"My Childhood" by Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky's "My Childhood", his autobiography is a painful recollection of his childhood that was strewn with poverty, loneliness, abuse and maternal deprivation. His young father dies of cholera and his mother has a miscarriage on the same day. Though he is unable to comprehend the happenings around him, he is engulfed by a profound sorrow. He ends up in his grandfather's house along with his mother after his father's death. His grandfather, a self-made man runs a dye workshop at his home. His grandfather often flogs him for his acts of mischief with a strange belief that it is for his good. 

When Gorky lives with his grandparents, he comes across a variety of people and his autobiography puts forth before us their characters without judging their actions on the basis of morality. He comes across the workers in the dye workshop who are subjected to oppression for long, his two warring uncles who fight to extract money from his grandfather, the kids in the neighbouring house who are restricted to mingle with others but end up listening to Gorky's recital of his grandmother's stories, a bunch of mischievous kids with whom he steals wood for a living and many others. His autobiography respects everyone's decisions including his mother's when she decides to remarry and at the same time conveys the pain and suffering he endures in due course. 

Gorky's relationship with his grandmother is special and it provided the much needed emotional support which he yearned for. Gorky, as a writer would have grown listening to the stories from his grandmother. The contrasting religious beliefs and worshipping ways of his grandmother and grandfather made him pick his grandmother's "God" ahead of his grandfather's during his childhood. But, his independent intellect made him choose atheism at a later stage. 

Despite the physical abuse, emotional unavailability of his mother, his situation during his family's descent into poverty being a depressing narrative to hear, this autobiography of his reiterates how life instills hope in the form of people around us and promises a better and more humane future.

 

This book is an intimate portrait of Gorky's painful childhood in a dysfunctional family that instills in one the confidence to face upto the truth.