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.