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My Apprenticeship (1916) is the second book of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, each book of which represents an independent work.
612 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1916
And so my apprenticeship began, as a shop-boy in a ‘fashionable� shoe shop in the high street. The owner was a small fattish man with a swarthy, tired face, green teeth and eyes the colour of muddy water.
I was able to look into the windows in the lower storeys of houses, if they were not too heavily frosted over or hung with curtains. Those windows revealed many different activities. I saw people praying, kissing, fighting, playing cards, chattering away in anxious, hollow-sounding voices. A mute, fishlike life opened up in front of me � just as though I had put a kopek in a slot machine.
I thought that these people had no idea where they were being taken and could not care less where they disembarked. Wherever they landed they would stay on the quayside for a short time and then climb on board any ship that happened to arrive and go off somewhere else. They all seemed lost and homeless, and everywhere they went appeared strange to them. And they were all terrible cowards.
As I read I began to feel healthier and stronger, and I worked rapidly and skilfully, as I now had a purpose: the sooner I finished my chores the more time would be left over for reading. When they took books away from me I became listless and lazy, and a morbid forgetfulness which I had not known before would take hold of me.