Coloured by poverty & horrifying brutality, Gorky`s childhood equipped him to understand
- in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev
- the life of the ordinary Russian. After his father, a paperhanger & upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, & with his grandmother, a tender mountain of a woman & a wonderful storyteller, who would kneel beside their bed (with Gorky inside it pretending to be asleep) & give God her views on the day`s happenings, down to the last fascinating details. She was, in fact, Gorky`s closest friend & the epic heroine of a book swarming with characters & with the sensations of a curious & often frightened little boy.” My Childhood”, the first volume of Gorky`s autobiographical trilogy, was in part an act of exorcism. It describes a life begun in the raw, remembered with extraordinary charm & poignancy & without bitterness. Of all Gorky`s books this is the one that made him `the father of Russian literature`.