But acclaimed on all sides, by all classes of society, as the most
talented writer of the present day, is the young man who writes under
the name of Maxim Gorky (Bitter). The majority of the critics
confidently predict that he is the long-expected successor of Count
L. N. Tolstoy. This gifted man, who at one stroke, conquered for himself
all Russia which reads, whose books sell with unprecedented rapidity,
whose name passes from mouth to mouth of millions, wherever intellectual
life glows, and has won an unnumbered host of enthusiastic admirers all
over the world, came up from the depths of the populace.

"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