Gypsy. It is important to see the “close, stuffy circle of terrible impressions” in which Alyosha lived in the Kashirin family, how the hero’s ideas about morals expanded own world outside my grandfather's house.
Alyosha was greatly influenced by those “beautiful souls” whom he met in his grandfather’s house and in the world around him and who instilled “hope for rebirth... to a bright, human life.” The peculiarity of “Childhood” is that the narration is told on behalf of the narrator. This type of presentation is not new, but the difficulty lies in the fact that what is depicted in the story is seen both through the eyes of a child, the main character, who is in the thick of things, and through the eyes of a wise man, assessing everything from the standpoint of great life experience.
It is precisely the fact that the narrator preserves in the story the ardent spontaneity of a child’s perception of the world and at the same time gives a deep socio-psychological analysis that allows us to conclude that Gorky was trying to arouse disgust for the “abominations of life” and instill love for the mentally generous, persistent and the talented Russian people.
Maxim Gorky's autobiographical trilogy "Childhood. In People. My Universities", on which he worked for 10 years, is one of the most significant works of Russian realistic literature of the twentieth century. The writer himself called it “that truth that needs to be known to the roots, in order to root it out of memory, from a person’s soul, from our entire life, difficult and shameful.”
Provincial Russia literally comes to life before the reader of the trilogy late XIX- the beginning of the twentieth century, with its merchant yards and working-class suburbs, Volga ports, a series of colorful characters and an endless depth of understanding of the very soul of the Russian people, always balancing on the line between the beautiful and the ugly, between crime and holiness.
Maksim Gorky
Childhood. In people. My universities
Childhood
I dedicate it to my son
Chapter I
In a dim, cramped room, on the floor, under the window, lies my father, dressed in white and unusually long; the toes of his bare feet are strangely spread out, the fingers of his gentle hands, quietly placed on his chest, are also crooked; his cheerful eyes are tightly covered with black circles of copper coins, his kind face is dark and scares me with his badly bared teeth.
Mother, half naked, in a red skirt, is on her knees, combing her father’s long, soft hair from his forehead to the back of his head with a black comb, which I used to saw through the rinds of watermelons; the mother continuously says something in a thick, hoarse voice, her gray eyes are swollen and seem to melt, flowing down with large drops of tears.
My grandmother is holding my hand - round, big-headed, with huge eyes and a funny, doughy nose; she is all black, soft and surprisingly interesting; she also cries, singing along with her mother in a special and good way, she trembles all over and tugs at me, pushing me towards my father; I feast, hide behind her; I'm scared and embarrassed.
I had never seen big people cry before, and I did not understand the words repeatedly spoken by my grandmother:
- Say goodbye to your aunt, you will never see him again, he died, my dear, at the wrong time, at the wrong time...
I was seriously ill - I had just gotten back to my feet; during my illness - I remember this well - my father merrily fussed with me, then he suddenly disappeared and was replaced by my grandmother, a strange man.
-Where did you come from? – I asked her.
She answered:
- From above, from Nizhny, but she didn’t come, but she arrived! They don't walk on water, shush!
It was funny and incomprehensible: upstairs in the house lived bearded, painted Persians, and in the basement an old, yellow Kalmyk was selling sheepskins. You can slide down the stairs astride the railing, or when you fall, you can roll somersault - I knew that well. And what does water have to do with it? Everything is wrong and funny confused.
- Why am I pissed?
“Because you make noise,” she said, also laughing.
She spoke kindly, cheerfully, smoothly. From the very first day I became friends with her, and now I want her to quickly leave this room with me.
My mother suppresses me; her tears and howls sparked a new, anxious feeling in me. This is the first time I see her like this - she was always strict, spoke little; she is clean, smooth and big, like a horse; she has a hard body and is scary Strong arms. And now she is all somehow unpleasantly swollen and disheveled, everything on her is torn; the hair, lying neatly on the head, in a large light cap, scattered over the bare shoulder, fell on the face, and half of it, braided in a braid, dangled, touching the sleeping father's face. I’ve been standing in the room for a long time, but she has never looked at me, she combs her father’s hair and keeps growling, choking on tears.
Black men and a sentry soldier look in the door. He shouts angrily:
- Clean it up quickly!
The window is curtained with a dark shawl; it swells like a sail. One day my father took me on a boat with a sail. Suddenly thunder struck. My father laughed, squeezed me tightly with his knees and shouted:
- It’s okay, don’t be afraid, Luk!
Suddenly the mother threw herself up heavily from the floor, immediately sank down again, toppled over onto her back, scattering her hair across the floor; her blind, white face turned blue, and, baring her teeth like her father, she said in a terrible voice:
- Shut the door... Alexei - get out!
Pushing me away, my grandmother rushed to the door and shouted:
- Dear ones, don’t be afraid, don’t touch me, leave for Christ’s sake! This is not cholera, the birth has come, for mercy, priests!
I hid in a dark corner behind a chest and from there I watched my mother squirm across the floor, groaning and gritting her teeth, and my grandmother, crawling around, said affectionately and joyfully:
- In the name of father and son! Be patient, Varyusha!.. Most Holy Mother of God, Intercessor...
