Mark Donskoy

Peshkov is working for a middle class family, ostensibly as an aid to the architect son of the family, but the mean spirited mother keeps him from learning anything and insists on him doing menial jobs. (imdb/comments)

Tells the story of Aleksei Peshkov a 12 year old boy, living in 19th Century Russia, who would later be known as Maxim Gorky, possibly Russia's most famous and celebrated novelist and dramatist... (IMDB Comments)

Nazis occupy a Ukrainian village and brutalize the inhabitants. The victims include a pregnant woman who is tortured in the most harrowing sequence. Surprisingly, for a Soviet film, Christianity is tolerated. (imdb)

The story of Russia's political evolution is told through the life of a pretty school teacher sent to a village of pro-Czarist miners in Siberia. She tells the children that better days will come, and sure enough she's right. Her school many years later is a model of beauty and efficiency and the Siberian villagers are a smiling forward-looking lot. (The New York Times)

Also known as At Great Cost, this adaptation of a story by Mikhailo Kotsyubinsky--a Ukrainian writer executed in the Stalinist purges but rehabilitated in 1955--anticipates the wave of Sixties poetic cinema in its focus on star-crossed lovers and its celebration of nature. Set in the 1930s, the film begins as Solomia is forced into an arranged marriage. She escapes with her lover, Ostep, and for a while it looks as if the fugitives will make a clean getaway. (KG)

My Universities (Moi universiteti) is the last installment of Russian director Mark Donskoy's "Maxim Gorki" trilogy. Having endured a painful youth in My Childhood (1938) and a torturous sojourn as a serf in My Apprenticeship), future writer Gorki (Alexei Lyarsky) reaches maturity with an insatiable desire for personal and artistic freedom. The "university" of the title is actual the school of Hard Knocks, as Gorky goes to work in the shipyards. (imdb)

The story of a peasant poet.