Maxim Gorky - Childhood. In people. My Universities

Gorky Maxim

My Universities

A.M. Gorky

My Universities

So - I'm going to study at Kazan University, no less than that.

The idea of ​​a university was inspired by the schoolboy N. Evreinov, a dear young man, a handsome man with tender eyes of a woman. He lived in the attic in the same house with me, he often saw me with a book in hand, it interested him, we got to know each other, and soon Evreinov began to convince me that I had "exceptional talent for science."

You are created by nature to serve science, ”he said, shaking his long hair beautifully.

I did not yet know that science can be served in the role of a rabbit, and Evreinov proved so well to me: universities need exactly guys like me. Of course, Mikhail Lomonosov's shadow was disturbed. Evreinov said that in Kazan I would live with him, go through the gymnasium course in the fall and winter, pass "some" exams - he said so: "some", at the university they would give me a state scholarship, and in five years I will be a "scientist". Everything is very simple, because Evreinov was nineteen years old and had a kind heart.

Having passed his exams, he left, and two weeks later I followed him.

Seeing me off, my grandmother advised:

You - do not be angry with people, you are all angry, you have become strict and arrogant! This is from your grandfather, but what is he, grandfather? He lived, he lived, but he became a fool and went out, a bitter old man. You - remember one thing: it is not God who judges people, this is damn flattering! Goodbye, well ...

And, wiping away the scanty tears from her brown, flabby cheeks, she said:

I won't see you again, you will drive, fidget, far away, and I will die ...

Per recent times I walked away from the dear old woman and even rarely saw her, and then, suddenly, with pain I felt that I would never meet a person so close, so cordially close to me.

He stood at the stern of the steamer and watched as she was there, at the side of the pier, crossing herself with one hand, and with the other, with the end of an old shawl, wiping her face, her dark eyes full of radiance of ineradicable love for people.

And here I am in a semi-Tatar city, in a cramped apartment of a one-story building. The house stood alone on a hillock, at the end of a narrow, poor street, one of its walls overlooked a wasteland of conflagration, weeds grew thickly in the wasteland, in the thickets of wormwood, burdock and horse sorrel, ruins of a brick building rose in the elder bushes, under the ruins - a vast basement where stray dogs lived and died. I remember very much this basement, one of my universities.

The Evreinovs - a mother and two sons - lived on a beggarly pension. In the very first days, I saw with what tragic sadness the little gray widow, having come from the bazaar and laid out the purchases on the kitchen table, was solving a difficult problem: how to make enough good food from small pieces of bad meat for three healthy guys, not counting herself?

She was silent; her gray eyes froze the hopeless, meek stubbornness of a horse that has exhausted all its strength: he pulls the horse up the hill and knows - I won't take it out - but still lucky!

Three days after my arrival, in the morning, when the children were still asleep, and I was helping her peel vegetables in the kitchen, she quietly and carefully asked me:

Why did you come?

Study, to the university.

Her eyebrows went up along with the yellow skin of her forehead, she cut her finger with a knife and, sucking the blood, sank down on a chair, but, immediately jumping up, said:

Oh shit ...

Wrapping her cut finger with a handkerchief, she praised me:

You are good at peeling potatoes.

Well, you still shouldn't be able to! And I told her about my service on the steamer. She asked:

Do you think this is enough to go to university?

At that time, I did not understand humor very well. I took her question seriously and told her the procedure, at the end of which the doors of the temple of science should open before me.

She sighed:

Ah, Nikolay, Nikolay ...

And he, at that moment, entered the kitchen to wash, sleepy, disheveled and, as always, cheerful.

Mom, it would be nice to make dumplings!

Yes, good, - agreed the mother.

Wanting to show off my knowledge of the culinary arts, I said that meat is bad for dumplings, and there is not enough of it.

Here Varvara Ivanovna got angry and uttered a few words at my address so strong that my ears became bloodshot and began to grow upward. She left the kitchen, throwing a bunch of carrots on the table, and Nikolai, winking at me, explained her behavior with the words:

Out of sorts ...

He sat down on a bench and told me that women are generally more nervous than men, this is a property of their nature, this is indisputably proven by one reputable scientist, it seems - a Swiss. John Stuart Mill, an Englishman, also said something about this.

Nikolai really liked teaching me, and he used every opportunity to squeeze something necessary into my brain, without which it is impossible to live. I listened to him eagerly, then Fuchs, La Rochefoucauld and La Rochejacquelin merged into one face, and I could not remember who cut off whose head: Lavoisier - Dumouriez, or vice versa? The glorious young man sincerely wished to "make me a man", he confidently promised me this, but - he did not have time and all other conditions in order to seriously deal with me. The selfishness and frivolity of youth did not allow him to see with what effort, with what cunning his mother ran the household, his brother, a heavy, silent schoolboy, felt it even less. And for a long time and subtly I knew the complex tricks of chemistry and economy of the kitchen, I clearly saw the resourcefulness of a woman who was forced to deceive the stomachs of her children every day and feed a stray guy with an unpleasant appearance and bad manners. Naturally, every piece of bread that fell on my lot fell like a stone on my soul. I started looking for some kind of work. In the morning he left the house so as not to have dinner, and in bad weather he sat in a vacant lot in the basement. There, smelling the smell of corpses of cats and dogs, to the sound of the downpour and the sighs of the wind, I soon realized that the university was a fantasy and that I would have done smarter if I left for Persia. And I saw myself as a gray-bearded wizard who found a way to grow grain of bread in the volume of an apple, a pood of potatoes and in general managed to come up with quite a few benefits for the land, on which it is so devilishly difficult to walk not only for me alone.

I have already learned to dream of extraordinary adventures and great deeds. This helped me a lot in the difficult days of my life, and since there were many of those days, I became more and more sophisticated in my dreams. I did not expect outside help and did not hope for Lucky case, but willful stubbornness gradually developed in me, and the more difficult the conditions of life were, the stronger and even smarter I felt. I realized very early that a person is created by his resistance to the environment.

In order not to starve, I went to the Volga, to the piers, where one could easily earn fifteen or twenty kopecks. There, among the loaders, tramps, crooks, I felt like a piece of iron thrust into red-hot coals, every day saturating me with many sharp, burning impressions. There, naked greedy people, people of coarse instincts, whirled before me in a whirlwind - I liked their anger towards life, I liked their mockingly hostile attitude towards everything in the world and their carefree attitude towards themselves. Everything that I directly experienced drew me to these people, making me want to immerse myself in their caustic environment. Bret-Hart and the huge number of "tabloid" novels I read made me even more sympathetic to this milieu.