I'm scared; They are fiddling around on the floor near their father, touching him, moaning and screaming, but he is motionless and seems to be laughing. This lasted a long time - fussing on the floor; More than once the mother rose to her feet and fell again; grandmother rolled out of the room like a big black soft ball; then suddenly a child screamed in the darkness.
- Glory to you, Lord! - said the grandmother. - Boy!
And lit a candle.
I must have fallen asleep in the corner - I don’t remember anything else.
The second imprint in my memory is a rainy day, a deserted corner of the cemetery; I stand on a slippery mound of sticky earth and look into the hole where my father’s coffin was lowered; at the bottom of the pit there is a lot of water and there are frogs - two have already climbed onto the yellow lid of the coffin.
At the grave - me, my grandmother, a wet guard and two angry men with shovels. Warm rain, fine as beads, showers everyone.
“Bury,” said the watchman, walking away.
Grandmother began to cry, hiding her face in the end of her headscarf. The men, bent over, hastily began to throw earth into the grave, water squelched; Jumping from the coffin, the frogs began to rush onto the walls of the pit, clods of earth knocking them to the bottom.
“Move away, Lenya,” my grandmother said, taking me by the shoulder; I slipped out from under her hand; I didn’t want to leave.
“Oh my God,” the grandmother complained, either to me or to God, and stood silently for a long time, with her head down; The grave has already been leveled to the ground, but it still stands.
The men loudly splashed their shovels on the ground; the wind came and drove away, carried away the rain. Grandmother took me by the hand and led me to a distant church, among many dark crosses.
-Aren't you going to cry? – she asked when she went outside the fence. - I would cry!
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“Well, I don’t want to, so I don’t have to,” she said quietly.
All this was surprising: I cried rarely and only from resentment, not from pain; my father always laughed at my tears, and my mother shouted:
- Don't you dare cry!
Then we rode along a wide, very dirty street in a droshky, among dark red houses; I asked my grandmother:
- Won’t the frogs come out?
“No, they won’t get out,” she answered. - God be with them!
Neither father nor mother spoke the name of God so often and so closely.
A few days later, I, my grandmother and my mother were traveling on a ship, in a small cabin; my newborn brother Maxim died and lay on the table in the corner, wrapped in white, swaddled with red braid.
Perched on bundles and chests, I look out the window, convex and round, like the eye of a horse; Behind the wet glass, muddy, foamy water flows endlessly. Sometimes she jumps up and licks the glass. I involuntarily jump to the floor.
Gorky's childhood
Soyuzdetfilm. 1938
In people
Soyuzdetfilm. 1938
My universities
Soyuzdetfilm. 1939
If you read everything that domestic and foreign authors wrote about this work, you get the impression that we're talking about completely different films. In its homeland, the Gorky trilogy was rated as a venerable example careful attitude to filmed classics and, as a result, like film classics for children. The only drawback was a certain chaotic nature of the narrative, which, however, is quite excusable, explained by the natural desire of the authors to fit into the film as much as possible more heroes And storylines the book itself.
The same is with the traditional nature of the language - it was believed to be completely appropriate, since we are talking about the film adaptation of a work belonging to the national cultural tradition.
For foreign authors, the trilogy about Gorky is a grandiose cinematic prophecy, and a prophecy that has come true. Three films created at the very end of the 30s anticipated, they believe, the main events of world cinema in subsequent decades until the early 60s.
In fact, none of the Soviet directors (with the exception of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Pudovkin) had such a significant influence on the world film process as Mark Donskoy.
Italian neorealists considered him their direct predecessors, almost directly quoting Donskoy in their films. The father of Indian “parallel cinema,” Satyajit Ray, argued that the very form of his trilogy, which united almost all international film festivals the late 50s films “The Trolley Song”, “The World of Any”, “The Unbowed”, selected under the impression of Donskoy’s work. And young angry French film critics from the magazine Positif in the late 50s, in search of an alternative to old-fashioned French cinema, created a literal cult of Donskoy.
The discovery of Donskoy’s cinema for world cinema was the discovery of a new view of the world, or more precisely, a whole new world: it is no coincidence that the study of one of the French critics was called “The Universe of Mark Donskoy.” The meeting with this cinema was the same as Donskoy’s meeting with Gorky’s work was - a shock that determined his future fate. And we are not talking about stylistics, but about the model of the world, the place of man in it.
Gorky's word turned out to be the key to his own cinematic vision for the director and became his philosophy. It is no coincidence that most of Donskoy’s films contain Gorky quotes: either as an epigraph or as a final title. It is also no coincidence that it was with this film adaptation that the artist, who had been working in cinema for more than ten years, declared himself as an unconditional creative individual, which means: he built his own world.
And if we follow Donskoy’s example, then the epigraph to the article about his work could be the quote he cited in “Gorky’s Childhood”: “A thick, motley, inexpressibly strange life began and flowed with terrible speed.”
