Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian. After his father, a paperhanger and upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, and with his grandmother, a tender mountain of a woman and a wonderful storyteller, who would kneel beside their bed (with Gorky inside it pretending to be asleep) and give God her views on the day's happenings, down to the last fascinating details. She was, in fact, Gorky's closest friend and the epic heroine of a book swarming with characters and with the sensations of a curious and often frightened little boy. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

In My Apprenticeship, Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) gives an exact account of his own adolescence. After the death of his mother, fourteen-year-old Alexei Peshkov ( Gorky ) sets out to earn his own living. First he is the errand boy in a shoe shop; then, in turn, a draughtsman's apprentice, a dishwasher on a Volga steamboat, and an apprentice in a studio where icons are painted. Repulsed by the ugly mediocrity of middle-class life, by the "senseless, stupid animosity poisoning the life around him," he constantly searches for something better. My Apprenticeship (1916) is the second book of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, each book of which represents an independent work.

Published in 1923, My Universities is the third volume of Gorky's autobiography, recording his life from 1884 to 1888 when he was twenty. Frustrated in his desire to become a university student. Gorky seeks an education in clandestine discussions with revolutionaries and in arguments with religious fanatics and eccentric schoolteachers. He encounters a bewildering variety of people, from aimless drifters to half-demented visionaries: from the consumptive atheist Shaposhnikov, with his pathological hatred of God, to theological students who hold orgies in brothels and Klopsky, the despicable Tolstoyan who seduces two sisters. Throughout this volume, Gorky repeatedly stresses his disenchantment with the workers and peasants with their apathy, drunkenness and inertia. He submits himself to a ruthless self-analysis, and describes his attempted suicide. In common with My Childhood and My Apprenticeship, My Universities offers incidents of enormous breadth and variety and writing of rare power and intense conviction.