Book Description
In My Apprenticeship, Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) gives an exact account of his own adolescence. After the death of his mother, fourteen-year-old Alexei Peshkov ( Gorky ) sets out to earn his own living. First he is the errand boy in a shoe shop; then, in turn, a draughtsman's apprentice, a dishwasher on a Volga steamboat, and an apprentice in a studio where icons are painted. Repulsed by the ugly mediocrity of middle-class life, by the "senseless, stupid animosity poisoning the life around him," he constantly searches for something better.

My Apprenticeship (1916) is the second book of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, each book of which represents and independent work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Don't be a coward
This autobiography covers the beginning of Gorky's adult years at the age of eleven (!) and goes until he decides to enter university at the age of fifteen. At the age of 9, Gorky is thrown to the wolves (`the horrors of everyday life'). His `career' goes over architect apprentice, dish-washer on boats, bird trapper, nurse, icon seller and ultimately foreman at the age of 14!
He sees around him `men with insatiable sexual hunger', `dirt and the inevitable viciousness that came with the hard, half-starved life that people had to lead' and `a corrosive, exasperating boredom enveloping everything'. A world full of promiscuity, obscenities, `where all men are enemies'. Moreover, people were living in an environment of religious fanaticism brought on by a terrifying God.

But, he also made crucial encounters with clairvoyant men, who teach him: `go on, try and find out for yourself.' They force him to take decisions and make him understand clearly: `I must do something, or I'll be finished'. At the end, he tries to enroll himself as a student at the Kazan University.

This book is also a profound laudation on reading which was crucial for Gorky's escape out of darkness: `books made me invulnerable to many things' and that notwithstanding the `deep humiliation and the many insults his passion for reading inflicted on him'.

This work is a dark and terrible portrait of Russia under the tsars at the end of the 19th century.
But it shows how an individual can succeed in keeping his self-esteem and escape a certain intellectual death, here mainly through a passion for reading and knowledge.

Not to be missed.

Great Classic
Gorky's 2nd book of triology is every bit as good as the first. Russia's favorite Russian writer.

Gorky Means Bitter
The second part of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy takes him out of childhood and into his early teens. He develops into a headstrong, tough and intelligent boy. The difficult relationship with his Grandfather in the first book develops in amusing and shocking ways, while the influence exerted over him by his Grandmother also changes - but I don't want to give too much away!

What is most remarkable about My Apprenticeship, I think, apart from the humour and beauty of Gorky's rugged prose, is that the dilemmas faced by Gorky, growing up in poverty, and the dilemmas of those around him, are quite inseperable from the dilemmas facing people today (or at least, facing me), both existential and material. A remarkable passage towards the end of the book rises towards a magesterial outburst from the older writer, in which he explains why he is outlining in such graphic terms the hardship of life, that can force people to acts of such desperate barbarity. His duty it seems, is to make people aware of what is around them, to strip away the illusions that we willingly blind ourselves with, to protect ourselves from uncomfortable truths. In the age of Brass Eye vs tabloid truth-bending, this could not be more topical.

A gripping read on every level. It loses a star, I think, in comparison to the first installment. My Apprenticeship meanders a little, but the characters are as unforgettable.

P.S. Some trilogy's can be read out of order. This one can't. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (1)

Chelkash
Chelkash is a very deep story, which involves a thief named Chelkash and a young man on he finds on the street and hires.The story focuses on the use of the ocean to reflect moods and events as well as the importance ofmoney in our society. The story leads one to question how far one would gofor money. The book is much deeper than the story.One must take the timeto think about it before the meaning becomes clear or one can simply enjoythe story which is a page turner. ... Read more

Book Description
Maxim Gorky continues to be regarded as the greatest literary representative of revolutionary Russia. Born of the people, and having experienced in his own person their sufferings and their misery, he was enabled by his extraordinary genius to voice their grievances and their aspirations for a better life as no academic could.

His international fame rests on a tremendous literary output, including the powerful play "The Lower Depths", the monumental novel of the 1905 Russian Revolution, "Mother", his vital Autobiography and, of course, his short stories. This edition of "The Collected Short Stories of Maxim Gorky" includes his benchmark masterpieces "Creatures That Once Were Men" and "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" as well as "Chelkash and My Fellow-Traveller" among many others. The collection represents the very best of Gorky's genius.

For this edition the renowned scholar and author Frederic Ewen has written a penetrating new introduction evaluating Gorky's place in the world's literary pantheon. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

absorbing work of one brilliant individual
Gorky is quite unlike the other Russian writers that I've read. His works do exude the common pessimism, but that's clearly a by-product of the dreadful living conditions they all underwent. Beginning with detailed descriptions of place (even down to the nicks on a wooden lath or the odd drop of paint) that would do justice to Henry James, Gorky always delineates his characters so very painstakingly that we have not the least difficulty picturing them and vicariously living through their adventures.