The most amazing thing here is that each one is without exaggeration! - the word characterizes Donskoy’s cinema. And he characterizes it literally. For everything here is translated into a visual series - with that extreme clarity and concreteness that is inherent only in children's perception. It is not a verbal sequence, not even an event sequence, that is literally reproduced. But the very image of the world that appears in the narrative. And the book where main character- a child, turned out to be an ideal option for the director in this case.
Three episodes of the film ("Gorky's Childhood", "In People", "My Universities") were filmed one after another and were released in 1938, 1939 and 1940. In Donskoy's crowded film there are two central hero: boy and river. The river in the universe of Mark Donskoy is life. Not a symbol, not a metaphor for life, but precisely life itself: it flows. Children's primordial perception returns the metaphor to its source, reveals a secret - or sacrament? - her birth. The life of the human community, according to historians, arose primarily on the banks of large rivers and was concentrated there. The river gave, carried life with it, was the main condition for human life. And for a child who grew up on the banks of a big river, this identification is more than natural.
Therefore, the Volga in Mark Donskoy’s trilogy is not just a series of landscapes, wonderfully shot by cameraman Pyotr Ermolov, for whom these films were by far the largest creative creation. She in in a certain sense an animate creature that carries within itself, in its waters, some meaning inexpressible in words. And this meaning is connected with human existence, is superimposed on it, like in a double exposure shot.
The complexity, variability, ambiguity of the world - this is what Donskoy strives to capture. This is the source of the poetry of life. Or what would be more accurate in relation to this work - its magic.
Like Gorky, Donskoy is a childishly inspired contemplator, a pagan contemplator, like any child, looking at the variability and diversity of the world with a simultaneous feeling of delight and apprehension - “cautious curiosity,” as Gorky said. Is this where Donskoy’s keen interest in all kinds of magic comes from? In his films, shamans perform rituals, gypsy healers cast spells, and grandmother Akulina Ivanovna in Gorky’s Childhood, every time before going to a new place, seriously and inspiredly lures the brownie.
More than once or twice, a human anthill will boil near Donskoy on the banks of the Volga - in scenes replete with internal action, rich in plans, making one remember Bruegel. In fact, a dozen events are happening simultaneously in the frame: drunks pass by, prisoners are being chased away, parsley workers are giving a performance, a boy is stealing a loaf of bread from a hawker, loaders are dragging luggage - and above all this there is an endlessly open sky, and behind all this is the great river forever flowing into the distance ..
With this open space, the theme of freedom enters Donskoy’s cinema. The connection between freedom and the natural, spontaneous principle was extremely important for Gorky, and especially for young Gorky; and it turned out to be no less important for Soviet cinema of the late 20s and early 30s. Suffice it to recall the ice drift in Pudovkin’s “Mother” or the final storm over Asia in his “Descendant of Genghis Khan”. But by the end of the 30s - the time the trilogy was released on the screen - this theme ceases to exist in our cinema altogether: it goes away along with the theme of nature, which is now entirely subordinated to man.
The conflict between closed and open spaces as a visible, purely cinematic embodiment of freedom and unfreedom was not discovered by Donskoy. But it was Donskoy who became the cross-cutting motif for all cinema, and it became precisely at the moment when it lost its relevance for Soviet cinema as a whole.
In the vastness of Russian spaces, through which the great river flows, Donskoy discovers the origin of a specific synonym for this concept in our language: “will”. This is precisely natural freedom, and it is no coincidence that the Volga landscapes in the trilogy are superimposed folk song, absorbing, as it were, the eternal desire for freedom in this universe. In its very length there is an echo of spaces that save a person from being squeezed, worn out, and overcrowded in the eternal Russian crowd.
In a closed space, this crowd of people is unbearable. Kashirin's house in Gorky's Childhood has low ceilings, cramped from the abundance of things and people colliding with each other, constantly bumping into each other. The same icon painters' workshop ("In People"), Semenov's shelter and bakery ("My Universities"). There is a feeling of painful crampedness, overcrowding - people interfere with each other by their very existence.
In the trilogy there are almost no heroes who are satisfied with their lot. Everyone is tormented, if not directly by longing for another life, then at least by the feeling that their own life is not working out in this hellish cramped space. A shrill "Eh, you!" grandfather Kashirin, who fell into poverty, or the no less poignant “If Yakov were a dog”, aggravated by the many sins of Uncle Yakov. And as the general embodiment of this aspiration, this craving for a different life - the little legless cripple Lenka, transferred to the film from the story "Passion-face", dreaming in his basement hole of an "open field".
Donskoy brings out the childish in each of his characters; this is exactly what he looks for in performers. Is this why, for most, participation in the trilogy became " finest hour"? And for Akulina’s amazing grandmother - Varvara Massalitinova - the prima of the Maly Theater, who worshiped Meyerhold (what did it take for the director to convince the cinematic authorities to give her this “positive” role after the “negative” Kabanikha from “The Thunderstorm”). And for Mikhail Troyanovsky - Grandfather, in fact opened by Donskoy for the movie, in which the actor then played about three dozen different grandfathers. And for the nervous, temperamental Daria Zerkalova - Queen Margot, who never had the chance to play Anna Karenina in Pudovkin's work in the same year. And of course for Daniil Sagal - Gypsy: his creative collaboration with Donskoy continued until last work director of "The Orlova Spouse" (again, a film adaptation of the early Gorky, made in 1978).
