DISCOUNTED SET OF THE FOLLOWING THREE FILMS:

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (Detstvo Gorkovo) was the first of Russian director Mark Donski's trilogy based upon Gorky's memoirs. Alexei Lyarsky plays the young Maxim, who grows up under the czarist regime with his grandparents as guardians. Continually demeaned by his martinet grandfather, Maxim is drawn to his warm-hearted grandmother, who instills in him the willingness to pursue his writing muse. Gorky's deep abiding love for Russia is conveyed through the film's remarkably romantic landscape shots along the Volga River. 

DVD-R IS IN RUSSIAN WITH HARD-ENCODED ENGLISH SUBTITLES  LENGTH OF FEATURE FILM:  88 mins.

In the second part of the Maxim Gorky Trilogy, coming after The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, young Peshkov is working for a middle-class family, ostensibly as an apprentice to the architect in the family.  The matriarch, however, is mean-spirited and does her best to prevent him learning anything.  Instead, she harangues Peshkov constantly to perform menial tasks.  The boy finds solace in books lent to him by a rich woman.  When the family finally kicks him to the curb, he must find his own place in the world.

DVD-R is in Russian with switchable English subtitles.  Approx. 96 mins.  

In the final installment of the Gorky Trilogy (The Childhood of Maxim Gorky; My Apprenticeship), Peshkov is in his later teen years and, too poor to make real his dream of studying in a university, takes a job as a baker working for a rather cruel boss, Semyonov.  But Peshkov (Gorky) is now old enough to be aware of his political surroundings and it doesn't take him long to see the road that leads from oppressed worker to the oppressor employer, a realization which, in Russia, eventually led to the revolution to right capitalist wrongs, but instead led to communist oppression, where all were equal, but some men were more equal than others. 

DVD-R is in Russian with switchable English and Spanish subtitles.  Apprx. 96 mins.