Gorky, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Stalin on the Mausoleum tribune.
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
1932
Russian novelist Maxim Gorky photographed with Communist leader of the Soviet Union Josef Stalin
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
1933
Pyotr Kryuchkov, Maxim Gorky and Genrikh Yagoda.
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
Young Maxim Gorky
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
A gathering of Russian intellectuals in Moscow, circa 1900. Among them are: Stepan Skitalets, Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Teleshev, Feodor Chaliapin, Evgeny Chirikov and Ivan Bunin.
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin left, in confidential conversation with author Maxim Gorky, on the steps of the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow.
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
Russian and Soviet writer Maxim Gorky at his desk, circa 1915.
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
Russian writer Maxim Gorky leans out from the window of his train carriage.
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
Soviet Government heads and leaders of the Communist Party in Russia pictured at the Lenin Mausoleum as they reviewed a military display in Red Square during the monster May Day celebration. Left to right on the raised podium are: Shvernik, Dimitrov with his mother and sister, writer Maxim Gorky, Zhdanov, Molotov, Stalin, Kalinin and Yenukidze.
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky surround by a group of youthful admirers during his visit to a Camp of Youth at Moscow.
Gallery of Maxim Gorky
The Russian writer Maxim Gorky in 1901, little after he was released from prison where he had been detained for his revolutionary actions.
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Order of Lenin
The Order of Lenin that Maxim Gorky received in 1932.
A gathering of Russian intellectuals in Moscow, circa 1900. Among them are: Stepan Skitalets, Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Teleshev, Feodor Chaliapin, Evgeny Chirikov and Ivan Bunin.
Maxim Gorky with the actors from Moscow Artists Theatre during the production of a play. Photography comes from the Moscow Artists Museum. Moscow, 1902.
Soviet Government heads and leaders of the Communist Party in Russia pictured at the Lenin Mausoleum as they reviewed a military display in Red Square during the monster May Day celebration. Left to right on the raised podium are: Shvernik, Dimitrov with his mother and sister, writer Maxim Gorky, Zhdanov, Molotov, Stalin, Kalinin and Yenukidze.
(Foma Gordeyev is an 1899 novel by Maxim Gorky. It was fir...)
Foma Gordeyev is an 1899 novel by Maxim Gorky. It was first published by Zhizn magazine in February-September 1899 and came out as a separate edition in 1900, as part of the Zhizn Library, with a dedication to Anton Chekhov.
(Three Men is a 1901 novel by Maksim Gorky. The plot conce...)
Three Men is a 1901 novel by Maksim Gorky. The plot concerns Ilya Lunyev, a boy from an urban slum, who enters the middle-class milieu only to be disillusioned to find the same moral corruption.
(Maxim Gorky is the pen name of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshko...)
Maxim Gorky is the pen name of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov – orphaned at the age of nine, he was raised by his grandmother, a story-teller, who imprinted on him a love for tales and travel. All of his varied jobs and the places, people and situations he encountered on his way can be found in his stories.
(The Lower Depths is perhaps the best known of Maxim Gorky...)
The Lower Depths is perhaps the best known of Maxim Gorky's plays. It was written during the winter of 1901 and the spring of 1902. Subtitled "Scenes from Russian Life," it depicted a group of impoverished Russians living in a shelter near the Volga.
(The Life of a Useless Man is a 1908 Russian-language nove...)
The Life of a Useless Man is a 1908 Russian-language novel by Maxim Gorky. It concerns the "plague of espionage" under the Empire; the protagonist is Yevsey Klimkov, who spies for the Tsarist regime.
(Of all Gorky's novels, The Artomonovs is the most impress...)
Of all Gorky's novels, The Artomonovs is the most impressive and dramatic. In this book Gorky displays at their best the power of creating character and the gift for managing scenes of energetic action which won world-wide admiration for his early stories.
(Gorky first met Lenin at a Party Congress in London in 19...)
Gorky first met Lenin at a Party Congress in London in 1907. They met again many times - during Lenin's exile in Europe and after the successful revolution of November, 1917.
(For this edition the renowned scholar and author Frederic...)
For this edition the renowned scholar and author Frederic Ewen has written a penetrating new introduction evaluating Gorky's place in the world's literary pantheon.
Maxim Gorky was a Russian and Soviet writer and political activist. He also was a founder of the socialist realism literary method. Gorky is the author of such novels and plays as The Lower Depths, Twenty-six Men and a Girl, The Song of the Stormy Petrel, and My Childhood.
