Maxim Gorky's My Universities

In the period just before that covered by Gorky in My Universities, in the sixties and seventies, silent resentment was building among the peasantry and others in the lower classes, but the peasants still looked to the tsar for redress:

They looked back to a time before the landlords were in the land when woods and pasture had been free to all and plowland had belonged to him who worked it. The revolutionaries, who now began to abound, did everything to stimulate those memories (Lawrence 192).

This attitude is seen in what Nikiforych says to Gorky: "The Tsar is God to the people!" (Gorky 85). The revolutionary groups did not have this same attitude and fought against the tsar. In 1881 the terrorists brought off their greatest coup with the murder of the "liberator tsar" by a bomb (Lawrence 198).

In this era, may orphans were left to starve or beg, and the population was increasing in many districts to the point where there were more mouths to feed than there was food. In

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eir meetings, he found their theoretical arguments boring. Yet, the sort of storm that was brewing was indicated to Gorky by the older radical Rubotsov: Mark my words, people will lose patience. One day they'll get angry and start destroying everything. They'll turn all their rubbish into dust! They'll lose patience! (Gorky 93-94). It was not at all clear in Gorky's time, though, that these resigned peasants would ever become revolutionaries themselves. The picture of the revolutionary movement that emerges from My Universities accords with what Lawrence notes above, that the revolutionaries were organized in small groups and did not have any broader organization, ties to larger groups, or the strength to effect change. The movement was in its formative period, and the small group that Gorky joined was typical, still in the stage of arguing ideology and not ready to act. The underlying intent of the revolutionary and the perceived need for a certain type of what we would today call consciousness-raising is evident in what Romas tells Gorky in their discussion of the importance of learning both from books and real people: He told me what I already knew, that, first and foremost, the minds of villagers must be stirred i
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1494
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)