However, this childhood also has back side: immaturity. A boring life does not give people the opportunity to mature, that is, to become themselves, to be fulfilled. With all the abundance of individuals in the world of the trilogy, there are no personalities (the exceptions are, perhaps, grandmother and Queen Margot - women-mothers have a very special place in the world of Donskoy). No - and it cannot be, as long as these characters are within the flow of life, completely subordinate to it, and, consequently, to all the vicissitudes of fate. Until old age, the characters continue to remain children, like grandfather Kashirin, and even negative characters they do evil with a completely childish cunning, like the uncles in “Gorky’s Childhood” or the vile waiter Seryozhka (“In People”), or the owner of the bakery Semyonov, played superbly by Stepan Kayukov (“My Universities”).
This is where the wise order of the laundress Natalya (Irina Zarubina) could not stand it and broke down in single combat with life: “Don’t poke your nose in here - you’ll be lost.” Its essence is the need to keep a distance between yourself and the world. This distance, the role of a contemplator, gives a chance to comprehend the meaning of life - to understand the path of the river.
But this position turns Alyosha Peshkov into a lyrical hero par excellence. Young Alyosha Lyarsky with a clean, open face evoked restrained reproaches from critics for being somewhat constrained, lacking individuality, and ineffectiveness. Meanwhile, apart from a memorable appearance - an open forehead and wide eyes - such a hero does not need anything else. For, in essence, what we have before us is not a hero - a sign of a hero. The real hero is present primarily as the principle of the author's vision. The actual Alyosha Peshkov of the film is the world of the trilogy as a whole.
Obviously, the failure that occurred in the third part - in "My Universities" - is connected precisely with the fact that the matured hero begins to interfere, to "meddle" in life. Consequently, the very nature of the narrative is forced to change, to become dramatized. The director, true to his principle, this time chooses a performer (N. Valbert, who starred in a movie for the only time) solely on the principle of type matching - and the plot begins to collapse. Because the action in itself is not contraindicated to the lyrical hero, however, this action is of a very special kind: a purely, frankly symbolic act. But with energetic efforts, the director still maintains the unity of his universe as the space of the hero’s spiritual world, and maintains the holistic, purely cinematic, visual plot of the trilogy.
It can be formulated as a movement from confined spaces into an “open field”, now leading the hero to the river, now throwing him back to his original positions, so that in the final he finally reaches the sea into which the rivers flow. This is the comprehension of the mystery of life, given through numerous meetings with people along the way. This comprehension turns the hero from a child into a man, and gives him the ability to involve others in mastering life. And quite naturally, impeccably, Donskoy completes the trilogy with a plot from the story “The Birth of Man”: on the seashore, Alexey Peshkov gives birth to a displaced woman. Life visibly emerging on the shore big water, forever rolling its waves. If in the finales of previous episodes the hero went out into the open space of “pure fields” (“Gorky’s Childhood”) and rivers (“In People”) - now he introduces another into this space: a newborn.
What did Donskoy discover for world cinema in his trilogy? A new principle of plot construction, which was at the same time the basis of the tradition of Russian classical culture. If, in the tradition of the European novel, the hero’s encounter with people life path moves the plot, adventurous precisely for this reason, since the movement here can be compared with the movement of billiard balls colliding with each other, then in the Russian tradition a fleeting, chance meeting changes people: each already bears the imprint of the other, the imprint of someone else’s life experience, now becoming part of his own. This principle, thoroughly developed by Chekhov, Bunin, and Gorky, becomes the basis of all his work.
Where, then, does the scissors come from in the perception of Gorky’s trilogy at home and abroad? Perhaps the most accurate answer is found in Yuri Tynyanov, who noted back in 1924 that Gorky is “one of those writers whose personality in itself is literary phenomenon; the legend surrounding his personality is the same literature, but only unwritten, Gorky folklore. With his memoirs, Gorky, as it were, realizes this folklore."
The trilogy of Mark Donskoy in this case is another, along with Gorky’s memoirs, version of the folklore that Tynyanov is talking about - folklore, in those years almost legalized by the state. The director here acts as a storyteller, reproducing a commonly used folklore text, completely unaware of the deeply individual element that he brings into it with his performance. In the same way, the domestic audience, for whom the reproduced text is no less familiar, does not notice this; it was they who saw it in the first place, while the foreign audience sees the individuality of the director. Both perceptions are one-sided because they did not assume the presence of each other and did not feel the need for it. That necessity that gave rise to the Donskoy phenomenon, which first expressed itself with full force in the trilogy about Gorky.
That's why, probably, no one noticed how in Soviet picture 1938, in the very first scenes, in the midst of the pagan violent boiling of life, a character appeared, ready to take on (and accept) someone else's pain, shouldering a cross that would crush him, abandoned treacherously, with its unbearable weight. And after that the House will begin to collapse: there is blood on its inhabitants.
