A Volga merchant's son inherits the barges, the money and the trade, and cannot make himself want any of it — he drinks, he asks people what life is for, and nobody in the merchant world has an answer. Gorky — the name means Bitter — was orphaned at eleven, worked as a dishwasher, baker and dock hand and shot himself at nineteen; this 1899 novel is the first great portrait of the class that was running Russia and did not know why. Sixty plates by painters including Repin and Levitan trace the wide river light and the melancholy of the Russian merchant world Gorky knew firsthand.
