My Childhood (1913)

A scene near the beginning of the 1938 film adaptation of Maxim Gorky's My Childhood, the first in a literary trilogy that includes My Apprenticeship and My Universities, though I should say that My Apprenticeship is sometimes translated as Among Them and, conversely, On His Own, making this middle book, by virtue of its conflicting titles, the most intriguing. Nevertheless, I am reading My Childhood, and Roland Wilks's translation is helping.

The scene is in the Nizhny home of Gorky's maternal grandparents, where he and his mother have come by river boat (Volga) after the work-related death of Gorky's father. Gorky adores his grandmother, which is evident in his descriptions of her ("She was a clean, smooth, large person, like a horse"), while he "took a particular dislike to his grandfather, immediately sensing he is an enemy." (Nizhny was later renamed Gorky. My babushka was from the nearby city of Saratov.)

Gorky's first impressions of his grandparents' "dirty pink" house is one of chaos:

"From the street it looked very big, but inside its dim little rooms it was very cramped. Angry people rushed about in all directions like passengers about to disembark a ship, ragged children swarmed all over the place like thieving sparrows, and the whole house was filled with a pungent smell."

But it is the mental and physical violence Gorky is about to endure -- in a household "choked by a fog of mutual hostility" -- that returns me to Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), in particular the protagonist's father's Russian bride-to-be, Valentina, and her need to both acquire and debase.