Gorky, Maksim

Gorky, Maksim or Gorki, Maksim, pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (1868-1936), 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. His pen name, Gorky, means “the bitter one” in Russian.

Gorky's first short story was published in a T’bilisi newspaper 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. He had thrown off his earlier Romanticism and wrote realistically although optimistically of the harshness of the life of the lower classes in Russia. He was the first Russian author to write knowledgeably and sympathetically about workers and such people as tramps and thieves, emphasizing their courageous fight against overwhelming odds. “Twenty-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. In 1907, because of failing health, he settled on the Italian island of Capri. He returned to Russia in 1915.

Gorky supported the Russian Revolution of 1917 and was active in Soviet literary organizations. 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. It is supposed that Gorky's sudden death on June 18, 1936, was ordered by the dictator Joseph Stalin.

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 Klim Samgin (1927-1936; trans. 1930-1938), 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 (1913-1914; trans. 1915), In the World (1915-1916; 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 philosophizing of his earlier works and because it contains numerous memorable characterizations. Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev (1920-1928; trans. 1949), which avoids the reverential approach to famous writers common among Russian literary critics up to that time, has been hailed as Gorky's masterpiece.