So - I'm going to study at Kazan University, no less than that. The idea of ​​a university was inspired by the schoolboy N. Evreinov, a dear young man, a handsome man with tender eyes of a woman. He lived in the attic in the same house with me, he often saw me with a book in hand, it interested him, we got to know each other, and soon Evreinov began to convince me that I had "exceptional talent for science." “You were created by nature to serve science,” he said, shaking his long hair beautifully. I didn’t know then that it’s possible to serve science in the role of a rabbit, and Evreinov proved so well to me: universities need guys like me. Of course, Mikhail Lomonosov's shadow was disturbed. Evreinov said that in Kazan I would live with him, go through the gymnasium course in the fall and winter, pass "some" exams - he said so: "some" - at the university they would give me a government scholarship, and in years at five I will be a "scientist." Everything is very simple, because Evreinov was nineteen years old and had a kind heart. Having passed his exams, he left, and two weeks later I followed him. Seeing me off, my grandmother advised: - You - do not be angry with people, you are all angry, you have become strict and arrogant! This is from your grandfather, but what is he, grandfather? He lived, he lived, but he became a fool and went out, a bitter old man. You - remember one thing: it is not God who judges people, this is flattering to the devil! Goodbye, well ... And, wiping away the scanty tears from her brown, flabby cheeks, she said: - I won't see you again, you will come, fidget, far away, and I will die ... Recently, I have moved away from the dear old woman and even rarely saw her, and then suddenly with pain I felt that I would never meet a person so tightly, so cordially close to me. He stood at the stern of the steamer and watched as she, there, at the side of the pier, crossed herself with one hand, and with the other, with the end of an old shawl, wiped her face, her dark eyes full of the radiance of ineradicable love for people. And here I am in a semi-Tatar city, in a cramped apartment of a one-story building. The little house stood alone on a hillock, at the end of a narrow, poor street, one of its walls overlooked the wasteland of the conflagration, and weeds grew thickly on the wasteland; in the thickets of wormwood, burdock and horse sorrel, in the elder bushes, the ruins of a brick building towered, under the ruins was a vast basement, in which stray dogs lived and died. I remember very much this basement, one of my universities. The Evreinovs - a mother and two sons - lived on a beggarly pension. In the very first days, I saw with what tragic sadness the little gray widow, having come from the bazaar and laid out the purchases on the kitchen table, was solving a difficult problem: how to make enough good food from small pieces of bad meat for three healthy guys, not counting herself? She was silent; her gray eyes froze the hopeless, meek stubbornness of a horse that has exhausted all its strength: he drags the horse up the hill and knows - I won't take it out - but still lucky! Three days after my arrival, in the morning, when the children were still asleep, and I was helping her peel vegetables in the kitchen, she quietly and carefully asked me: - Why did you come? - Study, to the university. Her eyebrows went up along with the yellow skin of her forehead, she cut her finger with a knife and, sucking the blood, sank down on a chair, but immediately jumped up and said:- Oh shit... Wrapping her cut finger with a handkerchief, she praised me: - You are good at peeling potatoes. Well, you still shouldn't be able to! And I told her about my service on the steamer. She asked: - Do you think this is enough to enter the university? At that time, I did not understand humor very well. I took her question seriously and told her the procedure, at the end of which the doors of the temple of science should open before me. She sighed: - Ah, Nikolay, Nikolay ... And at that moment he entered the kitchen to wash, sleepy, disheveled and, as always, cheerful. - Mom, it would be nice to make dumplings! “Yes, good,” the mother agreed. Wanting to show off my knowledge of the culinary arts, I said that meat is bad for dumplings, and there is not enough of it. Here Varvara Ivanovna got angry and uttered a few words at my address so strong that my ears became bloodshot and began to grow upward. She left the kitchen, throwing a bunch of carrots on the table, and Nikolai, winking at me, explained her behavior with the words:- Out of sorts ... He sat down on a bench and told me that women are generally more nervous than men, this is a property of their nature, this has been indisputably proven by one reputable scientist, I think a Swiss. John Stuart Mill, an Englishman, also said something about this. Nikolai really liked teaching me, and he used every opportunity to squeeze something necessary into my brain, without which it is impossible to live. I listened to him eagerly, then Foucault, La Rochefoucauld and La Rochejacquelin merged into one face, and I could not remember who cut off whose head: Lavoisier - Dumouriez or vice versa? The glorious young man sincerely wished to "make me a man", he confidently promised me this, but - he did not have the time and all other conditions in order to seriously deal with me. The selfishness and frivolity of youth did not allow him to see with what effort, with what cunning his mother ran the household, his brother, a heavy, silent schoolboy, felt it even less. And for a long time and subtly I knew the complex tricks of chemistry and economy of the kitchen, I well saw the resourcefulness of a woman who was forced to cheat the stomachs of her children every day and feed a stray guy with an unpleasant appearance and bad manners. Naturally, every piece of bread that fell on my lot fell like a stone on my soul. I started looking for some kind of work. In the morning he left the house so as not to have dinner, and in bad weather he sat in a vacant lot in the basement. There, smelling the smell of corpses of cats and dogs, to the sound of the downpour and the sighs of the wind, I soon realized that the university was a fantasy and that I would have done smarter if I left for Persia. And I saw myself as a gray-bearded wizard who found a way to grow grain-sized grains of an apple, a pood of potatoes and in general managed to come up with many benefits for the land, on which it is so devilishly difficult to walk not only for me alone. I have already learned to dream of extraordinary adventures and great deeds. This helped me a lot in the difficult days of my life, and since there were many of those days, I became more and more sophisticated in my dreams. I did not expect help from outside and did not hope for a happy chance, but willful stubbornness gradually developed in me, and the more difficult the conditions of life were, the stronger and even smarter I felt. I realized very early that a person is created by his resistance to the environment. In order not to starve, I went to the Volga, to the piers, where one could easily earn fifteen or twenty kopecks. There, among the loaders, tramps, crooks, I felt like a piece of iron thrust into red-hot coals - every day saturating me with many sharp, burning impressions. There, naked greedy people, people of coarse instincts, whirled before me in a whirlwind - I liked their anger towards life, I liked their mockingly hostile attitude towards everything in the world and their carefree attitude towards themselves. Everything that I directly experienced drew me to these people, making me want to immerse myself in their caustic environment. Bret-Hart and the huge number of "tabloid" novels I read made me even more sympathetic to this milieu. The professional thief Bashkin, a former student of the teacher's institute, a brutally beaten, consumptive person, eloquently suggested to me: - Why are you, as a girl, shivering, or is it afraid to lose honor? To the girl honor is all her property, and to you - only a yoke. The bull is honest, so he is fed up with hay! Red-haired, shaved, like an actor, with dexterous, soft movements of his small body, Bashkin resembled a kitten. He treated me kindly, patronizingly, and I saw that he sincerely wished me good luck and happiness. Very smart, he read a lot good books, most of all he liked "The Count of Monte Cristo". “This book has both purpose and heart,” he said. He loved women and talked about them, smacking deliciously, with delight, with some kind of convulsion in his broken body; there was something painful in this convulsion; it aroused a disgust in me, but I listened attentively to his speeches, feeling their beauty. - Baba, baba! - he chanted, and the yellow skin of his face flushed, dark eyes shone with admiration. - For the sake of a woman, I will do anything. For her, as for the devil, there is no sin! Live in love, nothing better than this! He was a talented storyteller and easily composed touching songs for prostitutes about the sorrows of unhappy love, his songs were sung in all the cities of the Volga, and - by the way - he owns a widespread song:

I'm ugly, poor
I'm badly dressed
Nobody gets married
The girl for this ...

