Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, better known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, journalist, and advocate for socialism. He received five nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before finding success as a writer, he spent years traveling across the Russian Empire and working many different jobs, experiences that later shaped his fiction. He knew fellow authors Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, both of whom he wrote about in his memoirs. Gorky took part in the emerging Marxist socialist movement and later backed the Bolsheviks. He openly opposed the Tsarist government and for a time worked closely with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov’s Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. During World War I, he supported pacifism, internationalism, and anti-war protests. For much of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union, criticizing both Tsarism and the Bolsheviks for their political repression during the Russian Civil War and the 1920s. In 1928, he returned to the USSR at the personal invitation of Joseph Stalin, and from 1932 onward he lived there until his death in June 1936. After his return, he was officially named the “founder of Socialist Realism.” Still, his relationship with the Soviet regime was complicated: while he publicly supported Stalin, he remained friends with Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, anti-Stalin opposition leaders who were executed after Gorky’s death. He also tried to soften Soviet cultural policies and defended writers who broke the rules, which led to him spending his final days under unannounced house arrest. Gorky’s best-known works include his early short stories from the 1890s, which were marked by romanticism and Nietzscheanism—such as “Chelkash,” “Old Izergil,” and “Twenty-six Men and a Girl”—along with the play *The Lower Depths* (1902), his fictional autobiographical trilogy *My Childhood*, *In the World*, *My Universities* (1913–1923), and the novel *Mother* (1906). Gorky considered *Mother* one of his biggest failures, and it received broad criticism from literary circles and later scholars, yet it remains one of his most famous books. Some of his lesser-known post-revolutionary works have received warmer appraisals, including the novel *The Artamonov Business* (1925), which some call his finest, and *The Life of Klim Samgin* (1925–1936), his most ambitious project. Though unfinished, the latter is considered by some to be his masterpiece and has been viewed by critics as a modernist work. Unlike his pre-revolutionary writings, known for their “anti-psychologism,” his later works differ, showing an ambivalent view of the Russian Revolution and a greater interest in human psychology. **Life**

**Early years**

Born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky was orphaned at age eleven. He was raised by his maternal grandmother and ran away from home at twelve in 1880. After a suicide attempt in December 1887, he spent five years traveling on foot across the Russian Empire, taking various jobs and gathering impressions he later used in his writing. Working as a journalist for provincial newspapers, he wrote under the pseudonym Jehudiel Khlamida. He began using the name “Gorky” (meaning “bitter”) in 1892, when his first short story, “Makar Chudra,” was published by the newspaper *Kavkaz* in Tiflis, where he had spent several weeks doing menial jobs, mostly for the Caucasian Railway workshops. The name reflected his simmering anger about life in Russia and his determination to speak the bitter truth. His first book, *Essays and Stories* (1898), was a sensational success, launching his writing career. Gorky wrote constantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice—though he worked hard on style and form—than as a moral and political act that could change the world. He described the lives of people in the lowest social strata and on society’s margins, revealing their hardships, humiliations, and brutalization, but also their inner spark of humanity. **Political and literary development**

Gorky’s reputation grew as a unique literary voice from the bottom of society and as a fervent advocate for Russia’s social, political, and cultural transformation. By 1899, he was openly associating with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement, which helped make him a celebrity among both the intelligentsia and the growing numbers of “conscious” workers. At the heart of all his work was a belief in the inherent worth and potential of the human person. In his writing, he contrasted individuals aware of their natural dignity and inspired by energy and will with people who succumb to the degrading conditions around them. Both his writings and his letters reveal a “restless man” (a term he often used for himself) struggling to resolve contradictory feelings of faith and skepticism, love of life, and disgust at the vulgarity and pettiness of the human world. In 1916, Gorky said that the teachings of the ancient Jewish sage Hillel the Elder deeply influenced his life: “In my early youth I read...the words of...Hillel, if I remember rightly: ‘If thou art not for thyself, who will be for thee? But if thou art for thyself alone, wherefore art thou’? The inner meaning of these words impressed me with their profound wisdom...The thought ate its way deep into my soul, and I say now with conviction: Hillel’s wisdom served as a strong staff on my road, which was neither even nor easy.