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ImaReadImaRead Stories · No. 00

Illustrated Story

My Childhood in 10 Minutes: A Boy's Small Light Inside a World Heavy as Lead

高尔基自传三部曲的开篇：暴戾外祖父与讲故事的外祖母

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ImaReadFolio 02 — 05

父亲在阿斯特拉罕死于霍乱；幼年阿廖沙随母亲乘轮船溯伏尔加河北上，投奔外祖父卡希林一家在下诺夫哥罗德的家——一路上外祖母给他讲故事，成为黑暗旅途里的第一缕光

Opening: A Small Boat Against the Current

Picture it: a child of three or four, his father just dead, carried aboard a steamboat by his mother, heading north up a great river to throw themselves on the mercy of a grandfather he has never met and has only heard is a fierce man. The cabin is dark. There is a corpse in the next berth. The child is crying, and so is his mother. It is his grandmother alone who gathers him into her arms and pushes back the darkness with a story that never seems to end. This is the book's first image — a small boat moving up a river, and a child meeting light for the first time in the dark.

What Kind of Book Is This

My Childhood is the first volume of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, serialized in a Russian magazine in the 1910s and translated into English the following year. It is not about the literary giant later canonized in Soviet textbooks, but about that same man between the ages of four or five and eleven or twelve — a childhood spent in the 1870s, in old Russia, in a city on the Volga. It is one of the twentieth century's most reread stories of growing up: once it was adapted into film, the small boy running between the dye works and the wooden house, Alyosha, became, for readers the world over, almost a shorthand for a childhood at the bottom of Russian society. The reason it has stayed with people is simple. Gorky chooses to look, at a child's eye level, straight at the brutal, grasping, ignorant adults around him, and to write the ugliness plainly — while making the handful of good people hidden inside that ugliness shine brighter than the darkness around them.

People and World: A Household of Two Extremes

The whole book turns on one confrontation — grandfather against grandmother. Grandfather Vasily Kashirin is the household's tyrant. He runs a small dye works, working the vats himself, a tradesman living pot by pot on his craft. He holds to a harsh old morality: beatings, stinginess, a temper always ready to go off. He keeps precise accounts of who has earned what and who owes what, and his two sons fight to the death over the family's money right under his nose — which only makes him crueler. He once beats his grandson with a soaked birch switch until the boy loses consciousness, and this is not a moment of temper slipping its leash — it is how this household runs.

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ImaReadFolio 03 — 05

外祖父开着染坊，家却被两个舅舅为争夺家产的争斗、酗酒与暴力撕裂；阿廖沙初次撞见成人世界的残忍与那『铅样沉重』的市侩生活

ImaReadFolio 04 — 05

快活善良的养子『小茨冈』伊万，在替两个舅舅抬一具沉重的橡木十字架时被压倒惨死——善良者的早夭第一次击碎了这个孩子

ImaReadFolio 05 — 05

Two things about the craft here are worth dwelling on. First, the child's eye. Alyosha is never made to deliver an author's outrage by proxy — he genuinely sees with the eyes of a four-year-old, a seven-year-old. He can set something terrible side by side, in the same frame, with the smell of porridge on the stove; he can look up, right after a beating, and count the folds in the robes on the icons. This vantage gives cruelty a concrete shape without ever letting it turn into a slogan. Second, the writing works by contrast. Gorky never lets his bright figures appear in the light — he places them against the darkest possible background. His grandmother's stories come right after a savage beating; Tsyganok's death happens in the snow around Christmas; Good Business is driven out at the moment the household is at its most mercenary. The more the darkness presses down on the light, the brighter it shows. This is why the book has gone on moving readers for more than a hundred years.

