Maxim Gorky - great Russian writer, constantly forced to move

My Childhood
by Maxim Gorky, 

first published in 1913

Aleksei Maximovich Peshkov/Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) was born in the Volga city of Nizhny Novgorod. His cabinet maker father died when Gorky was 4. And he became a total orphan at 9, when his mother died. The boy was then raised in poor cir­cumstances by his grand­parents, but at least his grandmother helped his development as a storyteller.

From aged 10, Gorky work­ed everywhere - as a shopkeeper's assistant, on a Volga steamboat and an icon-maker’s app­ren­tice. This young lad saw much of the brutal side of life and stored up im­p­ressions for his later works. At 16 Gorky failed to enter the Kazan Uni, so for the next 6 years he wandered about Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus.

In 1887 Gorky saw a Nizhny Novgorid pogrom and was deeply shock­ed; thus he became a life-long opponent of racism. Gorky work­ed with the Liberation of Labour group and in Oct 1889 he was ar­rested, accused of spreading revolutionary propaganda. He was later rel­eas­ed but the Ok­hrana Department for Protecting Public Security and Ord­er decided to keep him under police surveill­ance.

Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky
in Yalta, 1900

As Gorky dev­el­oped more revolutionary sympathies, he was arrested for anti-government ac­tiv­ities in 1889. From then on, he was “risky”. In 1891-2 he lived in Tiflis where he worked in railroad work­shops, and where his first published short story appeared.

Praised by Anton Chekhov, Gorky’s play The Lower Depths (1892) was succ­ess­fully played in Europe and USA. From then on Gorky devoted him­self to literature, and in the next 5 years his stories appear­ed chiefly in Volga news papers. His first collection of stories, pub­lished in 1898, made him famous across Russia, and his fame spread internationally. These early stories feat­ured derelicts and out­casts, allowing Gorky to portray the oppressed and to demonstrate the need for social reform. He found ind­ividual dignity in even the most brut­al­ised derel­icts, and thus became known as a powerful spokesman for illiterates and their dreams.

Foma Gordeyev (1899), the story of a well-intentioned but weak man who felt disgust and guilt inheriting a profitable family business, firmly established Gorky’s reputation. The man reb­el­led against his class but he was lacking in moral fibre, and event­ually the forces of trad­ition defeated him. In all his works from then, Gorky despised capitalism.

Moscow Art Theat­­­re produced Gorky’s most famous play, The Lower Dep­ths, in 1902. It showed the misery of people at the bottom of Rus­s­ian society and examined the illusions by which many of the unfortun­ates sustained themselves. Gorky even wore coarse dress and showed crude manners to identify with the unfortunates.

But even as a young man, his personality was attractive and he made many influential friends, including the two most famous writ­ers of the day, Leo Tolstoy & Anton Chekhov. His memoirs of these two men, writ­ten many years later, were very fine works.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 organise an underground press. When Gorky was el­ect­ed to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1902, Czar Nicholas II vetoed that sel­ect­ion because the author was “subversive”. Gorky was charged with inciting the people to revolt after Bloody Sund­ay 1905. As a res­ult, a wide-world protest at Gorky's imprisonment in Peter and Paul Fortress and the Czar agreed for him to be deported.

In 1906 Gorky left Russia for America, fundraising for fel­low revolut­ionists and in a year there, he wrote his novel Mot­h­er. It told of a simple working-class woman who became a militant activist in the class strug­gle. Mother was considered a classic of socialist realism.

Mother, by Gorky
First published in 1906, Amazon

The only Gorky book I read.

From 1906-13 Gorky lived on the island of Capri, where his home be­­came a centre of literary and political activity for ex-pat Russ­ians. In 1913 he won an amnesty from the Czar's gov­ernment and bravely returned to Russia! In a few years he completed the 3 volumes of his autobiography, Childhood (1913), My Ap­p­renticeship (1915) and My Uni­versities  (1922). Gorky's autobiography was his fin­est work, describing the people he knew and his adventures to man­hood in contemporary Russia. Gorky's nonfictional works were probably sup­erior to his fiction.

After the 1917 October Revolution, Gorky worked tire­lessly to help preserve Russia’s cultural heritage. He organised homes for writers and artists, founded publishing houses and theatres, and used his in­fluence with the Soviet regime to encourage the arts.

But he criticised Lenin and Trotsky for being corrupted with the dirty poison of power. They were “disrespectful of human rights, freedom of speech and all other civil liberties". In 1921 Gorky travelled back to Eur­ope, spending most of the next 12 years in Germany and Italy, both for med­ical treatment and because of disagree­ments with the Soviet government. During this time he wrote the long novels The Art­am­onov Business (1925) and The Life of Klim Sam­gin, sever­e­ly critical of life in pre-revolutionary Russia.

In 1932 after brief visits, Gorky returned permanently to Soviet Rus­sia, his return from Fascist Italy being a victory for Sov­iet propag­anda. He was placed in a rich Art Deco Moscow mansion of the railroad tycoon Ryabushinsky, which is today the Gorky Museum. He was made the Chairman of the Soviet Writer's Un­ion, and a figure­head of socialist realism. And as Gorky was an icon of the Soviet cultural est­ablish­ment, his birth city Niz­hnyi Nov­go­rod was renamed Gorky in 1932!!

Again he was very active on the cult­ural scene, chiefly in book and magazine publishing and literary criticism. Yet after the murder of pol­it­ician Sergei Kirov in 1934, Gorky was arrested and died suddenly at Len­in's Moscow dacha under mysterious circumstances, at 48 in 1936.

Designed in 1900 by Fyodor Schechtel for Pavel Ryabushinsky  

The Moscow house was given to Gorky in 1932, now Gorky Museum. 

The Soviet cult of Gorky made him even more celebrated as the greatest C20th Rus­s­ian writ­er. Many theat­res, museums, universities and collective farms were named after him.