The Life of a Useless Man

This book was begun by Maxim Gorky in 1907, less than two years after the unsuccessful armed rebellion on Bloody Sunday, with which he had been closely involved. Frail, battered and orphaned, Yevsey Kimkov creeps through the undergrowth of life; his intelligence remains observant, but his will is cowed, and his is easily coerced into spying for the military in support of the Tsar. He makes some friends who are capable of defying oppression, and his heart responds to them - but it is this association which is going to brink him to the terrible crisis of his life, which coincides with the insurrection and its suppression.

Maxim, Gorky

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

The Life of a Useless Man (Twentieth Century Classics)

Contemporary

Penguin Books, Ltd.

In addition to the celebrated Lower Depths, this volume contains a biographical sketch of Gorky by Alexander Bakshy and two of his less well-known plays, Enemies and The Zykovs.

The Lower Depths and Other Plays

Dramas & Plays

Yale University Press

Features Five Great Short Stories by Chekhov, Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, The Overcoat and Other Short Stories by Gogol, Pushkin's The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories by Tolstoy, Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, and Gorky's Chelkash and Other Stories.

Masterpieces of Russian Literature: Seven Books

Nikolái Gógol

LEO TOLSTOY

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

ANTON CHEKHOV

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

Literary

Dover Publications

1905. Russia is at a turning point. Zakhar Bardin is from the landowning class, but is now the uneasy owner of a factory. His managing director is determined to face down militant workers on a point of principle. But the shutting of the business has tragic consequences for everyone concerned.Gorky's extraordinary play, which was written in exile and banned in his home country, presents a panoramic view of a restless society, with a bourgeoisie no longer sure of its own values, and a working class steadily facing up to the terrifying sacrifices ahead. Described by Ronald Bryden in the Observer in 1971 as 'a real discovery . . . the missing link between Chekhov and the Russian revolution', Enemies has a dramatic breadth, humour and ambition unique to Gorky. Maxim Gorky's Enemies is adapted by David Hare and premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in May 2006.

Maxim Gorky's Enemies

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Faber and Faber

Enemies is a play by Maxim Gorky produced in Moscow in 1935.

Enemies

Aleksey Peshkov overcame indigence, violence, and suicidal despair to become Maksim Gorky, one of the most widely read and influential writers of the twentieth century. Childhood, the first book in Gorky's acclaimed autobiographical trilogy, depicts his early years, when after his father's death he was taken to live in the home of his maternal grandfather, a violent and vindictive man who both provided the child with a rudimentary education and subjected him to savage beatings.  With remarkable freshness and candor, Gorky immerses his reader in a young child's world, recreating in dynamic prose a boy's bewilderment at the senseless cruelty that surrounds him, his solace in the quiet beauty of the natural world, and his often funny, guileless observations of the many vivid characters who enter his early life. At the center of this story stands Gorky's grandmother, Akulina Kashirina, one of Russian literature's most remarkable heroines. Her tender love for her grandson serves as a vital antidote to the brutality that threatens to consume him. Her buoyant faith in a merciful, loving, but limited God provides the young Gorky with a life-affirming alternative to the vengeful, omniscient deity his grandfather worships ardently.  Although often unsettling in its portrayal of the poverty and ignorance that gripped nineteenth-century Russia, Childhood is ultimately a heartening account of a young boy's formative struggle to overcome the limitations of a decaying and corrupt society, and the remarkable old woman who enabled him to succeed and instilled in him an abiding, fierce compassion for Russia's destitute and defenseless. Childhood is freshly and beautifully translated by Graham Hettlinger, lauded for his translations of Ivan Bunin.

Childhood

Parenting & Relationships

Progress Publishers

What may surprise some readers who know of Gorky's revolutionary activities and who may expect him to have no interest outside of such matters, 'Bystander' seems to have been written as if there had never been a revolution in Russia. The action goes back to an earlier day. The characters are not of one class but of several classes. The emotions and experiences represented are typical of life everywhere. Gorky has been content to choose for his hero a young man who belongs neither to the inner circle of the aristocracy nor to the fringes of the proletariat, a young man who might have been living in any country of Europe or America. He does, it is true, encounter various conditions which are, or were, peculiar to Russia, just as any young man encounters local conditions to which he must specifically adjust himself wherever he lives. But the chief concern of the story is with the things which young men generally have to learn before they know how to live.

Bystander

Intl Law & Taxation Pub

Rasskazy. Adaptirovannyi tekst (s udareniiami, kommentariiami na finskom iazyke i slovarem). (in Russian)

Russkij Jazyk

Foma Gordeyev (Library of Contemporary Soviet Novels)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Lawrence & Wishart

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