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Maksim Gorky

(1868 – 1936)

Maksim Gorky, pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, Soviet novelist, playwright, and essayist, who was a founder of socialist realism. Although known principally as a writer, he was also prominent in the Russian revolutionary movement. Gorky was born on March 16, 1868, in Nizhniy Novgorod (renamed ‘Gorky in his honour from 1932 to 1991), into a peasant family. He was self-educated. Compelled to earn his own living from the age of nine, Gorky worked for many years at menial jobs and tramped over a great part of European Russia. During this time he shot himself through a lung in an attempted suicide, later developing tuberculosis, which left him in ill health for the rest of his life. Gorky’s first short story was published in a T’bilisi news-paper in 1892, and thereafter he wrote stories and sketches frequently for publication in various newspapers. His collected Sketches and Stories (1898) was an instantaneous success and made him famous throughout Russia. Tiventy-six Men and a Girl (1899; trans. 1902), a tale of sweatshop conditions in a bakery, is considered by many his finest short story. In 1899, Gorky became associated with the revolutionary activities of the Marxists, and in 1906 he went abroad to raise funds for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Compelled by illness to leave the country in 1922, Gorky spent six years in Sorrento, Italy. On his return to the Soviet Union he was received with official honours.

Gorky’s novels include Mother (1907; trans. 1929), an influential piece of propaganda about the revolutionary spirit of an old peasant; and the tetralogy The Life of ‘aim Samgin (1927-36; trans. 1930-38), a series on Russian history from 1880 to 1917. His best-known play is The Lower Depths (1902; trans. 1912), which depicts men reduced to the ultimate depths of degradation but retaining positive qualities. Among Gorky’s best works are his autobiographical and literary memoirs. The trilogy consisting of Childhood (1913-14; trans. 1915), In the World (1915-16; trans. 1917), and the ironically titled My Universities (1923; trans. as Reminiscences of My Youth, 1952), is considered a major artistic achievement because it lacks the excessive philosophising of his earlier works and because it contains numerous memorable characterizations. Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev (1920-28; trans. 1949), which avoids the worshipful approach to famous writers common among Russian literary critics up to that time, has been hailed as Gorky’s masterpiece.

It is supposed that Gorky’s sudden death on June 18, 1936, was ordered by the dictator Joseph Stalin.