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.