In this picture the hero's name is Ivan Tsyganok. In the director's next works, the heroes who accept the crown of thorns or bring a child savior to the world will be called differently. But before last movie they will walk and walk through the “Universe of Mark Donskoy”.
Gorky's trilogy
- Among the books that had a significant impact on the spiritual development of our people, one of the first places is occupied by Maxim Gorky’s trilogy “Childhood”, “In People” and “My Universities”. Almost every person with school years accompanies the exciting story of the childhood of Alyosha Peshkov, a boy who went through so many trials, the image of his grandmother is one of the most sublime female images of Russian literature. Gorky's stories had a different effect on each generation - they drew knowledge of people's life, and hatred of the philistinism, the unbearable burden of labor and oppression, and the forces of protest against obedience in these stories saw a call for creative activity, for self-education, for teaching, an example of how, despite poverty and lack of rights, a person can make his way to culture. They served as a source of faith in the forces of the people, an example of moral fortitude.
The stories “Childhood” and “In People” were written by Gorky in 1913-1914 and have since been included in world classics autobiographical genre along with such masterpieces of Russian literature as “The Past and Thoughts” by A. Herzen and “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth” by L. Tolstoy. Later, in 1923, “My Universities” was written, and thus a complete trilogy was formed.
If Tolstoy’s story of a hero is, first of all, the story of his quest, his demands on himself, an analytical biography, then Gorky’s trilogy is full of action, it is autobiographical, it is a biography, it consists of actions and events. At the same time, this is not only a description privacy, not the history of an individual, these are precisely stories, works that have the artistic power of generalization. Their material, with all the accuracy of facts and events, was selected not according to the laws of memory and knowledge of an adult, but according to the laws of writing talent. It creates a gallery of types pre-revolutionary Russia, images that live independently of the hero’s biography. Gorky tells us in “Childhood” not what he knows, but what a child might know. A child's vision of the world has its limits, and the author observes them with amazing accuracy. The surroundings open up to little Alyosha with separate, unconnected scenes, pictures, the meaning and tragedy of which he is not yet able to appreciate. The death of the father, and right there, at the coffin, the mother giving birth - this painful, incredible combination of circumstances from the very first page immerses us in the element of reliable life. And, starting from this scene, it is the truth, the courage of the truth that becomes the captivating force and feature of the book. Everything here is authentic. And this is what distinguishes it from other books of a similar genre. The author does not bring here his adult understanding, people, knowledge and experience. Nothing is done here for entertainment, there are no literary devices, there is no obligatory completion, making ends meet... We will never know much from the life of Alyosha Peshkov - how, why his grandfather’s condition is upset, where his mother disappears from time to time, why he suddenly has to move to another house... Over the years, sometimes , from the grandmother’s stories, some circumstances will become clear, but much will remain unknown to the boy and to us. And, oddly enough, such incompleteness and incomprehensibility of what is happening helps us better see the world through the eyes of the hero.
The trilogy recreates a huge panorama of life in working-class Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. He recreates on a grand scale, with an inexorable realism that requires from the writer not only honesty, but sometimes artistic courage.
Fates surround us one after another
people of different classes, different professions- dyers, icon painters, clerks, merchants, washerwomen, stokers, sailors, prostitutes... There are dozens of them, no, probably hundreds of people, and each is unique, each has not only its own history, but also its own understanding of life, its own contradictions, its own wisdom that sinks into the soul of a boy, and then a teenager. The densely populated impression is further enhanced by the brightness of each character, they are all separate, all significant personalities, strong, rebellious, blessed, eccentric, and even if, say, they are not strong, then most of them still have something special, their own mystery , your own idea, your relationship with God, with money, with love, with books... And all this is not composed or even seen. This is found in life. Alyosha Peshkov is constantly, inquisitively looking for answers to the eternal questions of life. He is interested in every person, he wants to understand why people live this way and not otherwise. This is the peculiarity of his character. He is not an observer, not a collector, he is an active, searching hero. The answers of these people - contradictory, paradoxical, shimmering with unexpected meaning - densely saturate the trilogy with philosophical thought. The controversy continues in the stories. Without suspecting it, all these people are polemicizing, their statements clash, clash irreconcilably.“As a child,” wrote Gorky, “I imagine myself as a hive, where various simple, gray people, like bees, carried the honey of their knowledge and thoughts about life, generously enriching my soul in whatever way they could. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but all knowledge is still honey.”
Books contributed a lot to Alyosha Peshkov’s life. They helped to understand the enormity of the world, its beauty and diversity. Not books in general, but specific books. Alyosha tells what exactly he liked, what and how he understood. He voraciously read everything he came across - pulp fiction, books by minor, random, now forgotten authors, mixed with classics: novels by Salias, Vashkov, Aimard, Xavier de Montepin, poems by Grave, Struzhkin, “The Legend of How a Soldier Saved Peter the Great” , “Songs” by Beranger, Pushkin’s fairy tales, “Secrets of St. Petersburg”, Dumas’ novels... From the text of Gorky’s trilogy, one can compile long lists of books he read, with his annotations and evaluations, and conduct interesting research about Alyosha Peshkov’s reading circle.
