En gagnant mon pain

My Apprenticeship is the second volume of Maxim Gorky’s great autobiographical trilogy, begun with Childhood and completed by My Universities.

After the poor and violent childhood recounted in the first volume, the young Alexei Peshkov — the future Maxim Gorky — must now “earn his bread.” Placed in service with various employers from a very young age, he successively discovers domestic labor, workshops, trades, the boats of the Volga, and above all an entire population of workers, craftsmen, vagrants, and outcasts.

Through this succession of often brutal experiences, the writer gradually takes shape, for in a world where education is beyond his reach, reading becomes one of the essential instruments of his emancipation.

The genesis of the three volumes closely follows the upheavals of Gorky’s own life and those of Russia. Childhood was conceived during the final years of his first exile, notably on Capri. After the amnesty of 1913, Gorky returned to Russia: it was in this context that he wrote My Apprenticeship, in 1915–1916, as war convulsed Europe and the Russian Empire approached its collapse. The third volume, My Universities, appeared in 1923, by which time Gorky had once again left Russia and maintained a complex relationship with the new Soviet power, made up of both his long-standing closeness to the revolutionaries and deep ideological differences.

My Apprenticeship tells precisely how an uneducated child becomes a reader before becoming a writer.

Rare on deluxe paper.