The dark man Trusov treated me well, handsome, dapperly dressed, with the thin fingers of a musician. He had a shop in the Admiralteyskaya Sloboda with the sign of "Watchmaker", but was engaged in the sale of stolen goods. - You, Maxim<ыч>, do not get used to thieves' pranks! - he said to me, solidly stroking his grayish beard, screwing up his sly and impudent eyes. - I see: you have a different path, you are a spiritual man. - What does it mean - spiritual? - A - in which there is nothing to envy, only curiosity ... This was wrong in relation to me, I envied many and many things; By the way, my envy was aroused by Bashkin's ability to speak in some special, verse-like manner with unexpected similes and turns of words. I remember the beginning of his story about a love adventure: “On a dull night, I sit - like an owl in a hollow - in rooms, in the impoverished city of Sviyazhsk, and - autumn, October, it is raining lazily, the wind is breathing, as if an offended Tatar is pulling a song; endlessly song: oo-oo-oo-oo-oo ... ... And then she came, light, pink, like a cloud at sunrise, and in her eyes - a deceiving purity of the soul. “Honey,” he says in an honest voice, “I’m not to blame against you.” I know it is lying, but I believe it is true! With my mind - I know for sure, with my heart - I don’t believe it, in any way! ” As he spoke, he swayed rhythmically, covered his eyes and often, with a soft gesture, touched his chest against his heart. His voice was dull, dull, and his words were bright, and something nightingale sang in them. I envied Trusov - this man spoke surprisingly interestingly about Siberia, Khiva, Bukhara, funny and very evil about the life of bishops, and once he mysteriously said about Tsar Alexander III: - This king is a master in his business! Trusov seemed to me to be one of those "villains" who, at the end of the novel, unexpectedly for the reader, become magnanimous heroes. Sometimes, on stuffy nights, these people would cross the Kazanka River, into the meadows, into the bushes, and there they drank and ate, talking about their affairs, but more often - about the complexity of life, about the strange confusion human relations, especially a lot about women. They were spoken of with bitterness, with sadness, sometimes - touchingly and almost always with such feeling, as if looking into the darkness full of terrible surprises. I lived with them for two or three nights under a dark sky with dim stars, in the stifling warmth of a hollow densely overgrown with willow bushes. In the darkness, damp from the proximity of the Volga, the lights of mast lanterns crawled in all directions like golden spiders, fireballs and veins were interspersed into the black mass of the mountain shore - these are the windows of taverns and houses of the wealthy village of Uslon. The plates of the steamer wheels beat dully on the water, the sailors on a caravan of barges howl like wolves, somewhere a hammer hits an iron, a song stretches mournfully, someone's soul smolders quietly, sadness falls like ashes on the heart of the song. And it is even sadder to listen to the quietly sliding speeches of people - people are thinking about life and each talking about his own, almost not listening to each other. Sitting or lying under the bushes, they smoke cigarettes, occasionally - not greedily - drink vodka, beer and go back somewhere, along the path of memories. “But there was a case with me,” says someone, crushed to the ground by the darkness of the night. After listening to the story, people agree: - It also happens - everything happens ... “It was”, “it happens”, “it happened” - I hear, and it seems to me that on this night people have come to the last hours of their lives - everything has already happened, nothing else will happen! This took me away from Bashkin and Trusov, but all the same - I liked them, and according to all the logic of what I experienced, it would be quite natural if I went with them. The offended hope to rise up, to start learning - also pushed me towards them. In the hours of hunger, anger and melancholy, I felt quite capable of committing crimes not only against the "sacred institution of property." However, the romanticism of my youth prevented me from turning off the road on which I was doomed. In addition to the humane Bret-Hart and the tabloid novels, I have already read many serious books - they aroused in me the desire for something obscure, but more significant than anything I have seen. And at the same time, new acquaintances and new impressions were born in me. On a vacant lot, next to Evreinov's apartment, high school students were going to play in small towns, and I was fascinated by one of them - Guriy Pletnev. Swarthy, blue-haired, like a Japanese, with a face in small black dots, as if rubbed with gunpowder, inextinguishable cheerful, dexterous in games, witty in conversation, he was saturated with the embryos of various talents. And, like almost all talented Russian people, he lived on the funds given to him by nature, not trying to strengthen and develop them. Possessing a fine ear and a great sense of music, loving it, he artistically played the harp, balalaika, harmonica, without trying to master a more noble and difficult instrument. He was poor, dressed badly, but his boldness, brisk movements of his sinewy body, and wide gestures were answered very much: a crumpled, torn shirt, trousers with patches and holey, worn out boots. He looked like a man who, after a long and serious illness, had just got up on his feet, or he looked like a prisoner released from prison yesterday - everything in life was new for him, pleasant, everything excited noisy fun in him - he jumped on earth like a cracker rocket. Having learned how difficult and dangerous it is for me to live, he offered to settle with him and prepare to become a rural teacher. And so I live in a strange, cheerful slum - "Marusovka", probably familiar to more than one generation of Kazan students. It was a large dilapidated house on Rybnoryadskaya Street, as if conquered from its owners by hungry students, prostitutes and some kind of ghosts of people who have outlived themselves. Pletnev was placed in the corridor under the stairs to the attic, there was his bed, and at the end of the corridor by the window: a table, a chair, and that's all. Three doors opened onto a corridor, behind two lived prostitutes, behind the third, a consumptive mathematician from seminarians, long, skinny, almost scary man overgrown with coarse reddish hair, barely covered with dirty rags; the bluish skin and ribs of the skeleton shone eerily through the holes in the rags. He ate, it seems, only his own nails, eating them to blood, day and night he drew something, calculated and continuously coughed with dull thumping sounds. Prostitutes were afraid of him, considering him insane, but, out of pity, they put bread, tea and sugar at his door, he picked up the parcels from the floor and carried them to him, snoring like a tired horse. If they forgot or could not for some reason bring him their gifts, he, opening the door, wheezed into the corridor:- Of bread! In his eyes, which fell into dark pits, the pride of a maniac, happy with the consciousness of his greatness, sparkled. From time to time a little hunchbacked freak came to him, with a twisted leg, in strong glasses on a swollen nose, gray-haired, with a sly smile on the yellow face of the eunuch. They closed the door tightly and sat for hours in silence, in a strange silence. Only one day, late at night, I was awakened by the hoarse, furious cry of a mathematician: - And I say - prison! Geometry is a cage, yes! Mousetrap, yes! Prison! The hunchbacked freak giggled shrilly, repeated some strange word many times, and the mathematician suddenly roared:- To hell! Get out! When his guest rolled out into the corridor, hissing, squealing, wrapping himself in a wide spread, the mathematician, standing on the threshold of the door, long, terrible, running his fingers through the tangled hair on his head, wheezed: - Euclid is a fool! Dur-cancer ... I will prove that God is smarter than a Greek! And he slammed the door so hard that something fell with a crash in his room. Soon I learned that this man wants - based on mathematics - to prove the existence of God, but he died before he could do it. Pletnev worked in a printing