Author: Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian writer and political activist. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.

Gorky’s most famous works are a short story collection Sketches and Stories (1899), plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and Children of the Sun (1905), a poem The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), his autobiographical trilogy My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913-1923), and a novel Mother (1906). Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and Mother has been frequently criticized (Gorky himself thought of Mother as one of his biggest failures). However, there have been warmer judgements of some less-known post-revolutionary works such as the cycles Fragments from My Diary (1924) and Stories of 1922-1924 (1925), the novels The Artamonov Business (1925) and The Life of Klim Samgin (1925-1936); the latter is considered Gorky’s masterpiece and sometimes being viewed by critics as a modernist work. Unlike his pre-revolutionary writings (known for their “anti-psychologism”), these differ with an ambivalent portrayal of the Russian Revolution and “unmodern interest to human psychology” (as noted by D. S. Mirsky). He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs.