Maksim Gorky
1868–1936
Biography
Maksim Gorky was the pen name of Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868–1936), the Russian writer and journalist who became one of the best-known literary figures of his country. 'Gorky' means 'bitter' in Russian, and he took the name when he began to publish. Before any success as an author he roamed the empire from the Volga to the Caucasus, working as a baker's boy, a dishwasher on a river steamer, a dock hand and a night watchman, and those wandering years later supplied the settings and characters of his stories. Tolstoy and Chekhov were both friends of his, and his portraits of them are among the best things in his memoirs. Readers meet him under several spellings, Maksim and Maxim among them.
His early short stories of the 1890s, such as 'Chelkash' and 'Twenty-six Men and a Girl', have a romantic tone and admire the strong, independent individual. The play The Lower Depths (1902) and the autobiographical trilogy My Childhood, In the World and My Universities (1913–1923) brought him wide fame. The novel Mother (1906), the story of a working woman who comes to share her son's revolutionary commitments, is the book on this site. Gorky himself counted it among his failures, but it is still one of his best-known works and is widely read.
He was active in the socialist movement and for a time close to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, yet he attacked the Tsar's police state and, after 1917, the new government's treatment of its opponents, and exile took up long stretches of his life. Stalin coaxed him back to the Soviet Union in 1928; he settled there for good in 1932 and died in June 1936. The state afterwards held him up as the father of Socialist Realism, though his dealings with it had been strained, and at the end he was kept at home under a watch that was never announced. The Nobel committee considered him five times for the prize in literature.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
A Mãe
by Maksim Gorky (translated by Augusto de Lacerda and Serge Persky)
A Portuguese translation of Maxim Gorky's Mother. Pelagueya Vlassova, the downtrodden widow of a factory worker, watches her son Pavel become a revolutionary and slowly takes up his cause herself.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Мать
by Максим Горький
Pelageya Vlasova, a worn-out factory worker's widow, comes to share her son Pavel's revolutionary beliefs and takes up his cause. Gorky's novel of the 1905 revolution became a model for Soviet fiction.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.