In the world (1917) PDF by Maxim Gorky
This is an autobiography of Gorky's adolescent years as a poverty-stricken orphan when he was passed around between relatives and lived a 'threadbare, depressing existence'.
He was forced to work as a menial in a shoe shop and was bullied by his cousin there, a brute whose secret pride and joy was a macabre crypt under a tree trunk containing a sparrow he had killed. Maxim destroys the crypt, enraged by his older relatives callous explanation for his shrine: "He flew into the shed and I put my cap over him and smothered him." "But why?" "Because I chose to." First intimations of something finer are found when he went alms-giving secretly with his grandmother at midnight and begins a tentative friendship with a lame fourteen-year-old girl, Ludmilla.
But reality always kicks him rudely and nothing lasts long for him, though he tried various jobs as a dishwasher on a barge, a bird catcher, an apprentice in an icon workshop. Gorky brilliantly rendered in the raw a life of ignorance, superstition and cruelty, where God's name is only evoked for curses and complaints, where to read a book is considered a deviant act.
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