Background
Maxim Gorky was born as Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on March 16, 1868, in the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. His father, a cabinetmaker, died when Gorky was 4 years old. Gorky was brought up by his grandmother and ran away from home at the age of twelve.
Education
After the death of his parents Maxim Gorky was sent to Nizhny Novgorod to be raised by his maternal grandparents. He enjoyed a liberal and unstructured education, that primarily consisted of his grandmother’s romantic fairytales and religious teachings. Later he was sent out by his grandfather to work at the tender age of eight. However, whilst working as a dishwasher on a Volga steamer, a fellow employee introduced him to reading, a seed that would continue to grow throughout his life. Almost completely self-educated, at the age of 16 Gorky tried without success to enter the University of Kazan.
Career
After failing to enter the University of Kazan, Maxim Gorky worked as a baker, docker, and night watchman. There he first learned about Russian revolutionary ideas from representatives of the Populist movement, whose tendency to idealize the Russian peasant he later rejected. Later he wandered widely about Russia, Ukraine, and the Caucasus and in 1888 he worked in fisheries of the Caspian Sea. Gradually he developed revolutionary sympathies. Gorky was arrested for antigovernmental activities for the first time in 1889 and from then on was closely watched by the police.
In 1891-1892 Maxim Gorky spent a year in Tiflis (Tbilisi), where he began to publish stories in the provincial press, of which the first was Makar Chudra, followed by a series of similar wild Romantic legends and allegories of only documentary interest. But with the publication of Chelkash in a leading St. Petersburg journal, he began a success story as spectacular as any in the history of Russian literature. His first collection of stories, published in 1898, made him famous throughout Russia, and his fame spread rapidly to the outside world. These early stories featured tramps, vagabonds, derelicts, and social outcasts. Gorky portrayed the bitterness of the oppressed and exploited people of Russia and demonstrated a proud defiance against organized, respectable society. He often found strong elements of humanity and individual dignity in even the most brutalized and demoralized of these "down-and-outers." His sympathy for the underdog made him known as a powerful spokesman for the illiterate masses - their sufferings and their dreams of a better life.
In 1899 Maxim Gorky wrote Foma Gordeyev a story of a well-intentioned but weak man who feels disgust, boredom, and guilt as the inheritor of a profitable family business. He rebels against his family and his class, but he is lacking in moral fiber, and in the end the forces of tradition defeat and destroy him. In this novel and all his later works, Gorky identified himself as being a bitter enemy of capitalism and depicted the society of prerevolutionary Russia as drab and dreary. During this same period Gorky began writing plays and formed close connections with the Moscow Art Theater, which in 1902 produced his most famous play, The Lower Depths. It shows the misery and utter hopelessness of the lives of people at the bottom of Russian society and at the same time examines the illusions by means of which many of the unfortunate people of this earth sustain themselves.
Gorky became increasingly active in the revolutionary movement. He was arrested briefly in 1898, and in 1901 he was exiled to the provinces for having helped organize an underground press. When he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1902, the Czar vetoed the appointment because of the author's subversive activities. During the 1905 Revolution, Gorky was again imprisoned for writing proclamations calling for the overthrow of the Czar's government. After becoming closely associated with the Bolshevik party, Gorky was sent on a fund-raising trip to the United States where he wrote his infamous revolutionary novel Mother. First published in 1906 by an American literary magazine, it was translated into Russian in 1907. Though it remained unsuccessful commercially, it crystallised much of his revolutionary spirit. From 1906 to 1913 Gorky lived in Italy on the island of Capri, where his home became a center of literary and political activity among Russians abroad.
In 1913 Maxim Gorky received an amnesty from the Czar's government and returned to Russia. In the next 3 years he completed the first two volumes of his autobiography, Childhood and My Apprenticeship. The third volume, My Universities, was published in 1922. Gorky was enthusiastic about the February Revolution, hoping that Russia would become a liberal democratic state. Soon after Lenin's return to Russia in April 1917, Gorky, writing in New Life, criticized the Bolshevik propaganda for a socialist revolution.
Maxim Gorky also organized homes for writers and artists, founded publishing houses and theaters, and used his influence with the new Soviet regime to encourage the development of the arts. He spent most of the period from 1921 to 1933, however, in Germany and Italy, partly for treatment of a lung ailment and partly because of disagreement with policies of the Soviet government. During this period he wrote the large novels The Artamonov Business and The Life of Klim Samgin, all of them severely critical of life in prerevolutionary Russia. In 1928, under pressure from Josef Stalin, Gorky returned to the Soviet Union. The years from 1928 to 1936 were trying for him, for he could see but not speak of the realities of Stalinist Russia. He became an icon and cooperated with the regime, apparently believing that socialism would modernize Russia.
