Maxim Gorky's My Apprenticeship - he becomes a reader - a book that was really true to life

I have been reading Maxim Gorky continue his education in the second volume of his autobiography, My Apprenticeship (1916).  The previous volume was My Childhood (1913), but that is over.  Now it is time to get to work.  Gorky is, when My Apprenticeship begins, eleven years old.

The book has a substantial resemblance to the grandfather of the picaresques, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554).  Like Lazarillo, young Gorky moves from job to job, enduring each one for the length of a chapter or two until the specific miseries of the situation induce a change.  And as in the Spanish story, the real interest is less the mechanics of the work but the people the boy meets.  One job is not even miserable, quite the opposite, the summer he spends gathering herbs and mushrooms in the woods with his grandmother, the only person alive who loves him.  Economically marginal, though, an idyll that cannot last.

The title of the book is ironic in that none of the jobs really turns into an apprenticeship, training in a skilled trade, just as the last volume in the trilogy, My University, is not about Gorky’s time at an actual university.  But My Apprenticeship is nevertheless about Gorky’s education, in people, in cruelty, but also in books.

The big reader, the childhood reader, will be pleased with My Apprenticeship.  Gorky is one of us; we identify.  His fundamental difficulties in acquiring books are in and of themselves dramatic, a plot.  The evolution of his tastes are another, his move from simple Russian moralistic stories (“It seemed that those books were actually laughing at me, as though I were an idiot…” Ch. 9, 138-9) to adventures and saint’s lives and a kind of serialized novel he calls “literature for the digestion of people who were bored to death” (161), and eventually to an amazed discovery of Dumas, Hugo, Scott, and “a book that was really true to life” (172), Eugénie Grandet.  “That truth, with which I was so familiar and which I found so boring in real life, now threw a completely new light on everything – calm and benevolent” (172).

Gorky reads Russian literature, too – Gogol, Turgenev, Pushkin – and the most startling scene is when he reads aloud Lermontov’s long narrative poem “The Demon” (1839) to a workshop of ikon painters and they have to lock the book away because it is too powerful (Ch. 14, 258).  Now that is the way to read.

Always fair, Gorky presents the opposing perspective.  This is from one of his relatives, when he has just fallen in love with reading:

“Some people who read books blew up a railway once and tried to murder someone.” (Ch. 8, 154)

How do you argue with that?  Yet Gorky kept reading.

For this volume of the autobiography I read the good translation by Ronald Wilks, the Penguin Classics edition, or at least the better one, since it cannot be worse than the one I read before.  See languagehat for the hilarious howlers.