Old Woman Izergil: Stories

Alexei Maximovich Gorky, real surname - Peshkov (1868-1936) - one of the most significant and well-known Russian writers in the world, five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, author of the trilogy Childhood. In People. My Universities, poem Song... of the Stormy Petrel, plays At the Bottom, The Lower Depths, Vassa Zheleznova, Children of the Sun, novels The Life of Klim Samgin, The Case of the Artemonovs, Mother, and numerous stories. The future writer was born in Nizhny Novgorod in a carpenter's family, from the age of three lived with his grandparents - his father died early. Alyosha's childhood was hard: at 11 he went into the world and became many things: an apprentice icon painter, a dyer, a fisherman in a co-operative, a loader, a baker, a burlak, a builder, a weighman, an oilman, a journalist, and more. He traveled a lot, and later these impressions became the foundation for his works. Peshkov did not even finish the elementary parish school but read continuously - Nietzsche, Hartmann, Schopenhauer, Byron, and began to write at the age of 18, repeating until the end of his days that he did not write, but only learned to write. Makara Chudra - a poetized gypsy drama - is the very first published story of the 24-year-old Gorky, under which he took such a telling pseudonym. Similar in tone, Old Woman Izergil was written two years later. Besides the story of Izergil's life, it includes legends: about the arrogant son of the eagle Larr and the selfless Danko, offering three points of view: to live outside of people and for oneself - to live with people, but for oneself - to live with people and for people. Chelkash, created in just two days, is fundamentally different from these lyrical narratives: it is a tough realistic story about one day in the life of a vagabond-smuggler, a former peasant, based on the life events of a real vagabond who was Gorky's bunkmate when he ended up in the hospital. The story published in the magazine Russian Wealth brought the young writer his first literary fame.