Maxim Gorky had long rejected all organized religions. Yet he was not a materialist, and thus he could not be satisfied with Marx's ideas on religion. When asked to express his views about religion in a questionnaire sent by the French journal Mercure de France on April 15, 1907, Gorky replied that he was opposed to the existing religions of Moses, Christ, and Mohammed. He defined religious feeling as an awareness of a harmonious link that joins man to the universe and as an aspiration for synthesis, inherent in every individual.
Politics
Between 1899 and 1906 Maxim Gorky lived mainly in St. Petersburg, where he became a Marxist, supporting the Social Democratic Party. After the split in that party in 1903, Gorky went with its Bolshevik wing. He took a prominent part in the Russian Revolution of 1905, was arrested in the following year, and was again quickly released, partly as the result of protests from abroad. But he was often at odds with the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin. Nor did Gorky ever, formally, become a member of Lenin’s party, though his enormous earnings, which he largely gave to party funds, were one of that organization’s main sources of income. In 1901 the Marxist review Zhizn (Life) was suppressed for publishing a short revolutionary poem by Gorky, Song of the Stormy Petrel.
Maxim Gorky opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and went on to attack the victorious Lenin’s dictatorial methods in his newspaper Novaya zhizn (New Life) until July 1918, when his protests were silenced by censorship on Lenin’s orders. Living in Petrograd, Gorky tried to help those who were not outright enemies of the Soviet government. Gorky often assisted imprisoned scholars and writers, helping them survive hunger and cold. His efforts, however, were thwarted by figures such as Lenin and Grigory Zinovyev, a close ally of Lenin’s who was the head of the Petrograd Bolsheviks. In 1921 Lenin sent Gorky into exile under the pretext of Gorky’s needing specialized medical treatment abroad.
Views
Maxim Gorky thought a lot about the Metaphysical concept of immortality. This concept was based on his thesis about the "disappearance of physical labor" and the "kingdom of thought". Gorky argued that the number of atoms in the universe had a limit, and therefore an "eternal return" was possible. After returning to the USSR in 1932, Gorky appealed to Stalin with a proposal to create the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, which would deal with, in particular, the problem of immortality. Stalin supported Gorky's request, the institute was established in Leningrad in the same year. However, in 1944 this institute was closed.
Quotations:
"Lenin and his associates consider it possible to commit all kinds of crimes . .. the abolition of free speech and senseless arrests. .. ."
"When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery."
"We kill everybody, my dear. Some with bullets, some with words, and everybody with our deeds. We drive people into their graves, and neither see it nor feel it."
"Politics is the soil in which the nettle of poisonous enmity, evil suspicions, shameless lies, slander, morbid ambitions, and disrespect for the individual grows rapidly and luxuriantly. Name anything bad in man and it is precisely in the soil of political struggle that it grows with particular liveliness and abundance."
"Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself."
"When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid."
Membership
In 1902 Maxim Gorky was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but his election was soon withdrawn for political reasons.
Personality
Tall and rawboned, Gorky affected coarse dress and often crude manners, but his personality was colorful and attractive. He also was a skillful chess player.
Quotes from others about the person
Anthon Chekhov: "A time will come when people will forget Gorky’s works, but he himself will hardly be forgotten even in a thousand years."
Interests
Sport & Clubs
Chess
Connections
Gorky's first wife was Yekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova, née Volzhina, a Soviet human rights activist and humanitarian. They married in 1896. The marriage produced a son Maksim Peshkov and a daughter Yekaterina Peshkova. Besides, the writer brought up his godson Zinovy Sverdlov who later took the last name Peshkov. After the death of their daughter Katya, Gorky and Peshkova broke up, however, the divorce was not official.
After the breakup with Peshkova, with Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s assistance, Maxim Gorky met the actress of the Moscow Art Theater Maria Andreeva. For the next 16 years, she was his wife unofficially. They separated in 1919. Gorky himself finished the relationship and stated he was leaving Andreeva for another woman, Maria Budberg, the former Baroness and simultaneously his secretary. With this woman, Gorky lived for 13 years in an unregistered marriage as well.