Early years from his personal library depicts the unchained
Prometheus rising from the pages of a book, breaking a
multi-tailed whip and shooing away black crows.
Saint Basil's Cathedral is portrayed in the background Born as Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on , in
Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother As a journalist working for provincial newspapers, he wrote under the pseudonym (Jehudiel Khlamida). He started using the pseudonym "Gorky" (from горький; literally "bitter") in 1892, when his first short story, "
Makar Chudra", was published by the newspaper
Kavkaz (The Caucasus) in
Tiflis where he spent several weeks doing menial jobs, mostly for the Caucasian Railway workshops. The name reflected his simmering anger about life in Russia and a determination to speak the bitter truth. Gorky's first book
Очерки и рассказы (
Essays and Stories) in 1898 enjoyed a sensational success and his career as a writer began. Gorky wrote incessantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world. He described the lives of people in the lowest strata and on the margins of society, revealing their hardships, humiliations, and brutalisation, but also their inner spark of humanity. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime and was arrested many times. Gorky befriended many revolutionaries and became a personal friend of
Vladimir Lenin after they met in 1902. He exposed governmental control of the press (see
Matvei Golovinski affair). In 1902, Gorky was elected an honorary Academician of Literature, but
Tsar Nicholas II ordered this annulled. In protest,
Anton Chekhov and
Vladimir Korolenko left the academy. with Gorky in
Yasnaya Polyana, 1900 From 1900 to 1905, Gorky's writings became more optimistic. He became more involved in the opposition movement, for which he was again briefly imprisoned in 1901. In 1904, having severed his relationship with the
Moscow Art Theatre in the wake of conflict with
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Gorky returned to
Nizhny Novgorod to establish a theatre of his own. Both
Konstantin Stanislavski and
Savva Morozov provided financial support for the venture. Stanislavski believed that Gorky's theatre was an opportunity to develop the network of provincial theatres which he hoped would reform the art of the stage in Russia, a dream of his since the 1890s. He sent some pupils from the Art Theatre School—as well as
Ioasaf Tikhomirov, who ran the school—to work there. By the autumn, however, after the censor had banned every play that the theatre proposed to stage, Gorky abandoned the project. As a financially successful author, editor, and playwright, Gorky gave financial support to the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), as well as supporting liberal appeals to the government for civil rights and social reform. The brutal shooting of workers marching to the Tsar with a petition for reform on 9 January 1905 (known as the
"Bloody Sunday"), which set in motion the
Revolution of 1905, seems to have pushed Gorky more decisively toward radical solutions. He became closely associated with
Vladimir Lenin and
Alexander Bogdanov's
Bolshevik wing of the party, with Bogdanov taking responsibility for the transfer of funds from Gorky to
Vpered. In 1906, the Bolsheviks sent him on a fund-raising trip to the United States with
Ivan Narodny. When visiting the
Adirondack Mountains, Gorky wrote
Mother, his probably most famous novel of revolutionary conversion and struggle; despite its success and political impact, various critics and Gorky himself were harsh of the book's value as of a work of art. After this was revealed all of the hotels in
Manhattan refused to house the couple, and they had to stay at an apartment in
Staten Island. Gorky was not a materialist. Most controversially, he articulated, along with a few other maverick Bolsheviks, a philosophy he called "
God-Building" (богостроительство, ''bogostroitel'stvo''), On returning to Russia, he wrote that his main impression was that "everyone is so crushed and devoid of God's image." The only solution, he repeatedly declared, was "culture". With Russia entering
World War I in 1914 and the outburst of patriotism Gorky became devastated; shortly after the destruction of the
Rheims Cathedral, Gorky wrote Andreeva: "All this is so terrible that I am unable to express even one one-hundredth of my heavy feelings, which are perhaps best described in words such as world catastrophe, the downfall of European culture." At first, Gorky along with the other writers signed a protest against the "barbarism of the Germans", blaming them for the war, "the despicable paper of the Russian liberals" in Lenin's words; later he wrote a series of anti-war publications, but succeeded in publishing only one of them, in which he appealed to feelings of international brotherhood and cooperation; one of the articles was confiscated by the censor, and another was condemned and led to the journal being confiscated after being published. While not being a strong "
defeatist" like Lenin, Gorky supported "a speedy end of the war and for peace without annexation or indemnities." In 1915, he launched the publishing house
Parus and the magazine
Letopis to spread anti-war stance and "defend the idea of international culture against all manifestations of nationalism and imperialism"; among its prominent writers were the poets
Sergei Yesenin,
Aleksandr Blok and
Vladimir Mayakovsky. Lenin was critical of Gorky's position: "In politics Gorky is always weak-willed and subject to emotions and moods." Gorky's best-known publication of the period were concerning
antisemitism, written in response to the severe
Tsarist repressions against the Jews, and an essay "Two Souls", which contrasted "the passive East" with "the active West" and promoted the values of European culture and progress and urged Russia to break free from the "Eastern-Asiatic" "soul" and encouraged the Russian bourgeoisie to participate "in the work of reform". Although the
Okhrana, the secret police, had failed to find a legal pretext to close the journal, the government decided to do it in January 1917, but these plans failed because of the
February Revolution. Gorky distrusted it at first, but in Spring became cautiously optimist about it. In Summer, Gorky's publishing house published one of Lenin's most famous writings,
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, with Lenin's criticisms of
Kautsky removed from the text. After the February Revolution, Gorky visited the headquarters of the Okhrana on Kronversky Prospekt together with
