Synopsis
My Universities (1940) is a Soviet drama by Mark Donskoy you can watch online on iFILM. Young Alexei Peshkov — the future writer Maxim Gorky — arrives in Kazan chasing one dream: a seat at the university.
The dream collapses fast. There is no room for a poor teenager in the lecture halls, so he takes whatever pays — the docks, a bakery, a corner to sleep in. His real schooling comes from the stevedores and bakers of the Volga, hard-drinking men who argue about God, justice and why life weighs so much. Despair eventually pushes him to the edge.
This closes Donskoy's trilogy on Gorky's early years, after My Childhood and My Apprenticeship, all drawn from the writer's autobiographical novels. Donskoy films poverty plainly, yet never lets it curdle into misery: even in a cellar or a ship's hold, his people stay alive and thinking. One for anyone who loves early Soviet cinema and Gorky on the page. Watch My Universities (1940) online on iFILM.
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