He himself learns to distinguish good book from bad. He needs to read “Tradition” twice to understand that this book is weak. It’s interesting to watch how a boy’s taste is formed and honed. Reading it randomly had its advantage - it trained the mind; he learned to navigate the sea of books, he was free from school authorities. So he independently understood and felt the genius of Pushkin “Pushkin surprised me so much with the simplicity and music of the verse that for a long time the prose seemed unnatural to me and it was awkward to read.” It should be noted, however, that aesthetic perception Alyosha was prepared to a large extent by the extraordinary poetic gift of his grandmother. Since childhood, listening to her songs and fairy tales, he keenly felt the play with the semi-precious word, admiring the beauty and richness of his native language.
Alyosha retold his favorite books to anyone - orderlies, sailors, clerks, read aloud, and people eagerly listened to him, sometimes cursed, ridiculed, but also sighed and admired...
And he avidly read and read Aksakov, Balzac, Sollogub, Buagobe, Tyutchev, Goncourt... Books cleansed his soul, gave him confidence that he was not the only one who would not perish on earth. He compared life with books and understood that the “black people” in Paris were not the same as in Kazan, they behaved bolder, more independent, and did not pray to God so fiercely. But he also begins to critically evaluate the fictionality of the characters’ relationships in books, and to separate great works from mediocre ones.
Rakambol taught him to be persistent, Dumas’s heroes inspired the desire to devote himself to some important cause. He conveys his impressions of Turgenev and Walter Scott. “Bursa” by Pomyalovsky is similar to the life of an icon-painting workshop “I am so familiar with the despair of boredom boiling over into cruel mischief.” Or “Dickens remains for me a writer, before whom I respectfully bow; this man amazingly comprehended the most difficult art of loving people.”
It is difficult to name other works in which books, their impressions, and their influence on a person’s life are described in such detail.
Suddenly Alyosha came across Lermontov’s “Demon”; amazed, he read it aloud - and a miracle happened in the icon-painting workshop: people were transformed, walked around shocked, thought about their existence, were imbued with kindness, and secretly cried.Inspired, Alyosha staged all sorts of performances; he wanted at all costs to “cause true free and easy joy in people!” And this showed the active temperament of the hero, an ardent desire to do something good for people.
The specificity of the hero's book interests is historical; he reads those books that were in many ways characteristic of the tastes of that time; The books contain only a fraction of the historical concreteness that the trilogy is full of. This property of Gorky’s prose is especially evident here. Everyday life is presented in all its material details. You can see what people ate, how they dressed, what they sang, how they prayed, how they slept, how they had fun.
In the icon-painting workshop, glass balls filled with water and suspended on strings from the ceiling are accurately described. They collect the light of the lamp, casting it onto the icon board with a white, cold beam.
If he sells divine books and icons in a shop, then it is known what kind of books and what kind of icons they are.Alyosha catches birds for sale, and her grandmother sells them for forty kopecks, and on market days for a ruble or more. Exact numbers in the story are a necessity, they are a measure of labor and the opportunity to live, the hero remembers every penny he earns. He also specifically depicts the Nizhny Novgorod fair, and work in a bakery, in an icon-painting workshop - with all the subtleties and differences of Byzantine, and Fryazhsky, and Italian writing styles. Gorky's work is always physically tangible and professionally verified, be it the simple work of a laundress, or trade techniques, or dyeing. Few writers understand the need to write out everyday life in this way. It's not only artistic technique, in this there is also an awareness of the historicity of what was experienced. And indeed, these details turn out to be the most precious. Over time, they increase in price, because they retain irretrievably disappeared signs of the past. The merit of the artist here is undoubted. In this sense, Gorky’s trilogy develops the traditions of Russian realism, such peaks as Eugene Onegin, where the encyclopedic accuracy of the era is embodied in all the concreteness of its existence.
Gorky's trilogy tells, first of all, how, despite all the insults and disappointments, Alyosha Peshkov's love and faith in man grew. The first who instilled these feelings were not books or observations, but the beautiful soul of Akulina Ivanovna Kashirina, the Balakhna lacemaker, Alyosha’s grandmother. She was a person with a talent for life, able to live easily and kindly, spreading joy and delight in life around her. Her love enriched the boy, saturating him with strong strength for difficult life. Her kindness is talented and original, since it is based on the artistry of her nature. She knew a lot of poems, songs, and even composed them herself, talking about Ivan the Warrior, the Pop-Goat, Mary the Egyptian Sinner... It was fortunate that Alyosha Peshkov had such a grandmother. She was a support, a spiritual protection from the despotism that fell on the child’s soul, the “hot fog of mutual enmity,” this stupid Kashirin tribe. Where did this woman get her inexhaustible love, her patience... “Having drunk, she became better, her dark eyes, smiling, shed light on everyone, warming the soul, and, fanning her flushed face with a handkerchief, she spoke melodiously
Lord, Lord! Everything is so good! No, look how good everything is!
