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Maxim Gorky Maxim Gorky Maxim Gorky, also spelled Maksim Gorky, pseudonym of Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, (born March 16 [March 28, New Style], 1868, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia— died June 14, 1936), Russian short-story writer and novelist who first attracted attention with his naturalistic and sympathetic stories of tramps and social outcasts and later wrote other stories, novels, and plays, including his famous The Lower Depths.
EARLY LIFE Gorky’s earliest years were spent in Astrakhan, where his father, a former upholsterer, became a shipping agent. When the boy was five his father died; Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to live with his maternal grandparents, who brought him up after his mother remarried. The grandfather was a dyer whose business deteriorated and who treated Gorky harshly. From his grandmother he received most of what little kindness he experienced as a child. Gorky knew the Russian working-class background intimately, for his grandfather afforded him only a few months of formal schooling, sending him out into the world to earn his living at the age of eight. His jobs included, among many others, work as assistant in a shoemaker’s shop, as errand boy for an icon painter, and as dishwasher on a Volga steamer, where the cook introduced him to reading—soon to become his main passion in life. Frequently beaten by his employers, nearly always hungry and ill clothed, he came to know the seamy side of Russian life as few other Russian authors before or since. The bitterness of these early experiences later led him to choose the word gorky (“bitter”) as his pseudonym.
Maxim Gorky His late adolescence and early manhood were spent in Kazan, where he 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. Oppressed by the misery of his surroundings, he attempted suicide by shooting himself. Leaving Kazan at the age of 21, he became a tramp, doing odd jobs of all kinds during extensive wanderings through southern Russia.
Maxim Gorky FIRST STORIES In Tbilisi (Tiflis) Gorky began to publish stories in the provincial press, of which the first was “Makar Chudra” (1892), followed by a series of similar wild Romantic legends and allegories of only documentary interest. But with the publication of “Chelkash” (1895) in a leading St. Petersburg journal, he began a success story as spectacular as any in the history of Russian literature. “Chelkash,” one of his outstanding works, is the story of a colourful harbour thief in which elements of Romanticism and realism are mingled. It began Gorky’s celebrated “tramp period,” during which he described the social dregs of Russia. He expressed sympathy and self-identification with the strength and determination of the individual hobo or criminal, characters previously described more objectively. “Dvadtsat shest i odna” (1899; “Twenty-Six Men and a Girl”), describing the sweated labour conditions in a bakery, is often regarded as his best short story. So great was the success of these works that Gorky’s reputation quickly soared, and he began to be spoken of almost as an equal of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov.
Maxim Gorky
PLAYS AND NOVELS Next Gorky wrote a series of plays and novels, all less excellent than his best earlier stories. The first novel, Foma Gordeyev (1899), illustrates his admiration for strength of body and will in the masterful barge owner and rising capitalist Ignat Gordeyev, who is contrasted with his relatively feeble and intellectual son Foma, a “seeker after the meaning of life,” as are many of Gorky’s other characters. From this point, the rise of Russian capitalism became one of Gorky’s main fictional interests. Other novels of the period are Troye (1900; Three of Them), Ispoved (1908; A Confession), Gorodok Okurov(1909; “Okurov City”), and Zhizn Matveya Kozhemyakina (1910; “The Life of Matvey Kozhemyakin”). These are all to some extent failures because of Gorky’s inability to sustain a powerful
Maxim Gorky narrative, and also because of a tendency to overload his work with irrelevant discussions about the meaning of life. Mat (1906; Mother) is probably the least successful of the novels, yet it has considerable interest as Gorky’s only long work devoted to the Russian revolutionary movement. It was made into a notable silent film by Vsevolod Pudovkin (1926) and dramatized by Bertolt Brecht in Die Mutter (1930–31). Gorky also wrote a series of plays, the most famous of which is Na dne (1902; The Lower Depths). A dramatic rendering of the kind of flophouse character that Gorky had already used so extensively in his stories, it still enjoys great success abroad and in Russia. He also wrote Meshchane (1902; The Petty Bourgeois, or The Smug Citizen), a play that glorifies the hero-intellectual who has revolutionary tendencies but also that explores the disruptions revolutionaries can wreak on everyday life.
