Maxim Gorky, like Leo Tolstoy, was primarily an autobiographical author, and the material here is considered amongst the greatest of his writings. Not only do they give the astonishingly varied life of Gorky from childhood through youth, but they also provide us with an unforgettable picture of one of the most crucial generations in Russian life and history --the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The autobiography begins at the age of five and ends with Gorky secure in his position as one of the leading Russian writers. From the beginning, the story is organized as a quest for knowledge and understanding, of oneself and the world one lives in. This quest brings Gorky into contact with the harsh realities of life in late 19th century Russia -the life that was to constitute his "universities". We follow him as he turns from one job to another in an effort to make a living for himself - rag picker, errand and stock boy, junior clerk, bird catcher, cabin boy on a Volga steamer, apprentice in an icon factory, baker, watchman and freight handler at railroad stations. We move with Gorky in his life of wandering from one part of Russia to the next, and, in the course of the journey, we meet some of the most extraordinary characters in literature. The people that crowd the pages of his life history are as interesting as they are varied. Peasants, artisans, scholars, writers, teachers, policemen and government officials -they passed in and out of Gorky?s strange, sad life, leaving each one of them a vivid imprint on his keen mind. Through them he learned to build for himself a philosophy of life, and with the memory of them he painted for us those stark, vital pictures which make the unforgettable character of his book.Each character is sharply individualized, mountingly alive, fascinating. There is Gorky?s grandmother with her strength, her idealism, her superstition, her sympathy. Herself a folk bard, she passed on to Gorky the impulse to hearten others and a rich store of folk song and folk story. There is Smoury, the chef of the Volga steamer, whom Gorky was later to call one of his outstanding teachers. There is also Olga, the woman with whom Gorky had his first love affair; eccentric, irresponsible, flirtatious, but charming and kind. In his portrait of these and many other fascinating characters in the book, Gorky has given us his greatest - and one of the greatest life stories in literature

From the Author of Frida, the Moving and Heroic Story of One of the Central Painters of the Twentieth Century Born in Turkey around 1900, Vosdanik Adoian escaped the massacres of Armenians in 1915 only to watch his mother die of starvation and his family scatter in their flight from the Turks. Arriving in America in 1920, Adoian invented the pseudonym Arshile Gorky-and obliterated his past. Claiming to be a distant cousin of the novelist Maxim Gorky, he found work as an art teacher and undertook a program of rigorous study, schooling himself in the modern painters he most admired, especially Cézanne and Picasso. By the early forties, Gorky had entered his most fruitful period and developed the style that is seen as the link between European modernism and American abstract expressionism. His masterpieces influenced the great generation of American painters in the late forties, even as Gorky faced a series of personal catastrophes: a studio fire, cancer, and a car accident that temporarily paralyzed his painting arm. Further demoralized by the dissolution of his seven-year marriage, Gorky hanged himself in 1948. A sympathetic, sensitive account of artistic and personal triumph as well as tragedy, Hayden Herrera's biography is the first to interpret Gorky's work in depth. The result of more than three decades of scholarship-and a lifelong engagement with Gorky's paintings-Arshile Gorky traces the progress from apprentice to master of the man André Breton called "the most important painter in American history."

Excerpt from Maxim Gorky: His Life and Writings "I have come from below, from the nethermost ground of life, where is nought but sludge and murk... I am the truthful voice of life, the harsh cry of those who still abide down there, and who have let me come up to bear witness to their suffering." - Gorky. Rich though Russia has been in men of obscure birth who slowly and painfully worked their way upwards into the higher regions of art, literature, science, and diplomacy, none has ever yet so rapidly attained such widespread fame as the writer who calls himself "Maxim Gorky." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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