house as a nightly proofreader for a newspaper, earning eleven kopecks a night, and if I did not have time to earn money, we lived by consuming four pounds of bread a day, two kopecks of tea and three sugar. And I didn't have enough time for work - I had to study. I have overcome science since the greatest work, I was especially depressed by grammar in its ugly narrow, ossified forms, I absolutely did not know how to squeeze the living and difficult, capriciously flexible Russian language into them. But soon, to my delight, it turned out that I had started to study "too early" and that, even having passed the exams for a rural teacher, I would not have received a place - because of my age. Pletnev and I slept on the same bed, I - at night, he - during the day. Wrinkled in a sleepless night, with his face even darker and sore eyes, he came early in the morning, I immediately ran to the tavern for boiling water, of course we did not have a samovar. Then, sitting by the window, we drank tea and bread. Guriy told me newspaper news, read funny poems by the alcoholic feuilletonist Red Domino, and surprised me with his playful attitude to life - it seemed to me that he treated her the same way he treated the fat-faced woman Galkina, a tradesman in old ladies' dresses and a pimp. From this woman he rented a corner under the stairs, but he had nothing to pay for the "apartment", and he paid with cheerful jokes, playing the harmonica, touching songs; when he hummed them in tenor, a smile shone in his eyes. Baba Galkina in her youth was a chorus of opera, she understood a lot about songs, and often small tears rolled abundantly from her cheeky eyes onto the plump gray cheeks of a drunkard and a glutton, she drove them from the skin of her cheeks with greasy fingers and then carefully wiped her fingers with a dirty handkerchief. “Ah, Gurochka,” she said sighing, “you are an artist! And if you were a little more beautiful, I would arrange your fate! How many young men I have attached to women whose hearts are bored in a lonely life! One of these "youths" lived right there, above us. It was a student, the son of a furrier, a guy of average height, broad-chested, with ugly narrow hips, like a triangle acute angle down, this corner is slightly broken off - the student's feet are small, like a woman's. And his head, deeply sunk into his shoulders, was also small, adorned with stubble of red hair, and bulging greenish eyes gazed gloomily on his white, bloodless face. With great difficulty, starving like a homeless dog, against his father's will, he contrived to finish high school and go to university, but he had a deep, soft bass, and he wanted to learn to sing. Galkina caught him on this and attached him to a rich merchant woman of about forty, her son was already a third-year student, her daughter was finishing her studies at the gymnasium. The merchant's wife was a woman thin, flat, straight, like a soldier, the dry face of an ascetic nun, large gray eyes hidden in dark pits, she was dressed in black dress, into an old-fashioned silk head, earrings with poisonous green stones tremble in her ears. Sometimes, in the evenings or early in the morning, she would come to her student, and more than once I watched this woman, as if jumping through the gate, walked across the yard with a decisive step. Her face seemed terrible, her lips are so tightly compressed that they are almost invisible, her eyes are wide open, doomed, sadly looking ahead, but - it seems that she is blind. It was not possible to say that she was ugly, but the tension was clearly felt in her, disfiguring her, as if stretching her body and squeezing her face painfully. - Look, - said Pletnev, - as if she's insane! The student hated the merchant's wife, hid from her, and she pursued him like a ruthless creditor or a spy. - I am a confused person, - he repented, having drunk. - And - why do I need to sing? With such a mug and figure - they won't let me on stage, they won't let me in! - Stop this gimmick! - Pletnev advised. - Yes. But I feel sorry for her! I can't stand it, but - it's a pity! If you knew how she is - eh ... We - knew, because we heard this woman, standing on the stairs, at night, pleading in a dull, trembling voice: - For Christ's sake ... my dear, well - for Christ's sake! She was the mistress big factory, had a house, horses, gave thousands of money for obstetric courses and, like a beggar, begged for affection. After tea, Pletnev went to bed, and I left in search of work and returned home late in the evening when Guria had to go to the printing house. If I brought bread, sausages or boiled "tripe", we divided the spoils in half, and he took his part with him. Remaining alone, I wandered through the corridors and back streets of "Marusovka", looking closely at how people new to me live. The house was very crowded with them and looked like a pile of ants. There were some sour, pungent smells in it, and everywhere in the corners there were thick shadows hostile to people. From morning until late at night, he hummed; seamstresses' machines were constantly rattling, operetta choristers were trying voices, a student cooed in bass, a drunken, half-insane actor recited loudly, hungover prostitutes screamed hysterically, and - a natural but insoluble question arose in me:"What is this all for?" Among the hungry youth, a red-haired, bald, high-cheekbone man, with a large belly on thin legs, with a huge mouth and horse teeth, dangled stupidly - for these teeth he was nicknamed the Red Horse. For the third year he was in litigation with some relatives, Simbirsk merchants, and declared to everyone: - I don’t want to be alive, but - I’ll destroy them to smithereens! They will go all over the world as beggars, they will live in alms for three years, - after that I turn to them everything that I get from them, I will give everything and ask: “What the hell? That's it! " - Is this the purpose of your life, Horse? - they asked him. - All of me, with all my heart, aimed at this and nothing else I can do! He spent whole days in the district court, in the ward, at his lawyer, often, in the evenings, brought in a cab a lot of bags, parcels, bottles and arranged in his dirty room with a sagging ceiling and crooked floor, noisy feasts, inviting students, seamstresses - everyone who wanted to eat and drink a little. The Red Horse himself drank only rum, a drink from which indelible auburn stains remained on the tablecloth, dress and even on the floor - after drinking, he howled: - You are my lovely birds! I love you - you are an honest people! And I am an evil scoundrel and a cr-rokodil, - I wish to destroy my relatives and - I will! By golly! I don’t want to be alive, but ... The Horse's eyes blinked pitifully, and his absurd high-cheekbone face was watered with drunken tears, he wiped them from his cheeks with his palm and smeared on his knees - his trousers were always stained with oil. - How do you live? He shouted. - Hunger, cold, bad clothes - is this the law? What can you learn in such a life? Eh, if the sovereign knew how you live ... And, snatching a pack of multi-colored credit cards from his pocket, he offered: - Who needs money? Take it, brothers! Chorus girls and seamstresses eagerly snatched money from his shaggy hand, he laughed, saying: - Yes, this is not for you! This is for students. But the students did not take money. - To hell with money! Shouted the furrier's son angrily. Once, drunk, he himself brought Pletnev a bundle of ten rubles, crumpled into a hard ball, and said, throwing them on the table: - Here - is it necessary? I do not need... He lay down on our bunk and growled, sobbed, so we had to solder it and pour it out with water. When he fell asleep, Pletnev tried to smooth out the money, but it turned out to be impossible - they were so tightly squeezed that it was necessary to moisten them with water in order to separate one from the other. In a smoky, dirty room, with windows facing the stone wall of the neighboring house, it is cramped and stuffy, noisy and dreadful. The horse yells loudest. I ask him: - Why do you live here and not in a hotel? - Darling - for the soul! Warm soul with you ... The furrier's son confirms: - That's right, Horse! And me too. Elsewhere I would have disappeared ... The horse asks Pletnev:- Play! Sing ... Putting the harp on his lap, Gury sings:

