Childhood: An English Translation
A new, vigorous translation of the first installment of Gorky’s three-volume autobiography, first published in 1914. Hettlinger, who directs international study programs at Georgetown University and translatedThe Collected Stories of Ivan Bunin(2007), begins with a swift summary of Gorky’s life (1868–1936), from his impoverished childhood ('Dickensian' is far too feeble a term) to his disturbing late-life pro-Soviet positions. (Gorky is a pen name; he was born Aleksey Peshkov.) The first volume of his autobiography is a stunning work—intense, violent, loving, wrenching, funny and frightening. It begins with the little boy viewing the body of his dead father. Soon after, another horrific scene—his mother giving birth on the floor to a little brother who quickly died—and then his father’s burial in the rain. All of this occurs in the first five pages. Gorky eventually moved in with his grandparents. His grandfather was explosively violent (beatings were routine), while his grandmother was more compassionate and protective. The grandmother was also an engaging storyteller, and Gorky distributes throughout the memoir a number of her affecting tales—verbatim. As his boyhood advanced, his living situation deteriorated, with the family moving into a series of increasingly dilapidated lodgings. Nonetheless, the author found himself drawn to a number of boarders and neighbors. Among the first is 'Gypsy,' who helped out with their dyeing business, but soon died after doing a heavy-lifting chore for the family. Another boarder they all called 'A Fine Business' (one of the man’s default phrases). Though he was a loner, Gorky befriended him, a relationship the family did not tolerate, and they eventually expelled the man from the house. The volume ends with the death of his mother, and the author, 11 years old and homeless, adrift on poverty’s sluggish river. Gorky’s paragraphs are stark photographs of horror and hope. (Kirkus Reviews)A young boy absorbs the brutal splendor of Russia in the 1870s in this new translation of a classic literary memoir. Russia’s great proletarian novelist recounts his childhood years in the house of his grandfather, a businessman whose slide into bankruptcy injects chaos and desperation into the family’s already miserable existence. He was orphaned as a child, and his young life is shaped by the countervailing influences of his kindhearted, resilient grandmother and the fearsome patriarch, who teaches him to read while meting out a pedagogy of vicious beatings. (Indeed, beatings—of children by parents, wives by husbands, lackeys by noblemen, strangers by locals— form a relentless leitmotif.) The narrative is a Dickensian tale with none of the romance or reformism and 10 times the squalor. There are piquant characters, last-ditch marriages, useless aristocrats and sullen peasants; there is vodka, uproar, filth, and cockroaches, children’s deaths that are hardly noticed, grinding poverty that erodes all human sympathies; there is a primal Russian stew of superstition, fatalism, despair, and saintliness, set in ravishing, melancholic landscapes. Hettlinger’s fine translation captures both the raw immediacy and the delicately shaded emotion of the author’s vibrant prose. The result is a harsh, luminous coming-of-age story and an unforgettable panorama of Old Russia’s lower depths. (Publishers Weekly)Gorky’s writing brims with a gritty, hard-edged realism that is as powerful and unsettling today as it was 100 years ago. And in this new translation ofChildhood, which many Russians count as their favorite among Gorky’s writings, Graham Hettlinger —whose translations of Bunin are brilliant —continues to prove his skill as one of our most gifted translators from Russian.If you want to understand why Gorky was considered one of the finest writers of his day (and marvel at our literary amnesia), this excellent volume is a perfect place to start. (Russian Life Magazine)Hettlinger's edition ofChildhoodcan be warmly recommended for the overall quality of the translation, which is nicely complemented by the notes.(Slavic and East European Journal)