Childhood

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. (Jan.)