Come up, come up, the sun is red ...

His voice is soft, penetrating into the soul. The room becomes quiet, everyone is pensively listening to the plaintive words and the quiet ringing of the harp strings. - Okay, damn it! - grumbles the unfortunate merchant comforter. Among the strange inhabitants of the old house, Gury Pletnev, possessing wisdom, whose name is fun, played a role good spirit fairy tales... His soul, stained bright colors of youth, illuminated life with fireworks of glorious jokes, good songs, sharp ridicule of the customs and habits of people, bold speeches about the gross untruth of life. He had just turned twenty, he looked like a teenager in appearance, but everyone in the house looked at him as a person who, on a difficult day, could give smart advice and is always able to help with something. Better people loved him, worse people were afraid, and even the old guard Nikiforitch always greeted Guria with a fox smile. Courtyard "Marusovka" - "checkpoint", rising up the hill, he connected two streets: Rybnoryadskaya with Staro-Gorshechnaya; on the latter, not far from the gates of our dwelling, Nikiforitch's booth nestled comfortably in a corner. This is the senior policeman in our quarter; a tall, dry old man, hung with medals, his face is smart, his smile is kind, his eyes are sly. He was very attentive to the noisy colony of former and future people; several times a day his neatly hewn figure appeared in the yard, he walked slowly and looked out the windows of the apartments with the gaze of the caretaker of the zoological garden at the cages of animals. In the winter, in one of the apartments, the one-armed officer Smirnov and the soldier Muratov, the cavaliers of St. George, members of the Akhal-Tekin expedition of Skobelev were arrested; they were arrested - as well as Zobnin, Ovsyankin, Grigoriev, Krylov and someone else - for trying to set up a secret printing house, for which Muratov and Smirnov, on Sunday afternoon, came to steal fonts at Klyuchnikov's printing house on a bustling street of the city. For this business they were seized. And one night in "Marusovka" the gendarmes captured a long sullen resident, whom I called the Wandering Bell Tower. In the morning, upon learning of this, Gury excitedly tousled his black hair and said to me: - That's what, Maksimych, thirty-seven devils, run, brother, rather ... Explaining where to run, he added: - Look - be careful! Maybe there are detectives ... The mysterious assignment made me terribly happy, and I flew to the Admiralty Sloboda with the speed of a swift. There, in the dark workshop of the coppersmith, I saw a young curly-haired man with unusually blue eyes; he tinkered with a pan, but - did not look like a worker. And in the corner, by the grip, a little old man with a strap on his white hair was busy rubbing the tap. I asked the coppersmith: - Do you have a job? The old man answered angrily: - We have it, but not for you! The young man, glancing at me briefly, again lowered his head over the pan. I gently pushed his leg with my foot, - he stared at me with amazement and anger with blue eyes, holding the pot by the handle and as if about to throw it at me. But when he saw that I was winking at him, he said calmly: - Go, go ... Winking at him again, I went out the door, stopped in the street; the curly-haired man, stretching himself, also went out and silently stared at me, lighting a cigarette.- Are you Tikhon? - Well, yes! - Peter was arrested. He frowned angrily, eyes feeling me. - What kind of Petra is this? - Long, like a deacon.- Well? - Nothing more. - And what do I care about Peter, the deacon and everything else? - asked the coppersmith, and the nature of his question finally convinced me: this is not a worker. I ran home, proud that I had been able to carry out the assignment. This was my first participation in the "conspiratorial" affairs. Guriy Pletnev was close to them, but in response to my requests to introduce me to the circle of these cases, he said: - It's early for you, brother! You - learn ... Evreinov introduced me to a mysterious person. This acquaintance was complicated by precautions that gave me a premonition of something very serious. Evreinov took me out of town, to the Arsk field, warning me on the way that this acquaintance required the greatest caution from me, it must be kept secret. Then, pointing to me in the distance a small gray figure walking slowly across the deserted field, Evreinov looked around, saying quietly: - Here it is! Follow him and when he stops, approach him, saying: "I am a stranger ..." Mysterious is always pleasant, but here it seemed funny to me: a sultry, bright day, a lonely man is swinging like a gray blade of grass in the field - that's all. When I caught up with him at the gates of the cemetery, I saw before me a young man with a small, dry face and a stern gaze of eyes, round like those of a bird. He was dressed in a gray schoolboy coat, but the light buttons were repulsed and replaced by black, bone ones, a mark of the coat of arms was visible on a worn-out cap, and in general there was something prematurely plucked in it - as if he was in a hurry to appear to himself a fully matured man. We sat among the graves, in the shade of dense bushes. The man spoke dryly, efficiently and completely, through and through, I did not like. Sternly asking me what I was reading, he invited me to study in a circle organized by him, I agreed, and we parted, - he left first, carefully looking around the deserted field. In the circle, which included three or four other youths, I was the youngest and completely unprepared to study the book of J. St. Mill with notes by Chernyshevsky. We gathered in the apartment of Milovsky, a student of the Teachers' Institute, - later he wrote stories under the pseudonym of the Olives and, having written five volumes, committed suicide - how many people I met have passed away without permission! He was a silent man, timid in thought, careful in words. He lived in the basement of a dirty house and was engaged in carpentry work for the "balance of body and soul." It was boring with him. Reading Mill's book did not fascinate me, soon the basic principles of economics seemed very familiar to me, I learned them directly, they were written on my skin, and it seemed to me that it was not worth writing a thick book in difficult words about what is absolutely clear to anyone who spends his energy for the welfare and comfort of "someone else's uncle." With great exertion I sat for two or three hours in a pit saturated with the smell of glue, watching woodlice crawling along the dirty wall. Once the teacher was late to come at the usual hour, and we, thinking that he would not come any more, made a small feast, having bought a bottle of vodka, bread and cucumbers. Suddenly the gray feet of our teacher quickly flashed past the window; we barely had time to hide the vodka under the table, when he appeared among us, and the interpretation of the wise conclusions of Chernyshevsky began. We all sat motionless, like idols, fearfully expecting that one of us would knock the bottle over with our foot. The mentor knocked her over, knocked her over and, looking under the table, did not say a word. Oh, it would be better if he swore hard! His silence, stern face and offended narrowed eyes terribly embarrassed me. Looking from under my brows at the faces of my comrades, crimson with shame, I felt like a criminal against the teacher and felt sorry for him, although the vodka was not bought on my initiative. It was boring at the readings, I wanted to go to the Tatar settlement, where good-natured, affectionate people live a special, clean life; they speak ridiculously distorted Russian; in the evenings from the high minarets they are called in the mosque by the strange voices of the muezzins - I thought that the Tatars' whole life was built differently, unfamiliar to me, not like what I know and what does not make me happy. I was attracted to the Volga to the music of working life; this music and to this day pleasantly intoxicates my heart; I remember well the day when I first felt the heroic poetry of labor. Near Kazan, a large barge with Persian goods sat on a stone, breaking through the bottom; An artel of loaders took me to overload the barge. It was September, a top wind was blowing, waves were jumping angrily along the gray river, the wind, furiously tearing off their crests, sprinkled the river with cold rain. The artel, about fifty people, sat gloomily on the deck of an empty barge, wrapping mats and tarpaulins; the barge was dragged by a small tugboat, gasping for breath, throwing red sparks into the rain. It was getting dark. The leaden, wet sky, darkening, descended over the river. The loaders grumbled and cursed, cursing the rain, wind, life, crawling lazily along the deck, trying to hide from the cold and dampness. It seemed to me that these half-asleep people are not capable of work, they will not save the perishing load. By midnight we swam to the roll, moored the empty barge side by side to the one sitting on the stones; An artel headman, a venomous old man, a pockmarked sly and foul-mouthed, with the eyes and nose of a kite, ripping a wet cap off his bald skull, shouted in a high, woman's voice: - Pray, guys! In the dark, on the deck of the barge, the movers huddled together in a black heap and grumbled like bears, and the headman, having finished praying before anyone else, shrieked: - Lanterns! Well, young fellows, show the work! Honestly, kids! With God - start! And heavy, lazy, wet people began to "show work." They, as if in battle, rushed to the deck and into the holds of the sunken barge - with a boom, a roar, with jokes. Sacks of rice, bales of raisins, leather, astrakhan fur flew around me with the ease of feather pillows, stocky figures ran, encouraging each other with howls, whistles, and strong curses. It was hard to believe that those very hard, gloomy people who had just sadly complained about life, about rain and cold, were working so cheerfully, easily and quickly. The rain became thicker, colder, the wind intensified, tore at shirts, throwing the skirts over their heads, exposing their bellies. In the wet darkness, with the faint light of six lanterns, black men darted about, stamping their feet dully on the decks of barges. They worked as if they were hungry for work, as if they had long awaited the pleasure of throwing four-pound sacks from hand to hand, running at a run with bales on their backs. They worked playing, with the cheerful enthusiasm of children, with that drunken joy of doing, which is sweeter than only the embrace of a woman. A large, bearded man in a jacket, wet, slippery - must be the owner of the load or his trusted one - suddenly shouted excitedly: - Well done - I put the bucket! Robbers - two are coming! Do it! Several voices at once roared loudly from all sides of the darkness:- Three buckets! - Three went! Do know! And the whirlwind of work intensified. I, too, grabbed the bags, dragged, threw them, ran and grabbed again, and it seemed to me that I myself and everything around was whirling in a stormy dance, that these people could work so scary and merrily without ustat, not sparing themselves, for months, years that they can, grabbing the bell towers and minarets of the city, pull it from wherever they want. I lived that night in a joy that I had not experienced; my soul was illuminated by the desire to live my whole life in this half-mad delight of doing. Waves danced behind the sides, rain whipped across the decks, the wind whistled over the river, half-naked wet people ran swiftly and tirelessly in the gray mist of dawn, shouting, laughing, admiring their strength, their work. And then the wind tore apart the heavy mass of clouds, and a pinkish ray of the sun flashed on the blue, bright spot of heaven - it was greeted with a friendly roar by cheerful animals, shaking their cute muzzles with wet fur. I wanted to hug and kiss these two-legged animals, so smart and dexterous in their work, so selflessly carried away by it. It seemed that nothing could withstand such a tension of a joyfully furious force, it was capable of doing miracles on earth, it could cover the whole earth in one night with beautiful palaces and cities, as the prophetic tales say about it. After looking for a minute or two at the work of people, the sunbeam did not overcome the heavy thick of clouds and drowned among them like a child in the sea, and the rain turned into a downpour. - Sabbat! Someone shouted, but they answered fiercely:- I’m going to do it! And until two o'clock in the afternoon, until all the goods were overloaded, half-naked people worked without rest, in the pouring rain and a sharp wind, making me reverently understand what mighty forces the human land is rich. Then they went to a steamer and there everyone fell asleep as if drunk, and when they arrived in Kazan, they fell out onto the sand of the shore in a stream of gray mud and went to the tavern to drink three buckets of vodka. There the thief Bashkin approached me, examined me and asked: - What did you do? I enthusiastically told him about my work, he listened to me and, sighing, said contemptuously: - Fool. AND - worse than that- go!

My housemate, gymnasium student N. Evreinov persuaded me to enter Kazan University. He often saw me with a book in his hands and was convinced that I was created by nature to serve science. My grandmother accompanied me to Kazan. Recently, I have moved away from her, but then I felt that I was seeing her for the last time.

In the "semi-Tatar city" of Kazan, I settled in the small apartment of the Evreinovs. They lived very poorly, "and every piece of bread that fell to my lot fell like a stone on my soul." Gymnasium student Evreinov, the eldest son in the family, due to youthful selfishness and frivolity did not notice how hard it was for his mother to feed three healthy guys on a meager pension. "His brother, a heavy, silent schoolboy, felt it even less." Evreinov liked to teach me, but he had no time to seriously engage in my education.

The harder my life was, the more clearly I understood that "a person is created by his resistance to the environment." The pier on the Volga helped me to feed myself, where it was always possible to find a penny job. Dozens of tabloid novels I read and what I experienced myself, pulled me into the environment of loaders, tramps and crooks. There I met a professional thief Bashkin, very smart person shivering loving women... Another friend of mine is the "dark man" Trusov, who sold stolen goods. Sometimes they crossed the Kazanka into the meadows, drank and talked "about the complexity of life, about the strange confusion of human relations" and about women. I have lived with them several such nights. I was doomed to walk the same road with them. I was hindered by the books I read, which aroused my desire for something more significant.

Soon I met a student Guriy Pletnev. This dark-skinned, black-haired young man was full of all kinds of talents that he did not bother to develop. Gury was poor and lived in the cheerful slum "Marusovka", a dilapidated barrack on Rybnoryadskaya Street, full of thieves, prostitutes and poor students. I moved to "Marusovka" too. Pletnev worked as a night proofreader in a printing house, and we slept on the same bed - Gury during the day, and I at night. We huddled in the far corner of the corridor, which we filmed from the fat-faced pimp Galkina. Pletnev paid her with "funny jokes, playing the harmonica, touching songs." In the evenings, I wandered through the corridors of the slum "looking closely at how people new to me live" and asking myself an insoluble question: "Why all this?"

