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9781282936744

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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.

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