Why the Story Is Still Worth Reading, Even Once You Know the Plot

A summary can hand you a map: who dies, who wrongs whom, and that in the end the child is pushed out into the world. But there are things only the text itself has, that no summary can give you. One is the sound of grandmother's storytelling voice. The saints' legends, the songs, the sayings, carry a rhythm in Chinese translation, and in the original Russian move even more like a nursery rhyme. This is the bedrock of the writer Alyosha would become, and once heard, it isn't forgotten. Two is the smell of the dye works. Hot indigo, hot ochre, damp wood, scorched cloth — Gorky's gift for pushing these smells straight into your nose is something a summary can only half convey. Three is the physical sensation of the beating. The sound of the wet switch on skin, the pain going numb, the final slide into unconsciousness — this is a moment that only the rhythm of the original sentences can hold down. Knowing the ending, knowing who dies and who gets driven out, actually lets a reader sink into the prose with an easy mind — once you know where the suffering lies, you can see exactly how the things that aren't suffering get held onto, in this child's hands, inside it. That is why this old book, more than a hundred years on, is still being opened up by one generation after another.

Art Direction4 plates

Before the guide was written, this book got a visual foundation — every illustration you just read grew out of it.

Character · My Childhood in 10 Minutes: A Boy's Small Light Inside a World Heavy as Lead

I. A Night on the Volga

Alyosha's father dies of cholera in a city in the south. After the funeral, his mother takes the small boy aboard a steamboat heading north up the Volga, to throw themselves on his grandfather. The cabin is dark, the air thick with disinfectant and the smell of a corpse; the child cries, and so does his mother. This is Alyosha's first encounter with death — and the real starting point of the story: from here on, he no longer has a home of his own. The one who saves him in the darkness is his grandmother. She takes him into her arms and begins the stories that never seem to end — stories of the Virgin, of bandits, of talking animals, and bits she makes up herself. What is worth noting in the writing is that Gorky doesn't lay on paragraphs of remembered feeling; he sets the night on the river and the grandmother's story side by side in a single scene, so the reader goes through the dark with the child first, and is only gradually lit up afterward.

II. A House Heavy as Lead

Off the boat, they arrive at grandfather's house — an old wooden house with a yard in Nizhny Novgorod, on the Volga, with dye vats in the yard, cloth hung out to dry, the smell of the workshop. But the child discovers, the moment he steps through the door, that this is no safer than the cabin had been. His two uncles, Mikhail and Yakov, are locked in a vicious fight over the family inheritance. In front of the child they throw things, curse, come to blows, and their wives cry and carry on right along with them. Nearly every grown man in this house drinks; the women are either beaten black and blue or hiding in corners in tears. Yakov's wife is eventually beaten to death. What is skillful here is that Gorky doesn't have Alyosha hear about these things — he has him stumble onto them. Through a crack in a door, from under a table, from a corner, the child pieces the whole scene together with his own eyes, and it is colder than any adult narrator's outrage could be.

III. The Wet Birch Switch, and by the Icon Lamp

Trouble is only a matter of time. Once Alyosha ruins an expensive tablecloth with dye, and his grandfather goes at him — a soaked birch switch, blow after blow, until the boy passes out and is left lying where he falls. This beating is the child's first direct encounter with violence. Gorky's writing here is restrained: he doesn't dwell on the blood, and he doesn't have Alyosha cry out any slogans. He simply writes that the boy blacked out, that his grandmother carried him back to bed, washed him, gave him water, and cried beside him. After this beating, his grandfather's cruelty takes on, in the child's mind, a concrete shape — every scolding and beating afterward will return him to this moment. And once again, it is his grandmother who saves him. From then on she becomes his nightly ritual: the small lamp by the icon is lit, she sits at the edge of the bed, and the stories begin — the Virgin, saints, bandits, wise men, kind little animals, vicious witches. A child of four or five, in the corner of a wooden house, builds himself a spiritual world of his own.

