My Apprenticeship is Part II of Mark Donskoi's epic trilogy based on the autobiography of the writer Maxim Gorky (see program note for The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, November 15). In this film, Donskoi depicts the author's teenage years, spent in seamy destitution in the service of a bourgeois family that falsely promises him an education, working as a dishwasher on a paddleboat and as an apprentice to an icon painter. The boy has learned to read in secret, and as the film closes he sets off toward his “universities” (see Part III, November 29). Film critic Georges Sadoul places the Gorky Trilogy “among the best Russian films of the thirties.... The expression ‘revolutionary romanticism' applies perfectly to these three very beautiful films whose value is increased by their fidelity to Gorky's original autobiographical works. Those who have visited Nijni-Novgorod (today called Gorky) and the house (now a museum) where the writer spent his childhood, have found the precise atmosphere re-created by Donskoi.”