Maxim Gorky MARXIST ACTIVITY Between 1899 and 1906 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. 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, “Pesnya o burevestnike” (“Song of the Stormy Petrel”). Gorky was arrested but released shortly afterward and went to Crimea, having developed tuberculosis. In 1902 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but his election was soon withdrawn for political reasons, an event that led to the resignations of Chekhov and the writer V.G. Korolenko from the academy. Gorky 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. He toured America in the company of his mistress, an event that led to his partial ostracism there and to a consequent reaction on his part against the United States as expressed in stories about New York City, Gorod zhyoltogo dyavola (1906; “The City of the Yellow Devil”).
Maxim Gorky EXILE AND REVOLUTION
On leaving Russia in 1906, Gorky spent seven years as a political exile, living mainly in his villa on Capri in Italy. Politically, Gorky was a nuisance to his fellow Marxists because of his insistence on remaining independent, but his great influence was a powerful asset, which from their point of view outweighed such minor defects. He returned to Russia in 1913, and during World War I he agreed with the Bolsheviks in opposing Russia’s participation in the war. He 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.
LAST PERIOD
Maxim Gorky In the decade ending in 1923 Gorky’s greatest masterpiece appeared. This is the autobiographical trilogy Detstvo (1913–14; My Childhood), V lyudyakh (1915–16; In the World), and Moi universitety (1923; My Universities). The title of the last volume is sardonic because Gorky’s only university had been that of life, and his wish to study at Kazan University had been frustrated. This trilogy is one of the finest autobiographies in Russian. It describes Gorky’s childhood and early manhood and reveals him as an acute observer of detail, with a flair for describing his own family, his numerous employers, and a panorama of minor but memorable figures. The trilogy contains many messages, which Gorky now tended to imply rather than preach openly: protests against motiveless cruelty, continued emphasis on the importance of toughness and self-reliance, and musings on the value of hard work. Gorky finished his trilogy abroad, where he also wrote the stories published in Rasskazy 1922– 1924(1925; “Stories 1922–24”), which are among his best work. From 1924 he lived at a villa in Sorrento, Italy, to which he invited many Russian artists and writers who stayed for lengthy periods. Gorky’s health was poor, and he was disillusioned by postrevolutionary life in Russia, but in 1928 he yielded to pressures to return, and the lavish official celebration there of his 60th birthday was beyond anything he could have expected. In the following year he returned to the U.S.S.R. permanently and lived there until his death. His return coincided with the establishment of Stalin’s ascendancy, and Gorky became a prop of Stalinist political orthodoxy. Correspondence published in the 1990s between Gorky and Stalin and between Gorky and Genrikh Yagoda,
Maxim Gorky the head of the Soviet secret police, shows that Gorky gradually lost all illusions that freedom would prevail in the U.S.S.R., and he consequently adjusted to the rules of the new way of life. He was now more than ever the undisputed leader of Soviet writers, and, when the Soviet Writers’ Union was founded in 1934, he became its first president. At the same time, he helped to found the literary method of Socialist Realism, which was imposed on all Soviet writers and which obliged them—in effect—to become outright political propagandists. Gorky remained active as a writer, but almost all his later fiction is concerned with the period before 1917. In Delo Artamonovykh (1925; The Artamonov Business), one of his best novels, he showed his continued interest in the rise and fall of prerevolutionary Russian capitalism. From 1925 until the end of his life, Gorky worked on the novel Zhizn Klima Samgina (“The Life of Klim Samgin”). Though he completed four volumes that appeared between 1927 and 1937 (translated into English as Bystander, The Magnet, Other Fires, and The Specter), the novel was to remain unfinished. It depicts in detail 40 years of Russian life as seen through the eyes of a man inwardly destroyed by the events of the decades preceding and following the turn of the 20th century. There were also more plays—Yegor Bulychov i drugiye (1932; “Yegor Bulychov and Others”) and Dostigayev i drugiye (1933; “Dostigayev and Others”)—but the most generally admired work is a set of reminiscences of Russian writers—Vospominaniya o Tolstom (1919; Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy) and O pisatelyakh (1928; “About Writers”). The memoir of Tolstoy is so lively and free from the hagiographic approach traditional in Russian studies of their leading authors that it has sometimes