Maxim Gorky is the most original and, after Tolstoy, the most talented of modern Russian writers. He was born in 1868 or 1869--he does not know exactly when himself--in a dyer's back shop at Nizhny Novgorod. His mother, Barbara Kashirina, was the daughter of the aforementioned dyer; and his father, Maxim Pyeshkov, was an upholsterer. The child was christened Alexis. His real name, then, is Alexis Pyeshkov, and Maxim Gorky[6] is only his pseudonym. When he was four, he lost his father, and three years later, his mother. He was then taken by his grandfather, who had been a soldier under Nicholas I, a hard, authoritative, pitiless old man, before whom all trembled. And it was under his rude tutelage that the child first began to read. When he was nine, he was sent to work for a shoemaker, an evil sort of man who maltreated him. [6] In Russian, Gorky means bitterness. "One day," Gorky tells us, "I was warming some water for him; the bowl fell, and I burned my hands badly. That evening I ran away, my grandfather having scolded me severely. I then became a painter's apprentice." He did not remain long in this position. From this time on, his unsatisfied soul was seized with the "wanderlust." First apprenticed to an engraver, and then as a gardener, he finally became a scullion on one of the boats that plies up and down the Volga. Here he felt more at ease. On board, in the person of the master-cook, named Smoury, he unexpectedly met a teacher. This cook, who had been a soldier, loved to read, and he gave the child all the books that he had in an old trunk. They consisted of the works of Gogol, Dumas' novels, the "Lives of the Saints," a manual of geography, and some popular novels. Surely, a queer collection! Smoury inspired his scullion, then sixteen years of age, "with an ardent curiosity for the printed word." A "furious" desire to learn seized the young fellow; he went to Kazan, a university city, in the hope of "learning gratuitously all sorts of beautiful things." Cruel deception! They explained to him that "this was not according to the established order." Discouraged, a few months later, he took a position with a baker. He who dreamed of the sun and the open air had to be imprisoned in a filthy and damp cellar. He remained there for two years, earning two dollars a month, board and lodging included; the food, however, was putrid, and his lodging consisted of an attic which he shared with five other men. "My life in that bakery," he has said, "left a bitter impression. Those two years were the hardest of my whole life." He has thus described his recollections in one of his stories: