Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov was born on March 16, 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, a commercial city on the Volga River. His father, a shipping agent, died of cholera when the boy was young, and his mother left him in the care of his maternal grandparents, the Kashirins, who ran a dye works ^[1]. The household was violent and quarrelsome. His grandfather beat him, the family business declined, and after his mother's death from tuberculosis in 1879 the eleven-year-old was told to go out and earn his own bread.

What followed was an education no school could have provided. He worked as an errand boy in a shoe shop, a dishwasher on Volga steamboats, an apprentice to an icon painter, and a helper in a bakery ^[2]. A ship's cook named Smury taught him to love books, and he read whatever he could find, from cheap adventure serials to Balzac. He had less than two years of formal schooling in his entire life.

In 1884 he moved to Kazan hoping to enter the university, but poverty made that impossible. He fell in with student radicals and self-taught workers, absorbed populist ideas, and labored in a pretzel bakery he later described in fiction. In December 1887, worn down and despairing, he shot himself in the chest. He survived, though the wound damaged a lung and contributed to the tuberculosis that plagued him for the rest of his life ^[1]. Two years of wandering on foot across southern Russia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus completed the apprenticeship that would supply his early stories.

His first published story, "Makar Chudra," appeared in a Tiflis newspaper in September 1892 under a new name: Maxim Gorky, meaning Maxim the Bitter ^[2]. The pseudonym was a statement of intent. He meant to write the bitter truth about Russian life from below, and readers understood the signal at once.

Through the 1890s he contributed stories and sketches to provincial papers while working as a journalist in Samara and Nizhny Novgorod. The short story "Chelkash" (1895), about a harbor thief and a greedy peasant boy, brought him to the attention of the literary establishment in St. Petersburg ^[3]. When his collected Sketches and Stories appeared in 1898, the two volumes sold out with a speed almost unknown in Russian publishing. Gorky became famous virtually overnight, celebrated as the voice of the bosyaki, the barefoot tramps and outcasts whom polite literature had ignored or sentimentalized.

Fame brought him into the orbit of Chekhov and Tolstoy, both of whom he came to know personally and later portrayed in remarkable memoirs ^[3]. It also brought police attention. Gorky had been arrested as early as 1889 for his radical contacts, and surveillance followed him for decades. In 1902 the Imperial Academy of Sciences elected him an honorary member, but Tsar Nicholas II ordered the election annulled. In protest, Chekhov and the writer Vladimir Korolenko resigned their own memberships ^[1].

Any account of Maxim Gorky achievements begins with The Lower Depths (1902), his drama set in a squalid Moscow flophouse. Staged by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in December 1902, the play was an enormous success and quickly traveled abroad, with Max Reinhardt's Berlin production running for hundreds of performances ^[4]. Its ensemble of ruined lives arguing about truth, comfort, and hope has kept it in the world repertory ever since.

His novels extended the same territory. Foma Gordeyev (1899) dissected the Volga merchant class he knew from childhood. Mother (1906), written partly in the United States, followed a downtrodden working woman drawn into her son's revolutionary circle; Soviet critics later canonized it as the founding text of socialist realism, though many readers consider it weaker than his best work ^[2]. Far stronger, by common critical judgment, is the autobiographical trilogy: My Childhood (1913 to 1914), In the World (1916), and My Universities (1923), an unsparing yet oddly tender reconstruction of his early years ^[3].

Gorky was also an organizer of literary life on a scale few writers have matched. He directed the Znanie publishing cooperative in the 1900s, paying authors generously and printing affordable editions. After 1917 he founded the World Literature publishing house to translate the classics of every nation, a project that kept dozens of hungry writers and scholars employed during the civil war ^[5]. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times between 1918 and 1933 but never received it ^[6].

Gorky's politics made him a legend before 1917 and a problem afterward. He funded revolutionary parties from his large royalties, and his presence in St. Petersburg during the Bloody Sunday massacre of January 1905 led to his arrest and imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress. An international protest campaign, joined by figures across Europe, helped secure his release ^[1]. In 1906 the Bolsheviks sent him abroad to raise money. An American tour collapsed in scandal when newspapers revealed that his traveling companion, the actress Maria Andreyeva, was not his legal wife, and hotels turned the couple out ^[4].

From 1906 to 1913 he lived on the Italian island of Capri, where his villa became a gathering place for Russian exiles. Lenin visited him there, and Gorky helped run a party school for workers, though he drifted toward a heterodox philosophical current called God-Building that Lenin sharply attacked ^[5]. An amnesty marking the Romanov tercentenary allowed him home in 1913.

The October Revolution tested the friendship with Lenin to the breaking point. In his newspaper Novaya Zhizn, Gorky published a series of essays, later collected as Untimely Thoughts, denouncing Bolshevik violence and the seizure of power as a gamble with the Russian people ^[5]. The paper was shut down in July 1918. He then used his standing to protect intellectuals from arrest and starvation, badgering officials for rations, housing, and releases. In 1921, exhausted and ill, and pressed by Lenin to leave, he went abroad again, settling eventually in Sorrento, Italy, where he wrote some of his finest late fiction, including The Artamonov Business (1925) ^[3].

Gorky married Yekaterina Peshkova in 1896, and the couple had a son, Maxim, and a daughter, Katya, who died in childhood. Although the marriage effectively ended around 1903, they never divorced and remained lifelong correspondents; Peshkova later headed the Political Red Cross, an organization that assisted political prisoners in Soviet Russia ^[1].

His longtime companion from 1903 was Maria Andreyeva, a leading actress of the Moscow Art Theatre and a committed Bolshevik. In his later years his household was managed by Moura Budberg, a baroness of famously uncertain loyalties who was also linked to the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart and the writer H. G. Wells ^[7].

Among the more curious Maxim Gorky facts is the fate of his son. Maxim Peshkov died suddenly in 1934 at the age of thirty-six, officially of pneumonia. During the Moscow show trials of 1938, prosecutors charged that he had been murdered on the orders of the secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, an accusation entangled in the fabrications of the trials themselves and never independently verified ^[8]. Gorky, a lifelong tuberculosis sufferer who chain-smoked despite one collapsed lung, was devastated by the loss.

Stalin's government courted the famous exile through the late 1920s with invitations, honors, and carefully staged tours. Gorky visited the Soviet Union in 1928 and 1929 and returned permanently in 1932. The rewards were extraordinary: his native city of Nizhny Novgorod was renamed Gorky, Moscow's main street briefly bore his name, and he was installed in a mansion formerly owned by the millionaire Ryabushinsky family ^[2].

The price was public service to the regime. He presided over the founding congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, where socialist realism was proclaimed the official method of Soviet literature ^[4]. In 1933 he co-edited a notorious volume celebrating the White Sea Canal, built by forced labor, and he wrote articles defending the state against its enemies. Biographers still argue over how much he knew, how far he believed, and whether he was a captive, a collaborator, or something of both. Letters and memoirs suggest growing isolation in his final years, with his correspondence monitored and foreign travel quietly cut off ^[8].

Gorky died on June 18, 1936, at a dacha at Gorki, outside Moscow, after an illness officially described as influenza and heart failure complicating his old lung disease. Two years later the state charged Yagoda and Gorky's own doctors with medically murdering him, a claim aired at the 1938 show trial and still debated by historians, most of whom treat the trial evidence as worthless while leaving the true circumstances open ^[8]. He was given a state funeral, and his ashes were placed in the Kremlin Wall; Stalin himself helped carry the urn.

For six decades Soviet culture presented Gorky as its founding father. Streets, parks, theaters, the world's largest fixed-wing aircraft of the 1930s, and the Literary Institute that trained generations of Soviet writers all carried his name ^[2]. That official cult did his reputation real damage abroad, where he was often dismissed as a state icon rather than read. Since the Soviet collapse, and especially after his native city voted to restore the name Nizhny Novgorod in 1990, scholars have recovered a more complicated figure: the author of Untimely Thoughts as well as Mother, the protector of persecuted writers as well as the apologist for the canal ^[5].

His literary standing rests most securely on the autobiographical trilogy, the memoir portraits of Tolstoy and Chekhov, the best of the early stories, and The Lower Depths, which continues to be staged from Tokyo to New York ^[3]. Writers as different as Isaac Babel, who called him his discoverer, and countless proletarian authors worldwide traced their start to his encouragement or his example.

Any serious Maxim Gorky biography must hold two truths together. He gave the Russian poor a literary voice of unprecedented authenticity, and he ended his life as the ornament of a dictatorship he had once condemned in print. The tension between those facts is exactly what keeps readers, playgoers, and historians returning to him ^[4].