My Universities
About My Universities
Alyosha Peshkov arrives in Kazan to study. The university stays a wish. He looks for work and has nowhere to sleep. His thinking is as hard as the days. In a spell of despair he tries to kill himself. This is the last film of Mark Donskoy’s trilogy from Maxim Gorky’s autobiographical books, after The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938) and My Apprenticeship (1939). Nikolai Valbert plays him.
Cast & crew
More about My Universities
Donskoy wrote and directed, from Gorky’s My Universities. Pyotr Yermolov photographed. Lev Shvarts composed. Soyuzdetfilm released it on 27 March 1940. It runs 92 minutes. Stepan Kayukov, Nikolai Dorokhin, Nikolai Plotnikov, Lev Sverdlin, and Daniil Sagal are billed. The Russian title is Мои университеты. A Commons file dates the picture 1939.
Themes
Making
Donskoy closes the trilogy on the Kazan arrival and the failed plan to study, not on a diploma. The suicide attempt is the low point the Russian synopsis names.
Look
Pyotr Yermolov shot the Kazan streets and the rooms where Peshkov has no fixed bed.
Music
Lev Shvarts composed the score.
Preservation
A 92-minute print survives.
Notes
- The “universities” of the title are not a course he attends. He does not get in.
- The previous reel is In People, released in 1939 as My Apprenticeship in English.
- Yermolov’s camera and Shvarts’s score are the crew credits on the Russian record.
- The Commons filename uses 1939. The release year is 1940.
Scenes
- He reaches Kazan with the university as the plan.
- The plan fails. He looks for work and a bed.
- In despair he tries to kill himself.
Influenced by
- My Universities (Maxim Gorky)
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (1939. Мои университеты.webm)
