Collected Works of Gorky

"Childhood" and "My University" selected in this collection can be regarded as Gorky's autobiography. The tragic experience of childhood, living in a foreign country when he was a little older, the complex, chaotic and colorful society was Gorky's best classroom and his university. The big classroom of society taught him to recognize the tyranny and debauchery of reactionary rulers and to appreciate the suffering and hardship of workers. The lives of people at the bottom of society have become an inexhaustible source of his creations. The basic themes of Gorky's early realist works are: on the one hand, he ruthlessly exposes the evils of Tsarist Russia and criticizes the despicable souls of exploiters and philistines; on the other hand, he uses sincere sympathy to convey the voice of the people at the bottom for resistance. The protagonists of these works are mostly unemployed workers, farmers, vagrants, beggars, thieves and prostitutes and other people at the lowest level. Gorky's works exposing the evils of the capitalist system have a unique style and have obvious new features compared to the works of critical realist writers of the era. If Tolstoy's works have the critical depth of "tearing off all masks", Chekhov has a calm, cold and melancholy style, then Gorky uses the raging fire of hatred to try to burn down the entire old world. The young Gorky's understanding of the capitalist system and his hatred for it are undoubtedly much deeper and stronger than those of Russian writers of the same period.