Maxim Gorky's My Universities is the central volume of his autobiographical works and tells the story of the period in his life when he was living among the outcasts of society. His universities are these outcast people, the drifters and revolutionaries who taught him about life and the real feelings of real people. This was the era of the development of anarchy as a political movement in Russian society, and this had an influence on young Gorky and fueled his revolutionary passions in later life.
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 this era, the government discouraged emigration within Russia, though that would have alleviated the problem and shifted people from infertile districts to more fertile districts (Lawrence 202-203). The revolutionary fervor was increasing, and in the 1880s Russian Marxists appeared, though it would be some time before they were widely organized or effective (Lawrence 204).
The peasantry which was so romanticized by the revolutionary groups of the ti...