Gury for these "future and former people"Played the role of a kind magician who could cheer, and console, and give good advice. Pletnev was respected even by the senior city quarter Nikiforich, a dry, tall and very cunning old man, hung with medals. He kept a watchful eye on our slum. Over the winter, a group was arrested in "Marusovka" that was trying to organize an underground printing house. It was then that "my first participation in the affairs of the conspirators" took place - I fulfilled the mysterious order of Guria. However, he refused to introduce me to the course of affairs, referring to my youth.

Meanwhile, Evreinov introduced me to a "mysterious person" - a student of the teacher's institute Milovsky. A circle of several people gathered at his home to read a book by John Stuart Mill with notes by Chernyshevsky. My youth and lack of education prevented me from understanding Mill's book, and reading did not fascinate me. I was drawn to the Volga, "to the music of working life." I understood the "heroic poetry of labor" on the day when the heavily laden barge stumbled upon a stone. I entered an artel of loaders unloading goods from a barge. "We worked with that drunken joy that is sweeter than the embrace of a woman."

Soon I met Andrey Derenkov, the owner of a small grocery store and the owner of the best library of forbidden books in Kazan. Derenkov was a "populist", and the funds from the shop went to help those in need. At his house I first met Derenkov's sister Maria, who was recovering from some kind of nervous illness. Her blue eyes made an indelible impression on me - "with such a girl I could not, I could not speak." In addition to Marya, the dry-handed and meek Derenkov had three brothers, and their household was run by the "concubine of a householder-eunuch". Every evening, students gathered at Andrei's, who lived "in a mood of concern for the Russian people, in continuous anxiety about the future of Russia."

I understood the tasks these people were trying to solve and at first I was enthusiastic about them. They treated me patronizingly, considered me a nugget and looked like a piece of wood requiring processing. In addition to the Narodnaya Volya students, Derenkov often had a “big, broad-breasted man, with a thick, thick beard and a Tatar shaved head”, very calm and silent, nicknamed Khokhol. He recently returned from ten years of exile.

In the fall, I had to look for work again. She was found in the pretzel bakery of Vasily Semyonov. This was one of the most difficult times in my life. Due to hard and plentiful work, I could not study, read and visit Derenkov. I was supported by the consciousness that I work among the people and educate them, but my colleagues treated me like a jester telling interesting tales. Every month they all visited the brothel with their whole company, but I did not use the services of prostitutes, although I was terribly interested in gender relations. The "girls" often complained to my comrades about the "clean audience", and they considered themselves better than the "educated" ones. I was bitter to hear that.

During these difficult days, I got acquainted with a completely new, albeit hostile, idea. I heard her from a half-frozen man whom I picked up on the street at night, returning from Derenkov. His name was Georges. He was the governor of the son of a certain landowner, fell in love with her and took her away from her husband. Georges considered labor and progress to be useless and even harmful. All that a person needs for happiness is a warm corner, a piece of bread and a beloved woman nearby. Trying to comprehend this, I wandered around the city until the morning.

The income from Derenkov's shop was not enough for all the suffering, and he decided to open a bakery. I started working there as a baker's assistant, and at the same time made sure that he did not steal. The latter was not very successful for me. The baker Lutonin loved to tell his dreams and feel the short-legged girl who visited him every day. To her he gave everything stolen from the bakery. The girl was the goddaughter of the elder city Nikiforitch. Maria Derenkova lived at a bakery. I served her and was afraid to look at her.

My grandmother died soon after. I learned about this seven weeks after her death from a letter from cousin... It turned out that my two brothers and a sister with children were sitting on my grandmother's neck and ate the alms she had collected.

In the meantime, Nikiforitch became interested in me and in the bakery. He invited me to tea and asked me about Pletnev and other students, and his young wife made eyes at me. From Nikiforitch, I heard the theory of an invisible thread that comes from the emperor and connects all people in the empire. The emperor, like a spider, feels the slightest vibrations of this thread. The theory impressed me a lot.

I worked very hard, and my existence became more and more meaningless. At that time I knew the old weaver Nikita Rubtsov, a restless and intelligent man with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. He was unkind and malicious with people, but he treated me like a father. His friend, a consumptive locksmith Yakov Shaposhnikov, a Bible scholar, was a fierce atheist. Often I could not see them, the work took all my time, in addition, they told me not to protrude: our baker was friends with the gendarmes, whose control was over the fence from us. My work also lost its meaning: people did not take into account the needs of the bakery and took all the money from the cash register.

I learned from Nikiforitch that Gury Pletnev had been arrested and taken to Petersburg. Discord arose in my soul. The books I read were saturated with humanism, but I did not find it in the life around me. The people about which my friends students were happy, the embodiment of "wisdom, spiritual beauty and kind-heartedness" did not really exist, because I knew another people - always drunk, thieving and greedy. Unable to withstand these contradictions, I decided to shoot myself with a pistol I bought at the bazaar, but did not hit my heart, only punctured a lung, and a month later, utterly embarrassed, again worked in a bakery.

At the end of March, Khokhol looked into the bakery and offered me to work in his shop. Without thinking twice, I packed up and moved to the village of Krasnovidovo. It turned out that the real name of Khokhla is Mikhail Antonich Romas. He rented a place for a shop and an apartment from a wealthy peasant Pankov. The rural rich did not like Romas: he interrupted their trade, giving the peasants goods at a low price. The artel of gardeners created by Khokhl especially interfered with the "world eaters".

In Krasnovidov, I met Izot, smart and very handsome man loved by all the women in the village. Romus taught him to read, now this responsibility has passed to me. Mikhail Antonich was convinced that the peasant should not be pitied, as the People's Will do, but should be taught to live correctly. This idea reconciled me with myself, and long conversations with Romus "straightened" me.

In Krasnovidovo, I met two interesting personalities - Matvey Barinov and Kukushkin. Barinov was an incorrigible inventor. In his fantastic stories, good always triumphed, and evil was corrected. Kukushkin, a skilled and versatile worker, was also a great dreamer. In the village, he was considered a void, an empty man and they did not love because of the cats, which Kukushkin bred in his bathhouse in order to breed a hunting and guard breed - cats strangled other people's chickens and chickens. Our owner Pankov, the son of a local rich man, separated from his father and married "for love." He treated me with hostility, and Pankov was also unpleasant to me.

At first I didn’t like the village, and I didn’t understand the peasants. Previously, it seemed to me that life on earth is cleaner than urban, but it turned out that peasant labor is very hard, and the urban worker has much more opportunities for development. I also did not like the cynical attitude of the village boys towards girls. Several times the guys tried to beat me, but to no avail, and I stubbornly continued to walk at night. My life, however, was good, and gradually I began to get used to country life.

One morning, when the cook was lighting the stove, there was a violent explosion in the kitchen. It turned out that Romus' ill-wishers had filled the log with gunpowder and placed it in our woodpile. Romus took this incident with his usual equanimity. It amazed me that Khokhol was never angry. When he was irritated by someone's stupidity or meanness, he narrowed his gray eyes and calmly said something simple and ruthless.

Sometimes Maria Derenkova came to visit us. She liked Romus' courtship, and I tried to meet with her less often. Izot disappeared in July. It became known about his death when Khokhol was leaving on business in Kazan. It turned out that Izot was killed, hit on the head, and his boat was flooded. The boys found the body under a broken barge.

Returning, Romus told me that he would marry Derenkova. I decided to leave Krasnovidovo, but did not have time: the same evening we were set on fire. The hut and the warehouse with the goods burned down. I, Romus and the men who ran away tried to put out the fire, but could not. The summer was warm and dry, and the fire went through the village. Several houses in our row burned down. After that, the men attacked us, thinking that Romus had set fire to his insured goods on purpose. Making sure that we suffered the most, and that there was no insurance, the men fell behind. Pankov's hut was still insured, so Romus had to leave. Before leaving for Vyatka, he sold all the things saved from the fire to Pankov and offered me to move in with him after a while. Pankov, in turn, offered me to work in his shop.

