MY UNIVERSITIES

Original 1964 Re-Release Russian 26 inch x 41 1/4 inch Poster for the 1940 Mark Donskoy Russian Drama MY UNIVERSITIES (MOI UNIVERSITETY), based on the autobiography by Maxim Gorky and starring Nikolai Valbert, Stepan Kayukov, Nikolai Dorokhin, Nikolai Plotnikov and Lev Sverdlin.

My Universities is the last installment of Russian director Mark Donskoy’s “Maxim Gorki” trilogy. Having endured a painful youth in My Childhood (1938) and a torturous sojourn as a serf in My Apprenticeship (1939), future writer Gorki (Alexei Lyarsky) reaches maturity with an insatiable desire for personal and artistic freedom. The “university” of the title is actual the school of Hard Knocks, as Gorky goes to work in the shipyards and commisserates with the hard-drinking, philosophical dockworkers. Donskoy’s depiction of street life under the Czarist regime of the late 19th century as unrelentingly depressing, filled with disenfranchised derelicts.

Poster art by Kovalenko.

The poster is in good to very good folded condition.