It was the cry of her heart, the slogan of her whole life.”
She had her own god, her own relationship with religion, warmed by the same active concern for people. With all her humility and humility, in moments of danger she could bravely and intelligently resist adversity like no one else. This is how she saves both people and property during a fire, throwing herself at the feet of a horse that was maddened by the fire, taking a bottle of oil out of the flame so that it wouldn’t explode, organizing the neighbors to put out the fire in the barn... She was not afraid of anything.
Her affection was tireless, but over the years Alyosha begins to appreciate both her optimism and the ease with which she endures life’s hardships, ruin, and loss of wealth. But he also sees something else - that light soul grandmothers are blinded by fairy tales, “...unable to see, unable to understand the phenomenon of bitter reality...”. In response to his indignation, the only thing she could say was “You have to be patient!” The preaching of patience no longer satisfied the teenager. And only as he grows up, after the death of his grandmother, will he be able to fully appreciate the life feat of this woman, will understand not that she could not, did not succeed, but what she was - a mother to all people.
Evil and good, hard and gentle intertwine unexpectedly, coexisting not only in this family, but also within people. A grandfather, a despot, a tyrant, the personification of the bourgeois, a grandfather who, it would seem, is in every way opposed to the poetic nature of the grandmother, this grandfather is transformed in some minutes.
Brutally, almost constipating Alyosha to the point of death, he comes to the bedside of the sick boy and tells him about his barge-haul youth on the Volga. Yes, as he tells it, and how much heroic valor he contains: “Quickly, like a cloud, my grandfather grew up in front of me, turning from a small, dry old man into a man of fabulous strength - he alone leads a huge gray barge against the river.”
Dialectics of the soul? Yes, but not only that. This is the hero Alexei’s grandmother probably fell in love with in his youth. It is all the more bitter to see how gradually wealth and the passion for profit distort his soul. Probably the most remarkable thing in this image is the destructive process of bestiality, the degeneration of humanity that occurs with the eldest Katirin and his sons. And no amount of grandmother’s kindness or sincerity can save or stop them.
Gorky carefully and mercilessly traces the growing pathological stinginess of his grandfather, how this recent rich man loses his honor, dignity, and scrounges from the houses of familiar merchants - and not from poverty, not for the sake of a piece of bread, but because of the greed that consumes him. Everything human disappears, is etched out. Children, grandchildren, wife, family, friendship - everything loses value and dies with the development of this incurable disease. Alyosha does not denounce him, his grandmother tries to explain, to forgive, but this disintegration of personality looks all the more terrible. Is it only pathology and character that is to blame for this? It is not for nothing that his god is different from that of his grandmother - his god is formidable, punishing, and behind him one sees other standards of life - the attitude towards work has changed, the need for work has disappeared, and nothing else has appeared in its place. For Gorky, work always also contains moral value - work educates, work heals the soul; Alyosha learns to measure a person’s dignity through his attitude towards work and the beauty of work. Once upon a time, his grandfather had his own wisdom, and Alyosha appreciated his teachings: “Learn to be your own worker, and don’t give in to others!” Live quietly, calmly, and stubbornly! Listen to everyone, and do what’s best for you...” Everyone really teaches him to live, each in his own way, both in adolescence and in youth. “First of all, don’t get married early... You can live where you want and how you want, it’s your will ! Live in Persia as a Mohammedan, in Moscow as a policeman, grieve, steal - everything can be fixed! And my wife, brother, is like the weather, you can’t fix her... no! This, brother, is not a boot - he took it off and threw it away.”
People appear and disappear, leaving behind something in the soul, stirring up thoughts, and bestowing them with acquired worldly wisdom.
And Alyosha Peshkov begins to understand that thoughts about life are no less difficult than life itself. But he doesn’t want to give up this burden. Every now and then he breaks down, blinding flashes of hatred come upon him, and he is picked up by violent, evil mischief; Youthful sensitivity to lies pushes you to ridiculous, wild antics. His path is not at all straight. Mistakes are offensive, there are many misconceptions. Faith leaves him. Every now and then he breaks down into disappointment, despair, even to the point of attempting suicide. This is not at all a constant ascension, acquisition and accumulation of wisdom. And all the more heroic is his struggle. No wonder Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was surprised when listening to Gorky’s stories “You are still kind, having the right to be evil.”
The life that Gorky describes is city life, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan - the life of working outskirts, tenement houses, streets lined with craft workshops, shops, taverns. These are the Volga piers, a fair, a courtyard, a workshop, where they sleep and eat. There are no rural open spaces or fields, nature is pushed aside, it is invisible, it is excluded from the worldview. The place for children to play is the street, courtyards, and markets. It is difficult for children to have privacy in the city. City life is unpoetic and ugly, but the people here are closer and understandable. “I like the workers,” Gorky admits, “I clearly see the advantages of the city, its thirst for happiness, the daring inquisitiveness of the mind, the diversity of its goals and objectives.”
