My Universities

The film is the last part of a trilogy about a writer’s life. After a painful childhood and the hard conditions of his apprentice years, the young man comes into maturity with an insatiable desire for personal and artistic freedom. He goes to work in the shipyards and finds fellow feeling among hard drinking, talkative dockworkers. Life itself, rather than school, becomes his university, and that is where the title comes from. The film does not confine learning to books and builds it out of encounters. The account belongs to Soviet cinema of 1940 and continues the literary adaptation tradition of the period. Poverty appears throughout as both subject and surroundings. Nikolai Valbert plays the lead in Mark Donskoy’s ninety seven minute Soviet film, completed in 1940.