Gorky in the world

Maxim Gorky wrote his second autobiography (Among the People)-or-as it was translated into English (In the World) between 1913 and 1923, meaning it took him ten years to complete his three-part autobiography, and in this article we will talk about the second part of this biography.
This book begins on the first page with the title:
(This is me among the people, a boy in a luxurious shoe store, and my boss man, a creature whose stature is short and his body is round, with rigid features, his face color turns to dust, and has greenish teeth. I thought he was blind, so I started to grimace at him in order to prove my suspicion, and he said to me: “Don’t do like that.” His cousin, who was older than him, helped him find this job. The store helpers worked in the warehouse during the day and slept in a room behind the store. There is an old cook in the house with a strange appearance, as he described her, who likes to watch the fighting, so she says to him and his cousin: “Go and fight, because I love fighting and I do not care who fights, dogs´-or-humans.” But without warning, the cook dies one day in the kitchen, as she slipped and fell while preparing food and then bleeds. The boss brings in a new cook. As for the boss’s wife, “she was skinny, with a big nose, stamping her feet on the ground and shouting at her husband as if he was the servant of the house.” In the shoe store, a young man specializes in selling customers. Gorky says about him, describing one of the funny situations: “A blonde woman entered the store to buy shoes. When she sat down and the assistant tried the shoes on her foot, he brought his fingers together and planted a kiss on her foot. The woman said, ‘What a cunning boy you are.’ He puffed out his cheeks and let out a deep exhale. Oh..h. I burst out laughing madly and held on to the doorknob, then I fell and my head hit the glass and shattered.”
He runs away from the shoe store, when he causes a fire in the kitchen, to his grandmother s house. During that period, his grandfather loses most of his money and becomes a poor man. They wake up before sunrise and go to the forest to catch birds in order to sell them and buy food. But despite all this poverty, his grandmother would sometimes wake him up early and go around the village houses and leave a little bread and biscuits for the children, and sometimes some money.
In the new neighborhood, he meets an older girl named (Lyudmila), whom he describes as talkative and lame. She tells him, justifying her illness, that one of the neighbors quarreled with her mother and cast a spell on her, which made her sick and caused her lameness. This girl’s forty-year-old father describes him as “curly-haired, with thick eyebrows, silent, and he used to beat his wife for no reason and stand like a soldier, as if giving a military salute.” As for her mother, she looked like a worn-out broom, as he described it, tall and skinny with a long face.
Due to his extreme poverty, he once accepted a terrifying challenge, which was to ------sleep------ all night near the coffin of a dead person in the cemetery for one ruble. His grandmother encouraged him to do so, because a ruble in those days bought a lot. The young man who asked him the challenge was named Valiuk, and when he went there, he would stay terrified all night counting the seconds until morning would come. Finally, he wins the ruble and his grandmother was happy about it.

At that time, his little brother dies of hunger and disease. His mother died some time ago and left the little baby with his grandmother. Here he remembers her with contradictory feelings. He longs for her and at the same time gets angry because she left him.
When winter came and the weather became cold, he had to look for a warm place to work, so his grandmother (Akulina) chose a place for him in the city with her older sister. He works there as a servant who cleans the house and goes to the market to buy the house’s necessities. As for his boss, he is the eldest son of his grandmother’s sister. He was, as he describes him, similar to the young man he loved and whose nickname was (This is wonderful). The old woman was always rude and shouted at him, waking him up early in the morning. He could not bear to work there, so he ran away when spring came and went to work on a board boat, cleaning dishes in the kitchen for two rubles a month. There, he met the cook (Samori), who influenced his life because he loved to collect books. He would ask him every evening to read some of his books. He loses his job and returns to his grandmother again with eight rubles, the largest sum he has ever received in his life. On his return, he picks birds in order to sell them and make a living from them.
Winter has come again, so his grandfather takes him to his grandmother s sister in the city to work for them as a servant, and there he meets a married woman who loves reading. She gives him some books to read, and one winter night, he sits at the window and places a metal tray that reflects the moonlight, reading all night from borrowed books. From the neighbor, and he slept at the window, then his grandmother’s sister woke up and saw him in that state, so she rebuked him, hit him with the book he was reading, and told him a sentence that he remembered: “Idiots and heretics write books, and reading them dangerous and harmful to humans.” This is what ordinary people thought about the books that time.
In the year 1881, the bells rang outside unusually and when his boss man, the painter, goes out to find out the news, he returns to say that Tsar Alexander II has been assassinated by an organization calling itself (The Will of the People).
Reading, as he says, was a balm that made him forget a life of misery. He admired the novels of Victor Hugo and Balzac and the poems of Pushkin. Here he declares that he admired foreign literature more than he admired Russian literature, especially the literature of Charles Dickens, the English writer, and W-alter-Scott. When he read the novel (Dead Souls) by the Russian writer Gogol, he said that he did not like it. Then he read Dostoevsky s (Memoirs from the House of the Dead). But I personally consider Gogol s novel wonderful because it contains important details that guide part of the history of Russian society. When summer comes, he returns and works on the boat again as an assistant cook for a salary of 7 rubles a month. But as soon as winter returned, he left the boat and returned to the city, working in icon-painting shop. He told us that his boss was fat, old and used to rebuke him because he was not good at attracting customers and selling. He tells us that he once tried to invite a customer to the store and said to him: Sir, this is the best icon store in the city. But the customer pushed him back and went to the store next door because their neighbor was selling cheaper than them

Finally, he returns and works with the painter, his grandmother s nephew, for five rubles a month. At that time, his stepfather returns and lives with them. He told him an important saying that he remembers: “People who stay in one place for a long time acquire one similar face over time.”

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