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 often had no home. These wretched people were ready to do anything in order to earn money. Such then were for the time being Gorky’s teachers, with them he suffered hunger, frost and poverty.

Later on, he engaged himself to a baker. His master was fond of books, thus resembling the cook (Smurij). With his employer he used to read and meditate, looking up to heaven! Gorky has immortalised this baker in his novel “Konovalov.”

Accompanying him Gorky walked in the fields, and both of them would often enter a cottage, where different kinds of poor men, tramps, and burlaki gathered together. They, after having been treated with vodka (whisky), would commence narrating the events of their own lives, for the most part a summary of what they had seen and heard in the wide world. These reminiscences rent the