"Gorky" Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkoff was born in Nizhni Novgorod in 1868 or 1869. Socially, he belongs to the petty burgher class, but his grandfather, on the paternal side, was reduced from an officer to the ranks, by the Emperor Nicholas I., for harsh treatment of the soldiers under his command. He was such a rough character that his son (the author's father) ran away from home five times in the course of seven years, and definitively parted from his uncongenial family at the age of seventeen, when he went afoot from Tobolsk to Nizhni Novgorod, where he apprenticed himself to a paper-hanger. Later on he became the office-manager of a steamer company in Astrakhan. His mother was the daughter of a man who began his career as a bargee on the Volga, one of the lowest class of men who, before the advent of steam, hauled the merchandise-laden barks from Astrakhan to Nizhni Novgorod, against the current. Afterwards he became a dyer of yarns, and eventually established a thriving dyeing establishment in Nizhni. Gorky's father died of cholera at Astrakhan when the lad was four years old. His mother soon married again, and gave the boy to his grandfather, who had him taught to read and write, and then sent him to school, where he remained only five months. At the end of that time he caught smallpox, and his studies were never renewed. Meanwhile his mother died, and his grandfather was ruined financially, so Gorky, at nine years of age, became the "boy" in a shoeshop, where he spent two months, scalded his hands with cabbage soup, and was sent back to his grandfather. His relations treated him with hostility or indifference, and on his recovery, apprenticed him to a draftsman, from whose harshness he promptly fled, and entered the shop of a painter of holy pictures. Next he became scullion on a river steamer, and the cook was the first to inculcate in him a love of reading and of good literature. Next he became gardener's boy; then tried to get an education at Kazan University, under the mistaken impression that education was free. To keep from starving he became assistant in a bakery at three rubles a month; "the hardest work I ever tried," he says; sawed wood, carried heavy burdens, peddled apples on the wharf, and tried to commit suicide out of sheer want and misery.[50] "Konovaloff" and "Men with Pasts"[51] would seem to represent some of the experiences of this period, "Konovaloff" being regarded as one of his best stories. Then he went to Tzaritzyn, where he obtained employment as watchman on a railway, was called back to Nizhni Novgorod for the conscription, but was not accepted as a soldier, such "holy" men not being wanted. He became a peddler of beer, then secretary to a lawyer, who exercised great influence on his education. But he felt out of place, and in 1890 went back to Tzaritzyn, then to the Don Province (of the Kazaks), to the Ukraina and Bessarabia, back along the southern shore of the Crimea to