BOOKS OF THE DAY.

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2693, 12 February 1916, Page 9

BOOKS OF THE DAY.

THE CHILDHOOD OF- MAXQI

GORKI.

'ily Childhood," by Maxim Gorki (Werner Laurie) affords an instructive insight into tho sordid misery which has long been rhe lot of a largo section of the people of the ' Russian cities. Gorki has always been known, as an unsparing realist, and in this, the account of his childhood, he displays that ■unflinching regard for the vealities of lite, however unpleasant :and oven re-pella-nt their description must be to the reader which has characterised so ■ much of his brilliant fiction. The story he now relates begins at the death of his father, after whioh the future novelist and his mother were offered and accepted a home in tho famous inland ®ity of Nijni Novgorod, one of the most essentially Russian of all Russian ' cities, with Gorki's grandfather. He was a horrible'brute this grandfather, and the lad's uncles were almost as had—violent of temper, drunken, and given to displays of the most sudden and ruthless savagery. The brutality, ■ however, which would, it might have been expected, have quenched, the lad's spirit or hardened him into desperate resistance, seems to havo been accepted by the boy, for some timo at least, with ' that curious fatalism which -is one of the leading traits of the Instead of blistering and .hardening his soul, it deepened his character, and made him all the'more sensitive and sympathetic to the sufferings and trials of those around him. Gorki writes: Grandfather flogged mo. till I . lost consciousness, and'l was unwell for some days, tossing about face downwards on a wide, stuffy bed > in a little room with one window and a lamp which always kept burning before the case of ikons in ■ the corner. Those dark days had been the greatest in my life. In the course of them I had developed wonderfully, and I was conscious of. a peculiar difference in myself. I began to experience a new solici- . - tude for others, and I became so keenly alive to their sufferings and my own that it was almost as if my heart had been lacerated and thus rendered sensitive. . If his grandfather were a cruel brute, -■ prejudiced against the lad from the start by his father's runaway and unforgiven marriage, the ohild found a tender and loving friend in his grandmother, who tola him beautiful fairy tales and recounted the old Russian legends to her ever-attentive and. entrahched. listener. They were wonderful stories, 6tories of ah existence far removed from the lad's awful daily environment. The old woman was not fair 1 to look upon,'with "her long mane of thick,'black hair," her "nose like a sponge,"' and her weakness for vodka. But she at .least believed in a God, and gave the lad some vague but comforting ideas about religion. _ Her picture of heaven is worth quoting: God's seat is on the hills, amidst the meadows of- paradise; it is an altar of sapphires under silver linden trees,, which flower all; the year round, for in Paradise there is' no winter,' nor even autumn, and the flowers,never wither, for joy is the divine favour., And'round about God many angels fly like flakes of ■ snow, and.it may be even that bees • 'num . there and white doves fly be-" 1 tween heaven and earth, telling God all about us and everybody. ... The.;miserable household; fell on yet more evil days; ■ the mother, made a silly second marriage, the grandfather, half insane, began to beat the lad even more brutally than before, his stepfather, leaving his wife for another woman, kicked and ill-treated her, the ' poor creature, finally dying of combined maltreatment and starvation. 'As' for • the lad, he was sent out to collect rags, yto steal wood, to do anything that , could bring.:. in*, a few miserable ■ "£opeks, ' which ■ forthwith his grandparents spent in vodka. Vodka; that seems "to have been at Jtace the Eole comfort,, joy, consolation, curse of the lower-class Russian in |he days when Gorki was a child. What new horizon the prohibition of Shis vile stuff, if it be'permanent, may pfiot open np to suffering Russia who jean say? But in Gorki's childhood it jwas the" curse of the country, a curse |ilmost as evil as a Hun invasion could *>ave been.; i. The. sordidity, the uglifness, the moral'.and physical filth of /Gorki's early environment'.must-have Vbeen truly disgusting'.. The time came when, long-suffering -. as he was, ,he broke out ihto> passionate Tevolt. Even now it is clear that even the far-away memories of that life are a veritable aightmaro 'to him. The unrelieved lgliness of "that existence : was enough ■0 revolt anyone who' was not close to .men savagery.' < Gorki writes :— Mother, yellow, and shivering .with cold, went about wrapped in a grey, torn shawl with a fringe. I hated ■ that shawl, which disfigured the large, wellbuilt body; I hated the tails of the fringe, and tore them off. I hated he house, the factory, and the vil- ; age. Mother went about in downjrodden felt hoots, coughing all the )jf time, _ her grey-blue eyes had 1 a bright, hard gleam in them, and she often stood about against the bare walls just as though she were glued to them. The actual revolt took the form of atiempting to stab his stepfather, who iVas in the act of kicking his mother's ■tfreast. ■ It is a horrible picture, and -jme may ask what good purpose is to ,ie served by painting it. Gorki himself foresees this question, and himself provides an answer which may stand ?s one of his critics has put it, "as the apologia of the whole race of Russian Sealists, from Gogol to himself": . It is worth while; because it is actual, vilo fact, which has not died ant,, even in these days—a fact which must bo traced to its origin, and pulled up by the root from the memories, the souls of the people, and from our narrow, sordid lives. Gorki explains, too, that tho Rusjans are curiously fond of sorrow: 'They live to amuse themselves with rjorrow— to play with it like children— r*nd are seldom ashamed of being un,happy.' Recent English writers on Russia havo noticed the fact that the cinema plays most popular with a Russian audience are those in which'there is the most liberalprovision of pathetic or even tragic incidents. In the now 'Russia; in tho rc-born Russia of after the war, in a Russia, let us hope, from which, vodka will be permanently banished, .there will be less brutality, less Jiiseijr, less occasion for sorrow, and jhat capacity for pity with which, to I?is credit be it said, the Russian is rfo richly _ endowed,- which is born of find sustained by sorrow. Gorki's book is not only .a wonderfully realistic picture of Russian low life, as it was before the war, it is also a marvellous levelation of the making of character, a human document of high importance an/I value to all students of sociology.