Childhood

8 hrs. 1 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Maxim Gorky

Narrator Svetlana Raskatova

This small story by Maxim Gorky makes up the first part of his famous trilogy (“Childhood,” “In the People,” “My Universities”) and belongs to the genre of literary autobiography. The patriarch of twentieth-century literature, the great artist of the word, tells here about his early years spent in his grandfather’s house in Nizhny Novgorod. According to the writer, it was “a dense, motley, unspeakably strange life,” where kindness and malice, dirt and beauty, cruelty and mercy, love and hatred were intermingled. A real family saga of extraordinary strength of characters and precise everyday-life sketches, vivid images and profound experiences helps one understand how the boy, painfully yearning for knowledge, made his way from a budding author of romantic works to a writer of worldwide fame, whose pen produced the immortal “Song of the Falcon” and “Song of the Stormy Petrel,” the brilliant plays “At the Bottom,” “The Barbarians,” “Children of the Sun,” and the great novels “Mother,” “The Artamonov Business,” “The Life of Klim Samgin.”

1. Childhood 2. My Apprenticeship (narrated by Svetlana Raskatova) 3. My Universities (narrated by Svetlana Raskatova) 0. How to Become a Famous Journalist (narrated by Filipp Matveev-Vitovsky)