I was offended, bitter. It seemed strange to me that men, kind and wise individually, would go berserk when they gather like a "gray cloud." Romus asked me not to rush to condemn and promised a quick meeting. We met only fifteen years later, “after Romas had departed another ten-year exile in the Yakutsk region in the case of the“ people of the people ”.

After parting with Romus, I was homesick. Matey Barinov took me in. Together we looked for work in the surrounding villages. Barinov also got bored. He, the great traveler, could not sit still. He persuaded me to go to the Caspian Sea. We got a job on a barge going down the Volga. We only reached Simbirsk - Barinov composed and told the sailors a story, "at the end of which Khokhol and I, like ancient Vikings, were cut with axes with a crowd of men", and we were politely dropped ashore. We rode as hares to Samara, where we again hired a barge and a week later sailed to the Caspian Sea, where we joined the fishermen's artel “in the Kalmyk dirty Kabankul-bai fishery”.

We invite you to familiarize yourself with the autobiographical work created in 1923, read its summary. "My Universities" was written by Maxim Gorky (pictured below). The plot of the work is as follows.

Alyosha leaves for Kazan. He wants to study, dreams of going to university. However, life did not turn out as planned. You will learn about the further fate of Alexei Peshkov by reading the summary. "My Universities" is a work in which the author describes his youth. It is part of an autobiographical trilogy that also includes Childhood and In People. The trilogy ends with the story "My Universities". A summary of the chapters of the first two parts of this article is not presented.

Life at the Evreinovs

Alexey realized, having arrived in Kazan, that he would not have to prepare for the university. The Evreinovs lived very poorly, they could not feed him. In order not to dine with them, he left home in the morning, looking for a job. And in bad weather, he sat in the basement, located not far from their apartment, the main character works "My Universities". The summary, like the story itself, is dedicated to the period of Gorky's life from 1884 to 1888.

Acquaintance with Gury Pletnev

Often on the wasteland, student youth gathered to play in the towns. Here Alyosha became friends with Gury Pletnev, a printing clerk. Having learned how difficult life is for Alyosha, he offered to move in with him and start preparing for the work of a rural teacher. However, nothing came of this venture. Alyosha found refuge in a dilapidated house inhabited by the urban poor and hungry students. Pletnev worked at night and earned 11 kopecks at night. Alyosha slept on his bed when he went to work.

The narrator, Alexei Peshkov, ran in the morning for boiling water to a nearby tavern. Pletnev read funny poems during tea, told the news from the newspapers. Then he went to bed, and Alyosha went to the dock of the Volga to work. He carried loads, sawed wood. So Alyosha lived from winter to the end of summer.

Derenkov and his shop

Let's describe further developments making up a summary. "My universities" continues with the fact that in 1884, in the fall, one of the students with whom the narrator was familiar, brought him to Andrey Stepanovich Derenkov. It was the owner of the grocery store. Even the gendarmes had no idea that the revolutionary-minded young people gathered in Andrei Stepanovich's apartment, forbidden books were kept in his closet.

Alyosha quickly became friends with the owner of the shop. He read a lot, helped him in his work. In the evenings, gymnasium students and students often met. The gathering was noisy. These were different from those with whom Alexei lived in Nizhny. They, like him, hated the well-fed stupid life of the bourgeoisie, wanted to change existing order... Among them there were also revolutionaries who remained to live in Kazan after returning from Siberian exile.

Visiting revolutionary circles

New acquaintances lived in anxiety and worries about the future of Russia. They were worried about the fate of the Russian people. At times it seemed to Peshkov that his own thoughts were heard in their speeches. He participated in the meetings of the circles that they held. However, these circles seemed "boring" to the narrator. He sometimes thought he knew life better than most of his teachers. He had already read about a lot of what they talked about, he went through a lot himself.

Work in Semyonov's pretzel establishment

Alyosha Peshkov, shortly after his acquaintance with Derenkov, went to work in a pretzel establishment, which was headed by Semyonov. He began to work here as an assistant baker. The establishment was located in the basement. Alyosha had never worked in such unbearable conditions before. I had to work 14 hours a day in mud and stupefying heat. Semyonov's workers were called "prisoners" by the neighbors in the house. Alexey Peshkov could not come to terms with the fact that they endure so meekly the bullying of the tyrant owner. He read forbidden books to the workers secretly from him. Alexey Peshkov (M. Gorky) wanted to give hope to these people that a completely different life is possible. "My universities", a summary of which in the format of one article can be given only in general outline continue with the description of the secret room.

The secret room in the bakery

Alyosha from Semyonov's bakery soon left to work for Derenkov, who opened a bakery. The income from it was supposed to be used for revolutionary purposes. Here Alexey Peshkov puts bread in the oven, kneads the dough, and early in the morning, filling a basket with rolls, delivers the pastries to the apartments, takes the rolls to the student canteen. All this is described by Maxim Gorky ("My Universities"). The summary that we have compiled should make it clear to the reader that already in his youth, Gorky developed an interest in revolutionary activity. Therefore, we note that under the rolls there were leaflets, brochures, books, which he handed out unnoticed along with baked goods to whoever should.

The secret room was located in a bakery. People came here, for whom it was only an excuse to buy bread. This bakery soon began to raise suspicions among the police. The policeman Nikiforitch began to "circle like a kite" around Alyosha. He asked him about the visitors to the bakery, as well as about the books that Alexei reads, invited him to his place.

Mikhail Romas

Among many other people, Romas Mikhail Antonovich, nicknamed he was wide-breasted, also visited the bakery, big man with a thick bushy beard and a Tatar-style shaved head. He usually sat in the corner and silently smoked his pipe. Mikhail Antonovich, together with the writer Galaktionovich, recently returned from the Yakut exile. He settled in Krasnovidovo, a Volga village located not far from Kazan. Here Romas opened a shop selling cheap goods. He also organized an artel of fishermen. Mikhail Antonovich needed this in order to conduct revolutionary propaganda among the peasants more imperceptibly and more conveniently, as noted by Maxim Gorky ("My Universities"). The summary takes the reader to Krasnovidovo, where Peshkov decided to go.

Alyosha goes to Krasnovidovo

In 1888, in June, on one of his visits to Kazan, Romas suggested that Alyosha go to his village in order to help in trade. Mikhail Antonovich also promised to help Peshkov to study. Naturally, Maksimych, as Alexei was often called now, agreed to this. He did not give up his dreams of learning. In addition, he liked Romas - his quiet stubbornness, calmness, silence. Alexei was curious to find out what this hero was silent about.

Maksimych was already in Krasnovidovo a few days later. He talked with Romas for a long time on the first evening upon arrival. Alexey really liked the conversation. Then other evenings followed, when, having closed the shutters tightly, a lamp was lit in the room. Mikhail Antonovich spoke, and the peasants listened attentively. Alyosha settled down in the attic, studied diligently, read a lot, walked around the village, talked with local peasants.

Fire

Continues to describe the events of his life in the autobiographical story "My Universities" Gorky. The summary of the work acquaints readers with the main ones.

The local wealthy and the headman were hostile and suspicious of Romas. At night they lay in wait for him, they tried to blow up a stove in his hut, and then, towards the end of summer, they burned down Romas' shop with all his goods. Alyosha, when it caught fire, was in the attic and first of all rushed to save the box in which the books were. He almost burned out himself, but he guessed to jump out of the window, wrapped in a sheepskin coat.

Romas' parting words

Romas soon after this fire decided to leave the village. Saying goodbye to Alyosha on the eve of his departure, he ordered him to look calmly at everything, remembering that everything passes away, everything changes for the better. At that time, Alexei Maksimovich was 20 years old. He was a strong, big, awkward young man with long hair, and they did not stick out already in different sides whirlwinds. His cheeky, rough face could not be called beautiful. But it was transformed when Alexei smiled.

Childhood: life with the Kashirins

When Peshkov, the hero of the work "My Universities" (Gorky), the summary of which interests us, was a little boy, the cheerful young worker of the Kashirins, Tsyganok (grandmother's foster child), once told him that Alyosha was "small, but angry." And that was indeed the case. Peshkov was angry at his grandfather when he offended his grandmother, at his comrades, if they mistreated those who were weaker, at their masters for greed, for their gray, boring life. He was always ready to fight and argue, protested against what humiliated human dignity, interfered with life.