Gorky is a master of the gamut of human emotion. As glorious as I find his understressed paean to nature in "Birth of a Man," equally profoundly disturbing do I find his narration of the kitten's fate in "Notch." Not even the most barely supraliminal aberration of human behavior escapes his notice and caustic commentary. Yet, the sarcasm that perpetually lies beneath the surface--so often indicative of the jaded writer--does not come across as such in Gorky: indeed, he is arguably one of the most human writers I've ever countenanced. ... Read more

Book Description
One of the most renowned Soviet writers of the twentieth century, Maxim Gorky was an early supporter of the Bolsheviks who became disillusioned with the turn of events after the 1917 revolution. This brilliant and controversial book is a collection of the critical articles Gorky wrote that describe the Russian national character, condemn the Bolshevik methods of government, and provide a vision of the future. ... Read more

Book Description
Baroness Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya Benckendorff Budberg hailed from the Russian aristocracy and lived in the lap of luxury—until the Bolshevik Revolution forced her to live by her wits. Thereafter her existence was a story of connivance and stratagem, a succession of unlikely twists and turns. Intimately involved in the mysterious Lockhart affair, a conspiracy which almost brought down the fledgling Soviet state, mistress to Maxim Gorky and then to H.G. Wells, Moura was a woman of enormous energy, intelligence, and charm whose deepest passion was undoubtedly the mythologization of her own life.

Recognized as one of the great masters of Russian twentieth-century fiction, Nina Berberova here proves again that she is the unsurpassed chronicler of the lives of Soviet émigrés. In Moura Budberg, a woman who shrouded the facts of her life in fiction, Berberova finds the ideal material from which to craft a triumph of literary portraiture, a book as engaging and as full of life and incident as any one of her celebrated novels. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Not quite the book I had hoped
Based on the book's description as "...a complex and compelling tale of political upheaval, espionage, sexual passion, and all the suffering wrought by war, poverty, oppression, and exile... told brilliantly with empathy and panache.", you might thinkthis would be a fascinating read.But this book wasn't quite the read I thought it would be.

Berberova really needed a strong editor to help her tighten her writing.There were too many people mentioned and the story tended to take so many tangents into other people's lives, making it difficult to get a strong sense of who Moura was.

But you can get a sense of who Moura wasn't.She wasn't a great mom (but to her defense, that was probably the case of a lot of women in her situation), wasn't a great friend, and not too devoted to anyone except herself.

The repeated name dropping made the book frustrating as well.Whether they were in her life for a week or a decade, it seems that Berberova mentions everyone Moura ever met.The index in the back of the book was necessary just to help distinguish the characters as there is little way to keep them all straight.

Over the Samovar
You've got to take this one in the right spirit.Berberova isn't a terribly good writer--discursive, disorganized, fatally susceptible to digression from almost any direction.Morever she doesn't seem particularly to like her subject--a failing perhaps more common among biographers than you might at first guess.

So, as biography, not a delight.But as conversation--my, this is wonderful.Stick with it a few pages and let yourself hear the voice: you get the sense that you are in her kitchen, beside the samover, while she rattles on conjuring up ghosts, settling old scores, and generally jabbing the ribs of a whole generation of Russian emigres and their friends.

The "Index of Names" at the end gives you some hint of what you are up against: some 60 pages, perhaps 600 names of all the people who wandered in and out of Moura's life, or cast a shadow over it.Who /did/ this index, anyway?It is a quirky marvel, not quite comprehensive but close enough that you want to keep it around for consultation in reading any number of other emigre works.

Oddly--okay, not so oddly--the dominant figures in this tumultuous cast are not the author herself but two of the men in her life: Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells.And what a pair of gasbags they turn out to be: writers of moderate talent and immoderate self-enchantment, too blinded by the mirror to understand anything about the dreadful world they lived in.Wells once tried to lecture Stalin on the state of the world; Stalin wasn't interested.Gorki actually moved back from exile into Russia, convinced he could make a difference; he died (or was murdered) somewhat the wiser.

The Russians do seem to have a knack for memoir: think Herzen, think Nadezhda Mandelstam, think Trotsky's autobiography.In fairness, Berberova's memoir of Moura isn't a patch on any of these three, not in insight or imagination or literary skill.But it's its own self, and judged on its own terms, it makes a compulsive read. ... Read more