Alexei Maximovich Gorky

Gorky entered literature in 1892 when the Tiflis newspaper Kavkaz published his short story "Makar Chudra." The pen name "Gorky," "the bitter one," was a declaration that he would speak harsh truths about Russian life. The early romantic stories of the 1890s, such as "Chelkash" and "Old Izergil," drew inner human pride from tramps, thieves and gypsies and sent a shock through Russian letters. His first collection, Essays and Stories (1898), was an immediate, sensational success.

His play The Lower Depths (1902), set in a squalid dosshouse, established him alongside Chekhov as a master of the "new drama." The Moscow Art Theatre premiere led to tours across Europe and secured his fame as a playwright of world stature. The novel Mother (1906), written during a fundraising trip to America and depicting a working-class mother's revolutionary awakening, was praised by Lenin as "a very timely book" and was later canonized as a forerunner of socialist realism.

The autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World, and My Universities (1913–1923), is considered a masterpiece that layers individual growth over the life of the Russian people. Of his late works, The Artamonov Business (1925) traces the decline of a merchant dynasty, while the unfinished epic The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936) dissects the psyche of a Russian intellectual across the revolutionary era; some critics regard it as his finest achievement. Gorky was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and remains, after Pushkin and Tolstoy, the third most-published writer in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union.

Alexei Peshkov, an orphan from the Volga, educated himself while drifting through Russia's lower depths as a dockhand, a baker's assistant and a tramp, and became the star of Russian literature under the pen name Maxim Gorky, "the bitter one". His play The Lower Depths (1902), which put the world of the down-and-out on stage, shook Europe. His fame and royalties flowed straight into the funds of the revolutionary movement.

On the eve of Bloody Sunday, 22 January 1905 (9 January Old Style), Gorky joined the deputation of intellectuals that went from office to office trying to prevent bloodshed, and immediately after the massacre he wrote an appeal, "To All Russian Citizens", denouncing the tsar's government as murderers. He was locked in the Peter and Paul Fortress, but a protest campaign by writers and scientists across Europe forced his release within a month. He went on to become the Bolsheviks' greatest financial patron, touring America to raise funds, and during his exile on Capri he gave over his villa to a party school for worker revolutionaries.

Through 1917 and into 1918 Gorky ran the series "Untimely Thoughts" in his newspaper Novaya Zhizn, publicly opposing the timing and methods of the October rising. His quarrel with his old comrade Lenin was fierce, but it was never a final break. In the Civil War years he created the World Literature publishing house and the Commission for Improving the Living Conditions of Scholars, which found rations and work for thousands of starving writers and scientists, and his home became a refuge for the Petrograd intelligentsia.

He left for Italy in 1921 as his tuberculosis worsened, began revisiting the Soviet Union in 1928 and returned for good in 1933. In 1934 he presided over the First Congress of Soviet Writers as the founding chairman of the Writers' Union and lent his name to the formulation of socialist realism. Literary historians still argue over these last years, but no one else could have carried his authority as the bridge between world literature and the construction of Soviet culture. He died of illness in June 1936 and was buried by the Kremlin wall.

On his first return visit in May 1928, made at the invitation of the Stalin government and timed to the Shakhty trial of fifty-three engineers, Gorky accepted the engineers' guilt without question and expressed regret for having earlier intervened on behalf of persecuted professionals. During that visit he formed friendships with Genrikh Yagoda, deputy head of the OGPU, and with OGPU officers Semyon Firin and Matvei Pogrebinsky, who held high office in the Gulag.

The Ryabushinsky mansion in Moscow and a dacha were given to him, and Nizhny Novgorod and its province were renamed Gorky. He became the first chairman of the board of the Union of Soviet Writers, founded in 1932, and was officially declared the "founder of socialist realism". Some scholars dispute or deny his belonging to socialist realism, noting that his closest works carry God-building ideology and that after the revolution he wrote no major socialist-realist work.

In 1933 he was chief editor, with Averbakh and Firin, of the book "The Stalin White Sea-Baltic Canal" and wrote its preface, but unlike other contributors he never visited the canal construction. He denied that even a single prisoner died during the work, and Solzhenitsyn refuted this, stating that thousands froze to death even in daytime for lack of adequate shelter and food. He also did not write the commissioned sketch "The Country and Its Enemies". In his 1933 preface and related writing he celebrated the transformation of former "enemies of the people" who had "proved useful to the state", asked his secretary Kryuchkov to collect more letters about heroism on the White Sea Canal, and said more should be written on the subject.

In 1930 he published the article "If the enemy does not surrender, he is destroyed". Questioned by troubled writers about its cruelty, he replied by asking what should be done with an enemy who does not surrender and denied calling for the destruction of those who had laid down arms, then went on to read aloud from his preface to the White Sea Canal book. In correspondence with Romain Rolland he justified the repressions and disputed that the charges were fabricated. He defended the arrest of the historian S. F. Platonov merely on the grounds that Platonov was insincere, cunning and a convinced monarchist, and in a 1930 letter wrote that the GPU existed not as a sporting institution but by political necessity. Answering Rolland's objection about possible fabricated or torture-extracted confessions of the organizers of the famine, he insisted such confessions were possible and said he had the right to assert it because he had read the authentic testimony. He sent a copy of this letter to Stalin.

On 23 May 1934, by Stalin's order, Pravda and Izvestia simultaneously published his article "Proletarian Humanism", which in the context of the communism-fascism ideological confrontation categorically characterized homosexuality as a pernicious property of the German bourgeoisie and stated that in the country where the proletariat works courageously and successfully, homosexuality, corrupting youth, is recognized as socially criminal and punishable. In September 1933 he wrote to Kataev that the famine was a fact but that its sources were probably to be found in the widespread wrecking that must explain the numerous winter arrests in Ukraine, as well as the suicides of Khvylevy and Skrypnyk. The same record documents that he knew of mass peasant revolts against collectivization and nonetheless supported Stalin's decisions, and in 1933 attributed food problems to the kulaks.

The same period records Gorky as a "buffer" between the state and the intelligentsia and as a helper of individual prisoners. Because of his intervention Mikhail Bakhtin's initial sentence of five years in Solovki was reduced to six years of internal exile; Victor Serge and Yevgeny Zamyatin were allowed to leave the country; Julia Danzas and others were released. He tried to intercede for Karl Radek, Bukharin and Kamenev, maintaining friendships with Bukharin and Kamenev, leaders of the anti-Stalin opposition executed after his death.

In June 1929 he visited the Solovetsky special-purpose camp, arriving on the notorious steamer "Gleb Boky" that carried prisoners to Solovki, accompanied by a camp chief. In his sketch "Solovki" he wrote positively of the prison regime and the re-education of its inmates, describing a life with no over-regulation and no resemblance to a prison. Dmitry Likhachov's memoir records a fourteen-year-old prisoner telling Gorky "the whole truth" about torture, starvation, men worked to death and summary executions, with Gorky coming out weeping in front of everyone. That story was first told by Solzhenitsyn and lacks documents, and some scholars treat it as legend, though Likhachov was himself at Solovki.

In his final years Gorky lived under NKVD supervision and tutelage and in unofficial disfavour. He was effectively under unannounced house arrest and was no longer allowed to travel to Italy. His relations with Stalin were conflicted and remain not fully understood by researchers; Paola Cioni writes that no document confirms a real political confrontation between Gorky and Stalin, so interpretations of whether his resistance was psychological or political differ.