been acclaimed as Gorky’s masterpiece. Almost equally impressive is Gorky’s study of Chekhov. He also wrote pamphlets on topical events and problems in which he glorified some of the most brutal aspects of Stalinism. Some mystery attaches to Gorky’s death, which occurred suddenly in 1936 while he was under medical treatment. Whether his death was natural or not is unknown, but it came to figure in the trial of Nikolay I. Bukharin and others in 1938, at which it was claimed that Gorky had been the victim of an anti-Soviet plot by the “Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites.” The former police chief Genrikh Yagoda, who was among the defendants, confessed to having ordered his death. Some Western authorities have suggested that Gorky was done to death on Stalin’s orders, having finally become sickened by the excesses of Stalinist Russia, but there is little evidence of this except that it was characteristic of Stalin to frame others on the charge of accomplishing his own misdeeds.
Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky LEGACY After his death Gorky was canonized as the patron saint of Soviet letters. His reputation abroad has also remained high, but it is doubtful whether posterity will deal with him so kindly. His success was partly due, both in the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent abroad, to political accident. Though technically of lower-middle-class origin, he lived in such poverty as a child and young man that he is often considered the greatest “proletarian” in Russian literature. This circumstance, coinciding with the rise of working-class movements all over the world, helped to give Gorky an immense literary reputation, which his works do not wholly merit. Gorky’s literary style, though gradually improving through the years, retained its original defects of excessive striving for effect, of working on the reader’s nerves by the piling up of emotive adjectives, and of tending to overstate. Among Gorky’s other defects, in addition to his weakness for philosophical digressions, is a certain coarseness of emotional grain. But his eye for physical detail, his talent for making his characters live, and his unrivaled knowledge of the Russian “lower depths” are weighty items on the credit side. Gorky was the only Soviet writer whose work embraced the prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary period so exhaustively, and, though he by no means stands with Chekhov, Tolstoy, and others in the front rank of Russian writers, he remains one of the more important literary figures of his age.
Maxim Gorky 5 reasons why Soviet writer Maxim Gorky is so great Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are considered among Russia's greatest writers, but they never could have imagined achieving such great fame as Maxim Gorky did during his lifetime. On March 28, Gorky would have turned 150, so let's take a closer look at the incredible life of this man from the common people. Known today as one of the most controversial authors in Russian literature, Maxim Gorky welcomed the first Russian revolution in 1905. However, he criticized the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, even though he was a friend of Vladimir Lenin. Gorky was a founder of Soviet literature that is tainted by the fact that many talented poets and authors, who didn’t want to write about brave Soviet workers, were not able to publish their works. Finally, he was close to Stalin, which was one reason why he didn't receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Instead, it went to Bunin. Here are five facts about the life of this semi-literate writer who arose from the lower depths of Russian society.
1. His books depict the reality in Russia that he saw
Maxim Gorky When Alexei Peshkov (Gorky's real name) was a child, his father died from cholera. Alexei was also infected, so his mother faced many hardships and was looking for a new husband. So, Alexei was left with his grandparents in Nizhny Novgorod. When his mother died, the grandfather expelled Gorky from the house, and thus he started down his own path in life. His ‘school’ was life on the streets in cities along the Volga River where he traveled. After failing exams at Kazan University, he worked in a bakery, and then joined a revolutionary circle that read Marxist literature. He even tried to commit suicide due to depression, but then worked on a farm, where he endured backbreaking labor. Next, he set off across Russia’s south: along the Don River, the Caucasus and Crimea. He mostly walked by foot, encountering many different people, mostly strangers and beggars like himself. In his autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In The World, and My Universities he provides lively and bold portraits of Russian people. A short story, Chelkash, and the novel, Mother, depict poor workers, and it was these works that first brought fame to Gorky and later made him a proletarian writer, praising ordinary laborers.