Gradually, Alexei began to realize that the wisdom of his grandmother was not always correct. This woman said that you need to firmly remember the good and forget the bad. However, Alyosha felt that one must not forget him, one must fight him, if the bad ruins a person, spoils his life. Gradually, his soul was growing attention to man, love for him, respect for work. He looked for good people everywhere and became very attached to them when he found them. So, Alyosha was attached to his grandmother, to the cheerful and intelligent Tsyganok, to Smuriy, to Vyakhir. I also met when I was working at the fair, with Romas, with Derenkov, and with Semyonov, Gorky ("My Universities"). The chapter summary only introduces the main characters, so we did not describe all of them. Alyosha made a solemn promise to serve these people.

As always, books helped him understand a lot in life, explained, and Alexey began to take literature more and more seriously, more demanding. From childhood, he carried away in his soul the joy of first acquaintance with the work of Lermontov, Pushkin, with special tenderness he always recalled grandmother's songs, fairy tales ...

Reading books, Alexey Peshkov dreamed of becoming like their heroes, he wanted to meet in his life such a "simple, wise man" so that he would lead him on a clear broad path, on which there would be truth, direct and firm, like a sword.

Gorky's "Universities"

Higher thoughts educational institution left far behind. Alyosha did not manage to enter there. "My Universities" (a summary will not replace the work itself) ends with a description of how he "wandered through life" instead of studying at the university, got to know people, gained knowledge in circles of revolutionary-minded youth, thought a lot and believed more and more that a person beautiful and great. Life itself became his university. It is about this that he spoke in his third, which we introduced the reader to, describing its brief content - "My universities". You can read the original work in about 4 hours. Recall that autobiographical trilogy are the following stories: "Childhood", "In people", "My universities". Summary last piece describes 4 years of the life of Alexei Peshkov.

The autobiographical trilogy of Maxim Gorky "Childhood. In people. My universities", on which he worked for 10 years, is one of the most significant works of Russian realistic literature of the 20th century. The writer himself called it "the truth that must be known to the root in order to rip it out from memory, from the soul of man, from our whole life, grievous and shameful."

Before the reader of the trilogy, provincial Russia of the late XIX - early XX century literally comes to life, with its merchant yards and workers' suburbs, Volga ports, a series of colorful characters and an endless depth of understanding of the very soul of the Russian people, always balancing on the verge between the beautiful and the ugly, between crime and holiness ...

Maksim Gorky
Childhood. In people. My Universities

Childhood

I dedicate to my son

Chapter I

In a semi-dark, cramped room, on the floor, under the window, lies my father, dressed in white and unusually long; the toes of his bare feet are strangely spread out, the fingers of his gentle hands, quietly placed on his chest, are also crooked; his cheerful eyes are tightly covered with black circles of copper coins, his kind face is dark and frightens me with badly bared teeth.

Mother, half-naked, in a red skirt, kneels, combing her father's long, soft hair from forehead to back of her head with a black comb, with which I used to saw through the peels of watermelons; the mother constantly says something in a thick, hoarse voice, her gray eyes are swollen and seem to melt, flowing down in large drops of tears.

My grandmother is holding me by the hand - a round, big-headed one with huge eyes and a funny loose nose; she is all black, soft and surprisingly interesting; she, too, cries, somehow singing especially well to her mother, trembling all over and jerking me, pushing me towards my father; I feast, I hide behind her; I'm scared and embarrassed.

I have never seen the big ones cry, and I did not understand the words repeatedly said by my grandmother:

- Say goodbye to your aunt, you will never see him, he died, my dear, not on time, not in his hour ...

I was gravely ill - I had just got to my feet; during his illness - I remember this well - my father fiddled with me merrily, then he suddenly disappeared and was replaced by his grandmother, a strange person.

- Where did you come from? I asked her.

She answered:

- From the top, from Nizhny, but I didn’t come, but I did! They don't walk on water, shish!

It was funny and incomprehensible: upstairs, in the house, lived bearded, dyed Persians, and in the basement an old, yellow Kalmyk was selling sheepskins. You can go down the stairs astride the railing or, when you fall, roll somersault - I knew that well. And what does the water have to do with it? Everything is wrong and amusingly confused.

- Why am I shish?

“Because you make noise,” she said, laughing too.

She spoke affectionately, cheerfully, and fluently. I made friends with her from the very first day, and now I want her to leave this room with me as soon as possible.

My mother oppresses me; her tears and howl ignited a new, disturbing feeling in me. This is the first time I see her like this - she was always strict, spoke little; she is clean, smooth and big like a horse; she has a rigid body and terribly strong arms. And now she was all somehow unpleasantly swollen and disheveled, everything on her was torn; the hair, which lay neatly on his head, in a large light cap, scattered over his bare shoulder, fell on his face, and half of it, braided in a braid, dangles, touching his father's face asleep. I have been standing in the room for a long time, but she never once looked at me - she combs her father's hair and growls all the time, choking on tears.

Black men and a security soldier peer through the door. He shouts angrily:

- Quickly clean up!

The window is covered with a dark shawl; it swells like a sail. Once my father took me on a boat with a sail. Thunder struck suddenly. My father laughed, squeezed me tightly with his knees and shouted:

- Nothing, do not be afraid, Bow!

Suddenly the mother threw herself heavily off the floor, immediately sank down again, toppled over onto her back, scattering her hair across the floor; her blind, white face turned blue, and, showing her teeth like a father, she said in a terrible voice:

- Shut the door ... Alexey - get out!

Pushing me away, grandmother rushed to the door, shouted:

- Dear ones, do not be afraid, do not touch, leave for Christ's sake! This is not cholera, childbirth has come, have mercy, priests!

I hid in a dark corner behind the chest and from there I watched my mother wriggle across the floor, groaning and gritting her teeth, and my grandmother, crawling around, said tenderly and joyfully:

- In the name of father and son! Be patient, Varyusha! .. Holy Mother of God, intercessor ...

I'm scared; they are fumbling on the floor near their father, touching him, moaning and shouting, but he is motionless and as if laughing. It went on for a long time - fiddling on the floor; more than once the mother rose to her feet and fell again; grandmother rolled out of the room like a big black soft ball; then suddenly a child cried out in the darkness.

- Glory to you, Lord! - said the grandmother. - Boy!

And lit a candle.

I must have fallen asleep in the corner - I don't remember anything else.

The second impression in my memory is a rainy day, a deserted corner of a cemetery; I stand on a slippery hillock of sticky earth and stare into the pit where my father's coffin was lowered; there is a lot of water at the bottom of the pit and there are frogs - two have already climbed onto the yellow lid of the coffin.

At the grave - me, grandmother, a wet guard and two angry men with shovels. All are showered with warm rain, fine as beads.

- Bury, - said the guard, walking away.

Grandmother burst into tears, hiding her face in the end of her headscarf. The peasants, bending over, hastily began to throw the earth into the grave, the water slouched; jumping from the coffin, the frogs began to rush to the walls of the pit, clods of earth knocked them to the bottom.

- Move away, Lenya, - said my grandmother, taking my shoulder; I slipped out from under her hand, did not want to leave.

“What a blessing you are, God,” complained the grandmother, either against me or against God, and stood for a long time in silence, her head bowed; the grave is already leveled to the ground, and it still stands.

The peasants thumped loudly with shovels on the ground; the wind came and drove, carried away the rain. Grandma took my hand and led me to a distant church, among many dark crosses.

- Why won't you cry? She asked as she stepped outside the fence. - I would cry!

“I don’t want to,” I said.

“Well, you don’t want to, you don’t need to,” she said quietly.

All this was amazing: I seldom cried and only from resentment, not from pain; my father always laughed at my tears, and my mother shouted:

- Don't you dare cry!

Then we drove along a wide, very dirty street in a droshky, among dark red houses; I asked my grandmother:

- Will the frogs come out?

“No, they won’t come out,” she replied. - God bless them!

Neither father nor mother uttered the name of God so often and in a kindred manner.

A few days later, my grandmother and mother were traveling on a steamer in a small cabin; my newborn brother Maxim died and was lying on the table in the corner, wrapped in white, swaddled with red braid.

Perching on knots and chests, I look out of the window, bulging and round like a horse's eye; muddy, frothy water flows endlessly behind the wet glass. Sometimes she throws herself up and licks the glass. I involuntarily jump to the floor.