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 to take refuge at night in the dark cellars of the bakery. Finally, his brain half turned, and his heart torn with so many longings which he failed to gratify, our hero decided to take away his life. He was but nineteen years old when he tried to blow out his brains with a revolver. “I am revived,” he says with humour, “and have decided to sell apples.”

Soon after this experience literary zeal began to awake within him.

In 1892 he published in the provincial newspapers his first narrative, which attracted the attention of Korolenko, who took an interest in the author.

Thanks to Korolenko the newspapers opened their columns for Gorky. During the first six years he was almost entirely unknown. Criticism began to occupy itself with him only in the year 1898, when appeared his “Narratione.”