Curly-haired Alyosha Peshkov increasingly appreciates independent street life. His first jobs were to help his grandmother - and they were typical of the city: he hands over rags, he catches birds, he carries timber... He sees how different layers of working people live and work. During these years, an energetic process of formation of the Russian proletariat took place. And at the same time, the forces of class protest grew, revolutionary figures appeared, like the guest Good Delo. With what sympathy Alyosha remembers this strange man, the boy does not really understand what he was doing, but his grandfather, with the instinct of an owner, sensed the danger of a seemingly harmless, serviceable tenant.
In this environment, the teenager’s spiritual maturation proceeded quickly; his observations of life and encounters with it accumulated a great deal of experience beyond his age. From childhood admiration for the robbers, the legendary Yegor Bashlyk, from resentment at the monstrous injustices of life, Alyosha Peshkov began the work of a self-reflecting force of protest. In the story “My Universities”, adolescent searches culminate in the logical consequence of universities becoming illegal circles, distribution of literature, printing houses - the path of conscious revolutionary struggle, which the young man begins in Kazan.He experiences more and more painfully the discrepancy between the prose of life and literature. The world of art, with its pure feelings, with clever words, almost does not come into contact with the vulgar, rude that surrounds the hero every day. Again and again he experiences disappointment, anger directed at those who create beautiful illusions. In this case, it was not books that helped him, but people. Responsive, kind, thoughtful, foolish - but precisely people, contact with folk life, wise in his movement.
The contradictions between ideals and reality were not resolved. But in these contradictions the advantages of popular thought were revealed “... I rarely encountered thoughts in books that I had not heard before in life,” notes Gorky, and this striking observation is not a reproach to literature, but rather reverence for life.
Since childhood, Gorky had a talent for beautiful people, he knew how to find them. Among the heroes of the trilogy, they appear one after another in a continuous sequence, starting with the Gypsy, who put his hand under the rod, protecting the boy from beatings. In difficult moments, they always come to his aid, saving his faith in man. Each of them is beautiful in its own way. The gypsy is cheerful, kind, selfless. Cook Smury is gloomy, but he is a man of high justice, thinking, reading, lonely, “broken away from life.” The icon painter, personal Zhikharev, is an artist of his craft, a hard-drinking man, and at the same time a soulful one, with a keen sense of poetry. Likewise, another master, Evgeny Sitanov, is a strongman who knows how to live an intense spiritual life in this workshop. He fell in love with a “walking” girl who “infected him with a shameful disease, but he does not beat her for this, as his comrades advise him, but hired her a room, treats the girl and always talks about her in a particularly affectionate, embarrassed way.” Or the plasterer Grigory Shishlin, a handsome blue-eyed man, a dreamer and a good-natured man. Or the saddler, the marvelous singer Kleshchov...
How many of them, gifted by nature, talented in soul, magnificent people, wasted themselves in vain, but managed to realize themselves, became drunkards, felt unnecessary, perished, killed by the meaninglessness of existence. One after another, women appear before Alyosha, surrounded by the radiance of his childhood, and then his youthful love. Girl Lyudmila, “porcelain” cutter, beautiful Queen Margot, cheerful, life-loving laundress Natalia Kozlovskaya... Some gave him warmth and sweet dreams, others encouraged him to read, got him books, taught him to love poetry.
But vulgarity, dirty gossip, bullying with some incomprehensible malice fell and overtook these women.
With all the strength of his great humanistic talent, Gorky rebels against dirt, rudeness, and vileness in human relations. He does not spare working people either, denouncing their lack of spirituality, everything vile, swinish, humiliated...
With inexplicable cruelty, the uncles mock the half-blind master Grigory in front of Alyosha, slipping him a red-hot thimble. The stepfather kicks Alyosha's mother. The wonderful peasant Izot is innocently killed with an ax. The best mason Ardalyon drinks himself to death, and with causeless anger he beats the once cheerful laundress Natalya. A little red-haired Cossack, who sings songs about the Don and Danube so beautifully that Alyosha thinks he is better and taller than all the people, this Cossack, again for no reason, brutally beats a woman, his mistress, tears her dress, and rolls her naked in the mud. Similar scenes a lot in each of the stories of the trilogy.
Why was it necessary to turn it around in front of the reader? fiction all these dirty tricks of life, to depict such disgusting features of your people, such terrifying characters, actions, all this cruelty, malice, fanaticism? Gorky himself once again poses the question: does a writer need to paint these leaden abominations of Russian life?
“And, with renewed confidence, I answer myself - it’s worth it; for this is a tenacious, vile truth, it has not died out to this day. This is the truth that needs to be known to the roots, in order to root it out from memory, from the human soul, from our entire life, heavy and shameful... Our life is not only amazing because it contains such a fertile and fatty layer all sorts of bestial rubbish, but because through this layer the bright, healthy and creative still victoriously grows, the good, the human, grows, arousing an indestructible hope for our rebirth to a bright, human life.”
Daniil Granin. Library world literature t.147 M. 1975
- Added: 1/18/2011
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