Maxim Gorky's My Apprenticeship is the second part of his three part autobiography which includes My Childhood and My Universities. For those who haven't been introduced to Gorky, Maxim Gorky is the pen name of Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, born in 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. After a difficult childhood marked by his mother and father's death, being forced out of his impoverished grandfather's house at the age of eleven, and an attempted suicide at nineteen, Gorky went on to achieve fame writing about the destitution, wretchedness, faint joy and torpor of Russia's peasant and working classes in the late 19th and 20th century. Forced to exile by both the czarist regime and later the Bolsheviks, Gorky returned to Russia in 1929 a literary and cultural hero. I have read Fragments from My Diary and now My Apprenticeship, both autobiographical, but Gorky is also remembered for his plays and novels.

My Apprenticeship begins with Gorky leaving the home of his grandfather and working as a servant and apprentice in "a fashionable shoe shop" in his home town of Nizhny Novgorod. The narrative proceeds through stints at the bourgeois home of a contractor and drafter, as a dishwasher on board a steamship on the Volga, at an ikon painter's shop, and other adventures and misadventures. The breadth of Gorky's adolescent memory and the vivid clarity of these impressions is staggering, especially so in his characterizations of the people that inhabit his past. In Fragments from My Diary as well as My Apprenticeship, Gorky's overall focus is the literary portrait; the appearance, idiosyncrasies, elaborate whims and simple gestures of his subjects. Gorky narrates his story primarily through his impressions of others, which can lead readers at times feeling as if he or she has read not one, but many biographies in the pages of My Apprenticeship. Through this approach Gorky makes sincere attempts at illuminating the life and soul of the Russian peasant and working class; what sustained or destroyed them amongst the squalor and morose of their everyday life.

Reading Gorky write about himself as a child from the vantage of an adult is at times disorienting, and perhaps the adult Gorky's Social Realism literary philosophy is too present within this book filled with the impressions of his youth. My Apprenticeship is rich with description into personal suffering and struggles balanced against a portrayal of the working class, petty bourgeois and peasant culture of the time. In the pages of the autobiography we find an extremely sensitive, aware and awakened child, who, even amongst the squalor and chaos of his life, manages to keep some grounded sense of self. Gorky as a child is portrayed as a sort of spiritual novitiate on a mission to find hope and redemption within his surroundings and the people that populate his world. However, My Apprenticeship is not given over to the creation of Gorky as a hero, and therefore he does not fill his narrative with the requisite villains and a sustained narrative arc to salvation. Though certain characters such as Smury, a cook on board a steamship Gorky works with, Gorky's grandmother, and "Queen Margot", a young upper class widow that lives next door to the Gorky, are treated with reverence, many of the rough hewn characters in My Apprenticeship are instead a focus of Gorky's disappointed vitriol or humanistic compassion. Throughout the text, Gorky relates how the general pressures of his society bend and at times break his counterparts into lives of chronic malaise, petty crime, drunkenness and prostitution.

Much of the narrative within My Apprenticeship is given over to Gorky's love of literature and those people who helped or dissuaded him from the lives, insights, and realities that can be found in books. As a matter of fact, My Apprenticeship could be used a sort of bibliography discussing the great Russian and European writers of the time. Many times in the text, the people who engage Gorky find him "different", give him books, and express that he should be in school. As a young boy, Gorky hungered for a reality that was better than the life in which he inhabited. Perhaps it was that dissatisfied hunger which later gave Gorky such vivid impressions of the Russian culture of his childhood, and of our common humanity.