Title: Aleskei Maksimovich Peshkov Was Born In Nizhni Novgorod

Aleskei Maksimovich Peshkov (1868-1936) was born in Nizhni Novgorod. When he was five, his father died. Gorky returned to Nizhni Novgorod to live with his maternal grandparents. The grandfather was dyer whose business deteriorated and who treated Gorky harshly. It was from his grandmother that he received most of what little kindness he experienced as a child. The bitterness of these early experiences later led him to choose the word Gorky (bitter) as his pseudonym. With only a few months of formal schooling, Gorky was sent into the world to earn this living at the age of eight. He worked as an assistant in a shoemaker’s shop, as an errand boy for an icon painter and as a dishwasher on a Volge steamer. Frequently beaten by his employer’s nearly always hungry and ill-clothed, he got to know the seamy side of Russian life. His late adolescence and early youth were spent in Kazan, where he worked as a baker, Decker and night watchman. It was here that he made his first contact with Russian revolutionary ideas period, oppressed by the miser of his surroundings, he attempted suicide by shooting himself. At the age of twenty-one he left Kazan; doing odd jobs, he wandered through South Russia. Gorky saw the wretched plight of the lower classes and the peasantry over whose bones the feudal chariot was rolling. The rage born from such experiences created the writer in him.