In the World

Once more I was in the town, in a two-storied white house which reminded me of a coffin meant to hold a lot of people. It was a new house, but it looked as if were in ill health...

Late in the autumn, when the steamboat voyages finished, I went as pupil in the workshop of an icon painter. But in a day or two my mistress, a gentle old lady given to tippling...

Once more I became a washer-up on a steamboat, the _Perm_, a boat as white as a swan, spacious, and swift. This time I was a "black" washer-up, or a "kitchen man." I received se...

Before the departure of the tailor's wife there had come to live under the flat occupied by my employers a black-eyed young lady, with her little girl and her mother, a gray-hai...

I went out into the world as "shop-boy" at a fashionable boot-shop in the main street of the town. My master was a small, round man. He had a brown, rugged face, green teeth, an...

I seemed to have had a wonderful lot of experience during the summer. I felt that I had grown older and cleverer, and the dullness of my master's house seemed worse than ever. T...

The books of the tailor's wife looked as if they were terribly expensive, and as I was afraid that the old mistress might burn them in the stove, I tried not to think of them, a...

Grandfather met me in the yard; he was on his knees, chopping a wedge with a hatchet. He raised the ax as if he were going to throw it at my head, and then took off his cap, say...

Every morning at six o'clock I set out to my work in the market-place. I met interesting people there. There was the carpenter, Osip, a grayhaired man who looked like Saint Niko...

In the morning when they were all asleep, I had to prepare the samovar for the men, and while they drank tea in the kitchen, Pavl and I swept and dusted the workshop, set out re...

I lived three years as overseer in that dead town, amid empty buildings, watching the workmen pull down clumsy stone shops in the autumn, and rebuild them in the same way in the...

I was in a boat with my master, passing along the market-place between shops which were flooded to the height of the second story. I plied the oars, while my master sat in the s...

However, I did run away in the spring. One morning when I went to the shop for bread the shopkeeper, continuing in my presence a quarrel with his wife, struck her on the forehea...

The snow melted away from the fields; the wintry clouds in the sky passed away; wet snow and rain fell upon the earth; the sun was slower and slower in performing his daily jour...

As Yaakov, the stoker, had done in his time, so now Osip grew and grew in my eyes, until he hid all other people from me. There was some resemblance to the stoker in him, but at...

Grandfather and grandmother had again gone into the town. I went to them, prepared to be angry and warlike; but my heart was heavy. Why had they accounted me a thief?

There was hardly any work in the market-square during the winter, and instead I had innumerable trivial duties to perform in the house. They swallowed up the whole day, but the...

The icon-painting workshop occupied two rooms in a large house partly built of stone. One room had three windows overlooking the yard and one overlooking the garden; the other r...

Imperceptibly, like a little star at dawn, my brother Kolia faded away. Grandmother, he, and I slept in a small shed on planks covered with various rags. On the other side of th...

At Sarapulia, Maxim left the boat. He went away in silence, saying farewell to no one, serious and calm. Behind him, laughing, came the gay woman, and, following her, the girl,...