[1] Short after the abolishing of serfdom in Russia in 1860s, Ilya Artamonov, a serf himself, moves to the provincial town of Dromov with his sons Peter and Nikita, and Aleksei, the adopted nephew.

In Dromov, Ilya makes Peter to marry the mayor's daughter, Natalia Baimakova, and founds 'the Artamonov Business', the linen factory.

At the end of his life, Peter retires from running the factory and completely isolates himself and falls into a sort of unconsciousness; his younger son Yakov becomes the head of the family business, but he gets murdered in 1917, after the February Revolution.

The New York Times wrote that "compared with Mother and others of the author's earlier works, his latest offering is weak in treatment, chaotic in texture, and loose in its grip upon its subject-matter",[4] while Time wrote that although "it is honest, impersonal realism, thoughtful though morose", "author Gorky's powers, however fully displayed here, have produced books that were far more readable than this one.

In this book Gorki displays at their best the power of creating character and the gift for managing scenes of energetic action which won world-wide admiration for his early stories.

His distinctive blend of humour and tragedy, violence and pity, exuberance and introspection, is here put at the service of a grander and more moving theme than he had hitherto attempted.