IV. The Death of Tsyganok

A childhood without one good friend would make a house this heavy even heavier. Tsyganok — Ivan — is a foundling taken in by the grandfather's household, working as a hand in the dye shop: cheerful, clever with his hands, able to take a hard knock, one of the few grown-ups in this gloomy wooden house who ever laughs. He plays with Alyosha, hides treats for him, teaches him to help out in the dye works. Then, one winter morning, tragedy comes. The two uncles ask Tsyganok to help carry a heavy oak cross to the cemetery — a cross so heavy it takes three men straining to lift it. The uncles, out of spite, let go of their end halfway there, and the whole weight comes down on Ivan. By the time Alyosha reaches him, Ivan is already pinned in the snow, a rib driven through his skin, coughing blood; he is dead not long after. This is the first time in Alyosha's life that a truly good person dies. Gorky doesn't stage a scene of wailing grief: he simply has Alyosha stand there in the snow, watching the grown-ups scramble, watching the two uncles push the blame onto each other. A good man dying without a sound makes this passage heavier than any lament could.

V. Good Business Is Driven Out

Not long after Tsyganok's death, another window closes. The lodger renting the attic room upstairs — a down-at-heel amateur chemist everyone calls Good Business — spends his days over a clutter of bottles and jars, running experiments: silent, solitary, keeping to himself. Everyone else finds him strange, unlucky to have around. But this man doesn't turn the child away. He talks to Alyosha, teaches him to look closely at a glass of water, a leaf, a piece of dyed cloth, and lets him see, for the first time, that there is a third kind of person in the world — one who lives by the mind, not by fists or the bottle. But this household has no room for an odd man out. The neighbors say he practices sorcery; his grandfather worries he'll blow the house up; in the end he is told to leave. Good Business goes quietly. Alyosha stands at the door once again, watching someone kind to him be driven away. What makes this passage work is that Gorky never lets Good Business become a mentor figure. He simply lets Alyosha begin, dimly, to understand for the first time that there is, beyond his grandfather's kind of person and his grandmother's kind of person, a third kind — someone who lives by thought and observation. That seed is where Alexei Peshkov's path toward becoming the writer Gorky begins.

VI. The Shadows Close In, Layer by Layer

The household keeps sliding downward. The dye business grows worse; his grandfather grows stingier and crueler; the two uncles finally split the family property. His mother comes back once, then remarries — to a man who treats her badly — and moves away with her new husband. Life for the rest of the family only gets harder. In the middle of all this, a great fire breaks out. His grandmother runs into the flames to save what she can — one of the book's finest moments — a stout, devout old woman, her face black with smoke, carrying things out of the fire, standing in the sharpest possible contrast to the man who beats children with a wet switch. His mother fares no better away from home, and after a while comes back to her parents' house, but by then she is already gravely ill. One relative after another is taken, and the shadows pile up, layer on layer.

VII. Out into the World

In the end, his mother dies, worn down by poverty and illness. His grandfather, too, can no longer manage, and tells Alyosha: you can't stay here any longer, you have to go out and make your own way. A boy of about ten is pushed, just like that, out of the last wooden house of his childhood. This is how the book ends — not with a reunion, not with hardship rewarded, and certainly not with a moral. It is a bitter beginning: childhood is over, and the small store of light gathered from his grandmother, from Tsyganok, from Good Business, is tucked away inside a child's coat and carried out into a larger, colder world. This is where the second volume of the autobiographical trilogy, In the World, begins.

Themes and Craft: A Faint Light Louder Than Suffering

Looking back at the book, what it is really saying is this: in a world where good people are almost impossible to find, here is how a few of them saved a child anyway. Grandfather and grandmother are the two poles of the Russian spirit: on one side, a harsh, domineering old morality that keeps order through beatings and money; on the other, a plain, devout folk wisdom that feeds a child on stories and songs. Gorky doesn't simply write his grandfather as a villain — he shows his cruelty, but also the moments he takes the trouble to teach Alyosha his letters. Nor does he simply write his grandmother as a saint — he shows her weight, her superstitions, her almost embarrassingly familiar faith in God. And yet this imperfect saint is the brightest pillar holding up the whole book.