2. Leo Tolstoy was jealous of his success
Maxim Gorky In 1902, Gorky published the play, The Lower Depths, which became extremely popular. Konstantin Stanislavsky immediately staged it at his Moscow Art Theater, and it was also staged in Europe. In fact, the German version was shown in Berlin 300 times in a row. Tolstoy was shocked by this success. When he first read the play he asked Gorky, “Why are you writing this”? He just couldn’t imagine that a play about a night shelter for homeless people depicting prostitutes and alcoholics could be interesting to the public. Gorky considered Tolstoy almost a god, and was strongly influenced by him. For his part, the white-bearded literary genius felt the importance of Gorky’s new prose, but he was annoyed when reading about Gorky’s unexpected successful, not to mention scandalous, tour across the United States. Read more about the difficult relations between these two extraordinary writers here.
3. Honorary member of the Academy of Sciences at age 34
Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky By his thirties, even though he had read such philosophers as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Gorky still remained semi-literate, and his wife Ekaterina had to correct his grammatical mistakes. He started working as a reporter for several newspapers, and literary magazines frequently published his short stories. Only after six years of working as a writer did Gorky become an honorary academic, something that so enraged Tsar Nicholas II that he ordered the author stripped of this honor. After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1917, Gorky once again became an academic.
4. Stormy Petrel of the Revolution
Maxim Gorky Gorky glorified the Revolution, and his “Song of the Stormy Petrel” was eagerly embraced by the revolutionary movement. Gorky was truly inspired by the 1905 Revolution, and when government troops shot into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators the author wrote a revolutionary proclamation that landed him in imprison. Still, he had misgivings about the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, considering it premature. He described it as a dangerous experiment, and later captured all its horrors, blood and chaos in a series of articles entitled Untimely Thoughts. Even in the years before the Bolshevik ascent to power, when Gorky was living mostly in Europe, especially on the Italian island of Capri, he met Lenin and the two spoke for hours. While the Bolshevik leader was open to numerous intellectual talks, he absolutely couldn’t tolerate any of Gorky’s political thoughts and suggestions. In 1921, Gorky’s relations with the new Soviet state grew worse, and he asked to emigrate, but was only allowed to take short trips in order to treat his tuberculosis. After Lenin’s death, Gorky was allowed to leave the Soviet Union but he was no longer a welcomed guest in Europe and not allowed to visit Capri. He only went to Sorrento.
5. The most influential writer in USSR
Maxim Gorky Gorky is considered the founder of Soviet literature, when he proclaimed Socialist realism that called for aesthetics and methods of writing to serve the goal of building a socialist state. This paradigm called for characters to have a sense of morality and ideology. The writer is a propagandist, and in order to be published one had to follow the new cultural dictate. Stalin understood Gorky’s influence on the people and wanted him on his side. That’s why the Soviet state spent huge amounts of money on Gorky’s luxurious living: foreign tours and Italian villas, a mansion in the center of Moscow and even his son’s automobile hobby. At the same time, Gorky had to do some dirty jobs, whatever Stalin asked of him. Among these was a visit to the Solovki Gulag camp, which Gorky had to praise, writing that it was a great place for re-education. He even wrote an article about the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal that justified the enslavement of prisoners. Still, it’s not entirely clear if Gorky acted sincerely, and there were even rumors that Stalin threatened to send Gorky’s son to the camps. There is also evidence from prisoners themselves that they were made to dress all in white and take newspapers in their hands, welcoming the writer as if their life in the gulag was a resort. Some held newspapers upside down, and Gorky approached one and turned it right way up as a sign that he understood what was really going on. Nevertheless, Gorky was severely criticized by non-conformist writers, who said that he had sold out to Stalin’s regime. Despite all of this, Gorky tried to help everyone who had a relative in prison, and it was always prestigious to have the proletarian writer as a friend.
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