Nikolai Sukhanov and Vladimir Zenisinov. Gorky described the former Okhrana headquarters, where he sought literary inspiration, as derelict, with windows broken, and papers lying all over the floor. Having dinner with Sukhanov later the same day, Gorky grimly predicted that the revolution would end in "Asiatic savagery". Initially a supporter of the Socialist-Revolutionary
Alexander Kerensky, Gorky switched over to the Bolsheviks after the
Kornilov affair. In July 1917, Gorky wrote his own experiences of the Russian working class had been sufficient to dispel any "notions that Russian workers are the incarnation of spiritual beauty and kindness". Gorky admitted to feeling attracted to Bolshevism, but admitted to concerns about a creed that made the entire working class "sweet and reasonable – I had never known people who were really like this". Gorky wrote that he knew the poor, the "carpenters, stevedores, bricklayers", in a way that the intellectual Lenin never did, and he frankly distrusted them. During World War I, his apartment in
Petrograd was turned into a
Bolshevik staff room, and his politics remained close to the Bolsheviks throughout the
revolutionary period of 1917. Gorky was unperturbed by the
October Revolution; in his diary he made a study of a gardener working the Alexander Park who had cleared snow during the February Revolution while ignoring the shots in the background, asked people during the
July Days not to trample the grass and was now chopping off branches, leading Gorky to write that he was "stubborn as a mole, and apparently as blind as one too". Gorky's relations with the Bolsheviks became strained, however, after the
October Revolution. One contemporary recalled how Gorky would turn "dark and black and grim" at the mere mention of Lenin. Gorky wrote that Vladimir Lenin together with
Leon Trotsky "have become poisoned with the filthy venom of power", crushing the rights of the individual to achieve their revolutionary dreams. Gorky wrote that Lenin was a "cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honor nor the life of the proletariat. ... He does not know the popular masses, he has not lived with them". Gorky went on to compare Lenin to a chemist experimenting in a laboratory with the only difference being the chemist experimented with inanimate matter to improve life while Lenin was experimenting on the "living flesh of Russia". A further strain on Gorky's relations with the Bolsheviks occurred when his newspaper
Novaya Zhizn (
New Life) fell prey to Bolshevik censorship during the ensuing civil war, around which time Gorky published a collection of essays critical of the Bolsheviks called
Untimely Thoughts in 1918, which would not be republished in Russia until after the
Perestroika. The essays call Lenin a tyrant for his senseless arrests and repression of free discourse, and an anarchist for his conspiratorial tactics; Gorky compares Lenin to both the Tsar and
Nechayev. :"Lenin and his associates", Gorky wrote, "consider it possible to commit all kinds of crimes ... the abolition of free speech and senseless arrests." He was a member of the Committee for the Struggle against Antisemitism within the Soviet government. In 1921, he hired a secretary,
Moura Budberg, who later became his mistress. In August 1921, the poet
Nikolay Gumilev was arrested by the Petrograd
Cheka for his
monarchist views. There is a story that Gorky hurried to Moscow, obtained an order to release Gumilev from Lenin personally, but upon his return to Petrograd he found out that Gumilev had already been shot – but
Nadezhda Mandelstam, a close friend of Gumilev's widow,
Anna Akhmatova wrote that: "It is true that people asked him to intervene. ... Gorky had a strong dislike of Gumilev, but he nevertheless promised to do something. He could not keep his promise because the sentence of death was announced and carried out with unexpected haste, before Gorky had got round to doing anything." In October, Gorky returned to Italy on health grounds: he had
tuberculosis. In July 1921, Gorky published an appeal to the outside world, saying that millions of lives were menaced by crop failure. He also proposed the establishment of the
Pomgol and joined the organization to relieve the famine. While most members of the organization were later arrested by the Soviet authorities for 'counterrevolutionary crimes', Gorky left Soviet Russia earlier and managed to avoid the arrest. The
Russian famine of 1921–22, also known as
Povolzhye famine, killed an estimated 5 million, primarily affecting the Volga and Ural River regions.
Second exile Gorky left Russia in September 1921, for Berlin. There he heard about the impending
Moscow Trial of 12 Socialist Revolutionaries, which hardened his opposition to the Bolshevik regime. He wrote to
Anatole France denouncing the trial as a "cynical and public preparation for the murder" of people who had fought for the freedom of the Russian people. He also wrote to the Soviet vice-premier,
Alexei Rykov asking him to tell
Leon Trotsky that any death sentences carried out on the defendants would be "premeditated and foul murder." This provoked a contemptuous reaction from Lenin, who described Gorky as "always supremely spineless in politics", and Trotsky, who dismissed Gorky as an "artist whom no-one takes seriously". He was denied permission by Italy's fascist government to return to Capri, but was permitted to settle in Sorrento, where he lived from 1922 to 1932, with an extended household that included Moura Budberg, his ex-wife Andreyeva, her lover,
Pyotr Kryuchkov, who acted as Gorky's secretary for the remainder of his life, Gorky's son Max Peshkov, Max's wife, Timosha, and their two young daughters. He wrote several successful books while there, but by 1928 he was having difficulty earning enough to keep his large household, and began to seek an accommodation with the communist regime. The General Secretary of the Communist Party
Joseph Stalin was equally keen to entice Gorky back to the USSR. He paid his first visit in May 1928 – at the very time when the regime was staging its first show trial since 1922, the so-called
Shakhty Trial of 53 engineers employed in the coal industry, one of whom, Pyotr Osadchy, had visited Gorky in
Sorrento. In contrast to his attitude to the trial of the
Socialist Revolutionaries, Gorky accepted without question that the engineers were guilty, and expressed regret that in the past he had intervened on behalf of professionals who were being persecuted by the regime. During the visit, he struck up friendships with
Genrikh Yagoda (deputy head of the
OGPU) who vested interest in spying on Gorky, and two other OGPU officers,
Semyon Firin and
Matvei Pogrebinsky, who held high office in the
Gulag. Pogrebinsky was Gorky's guest in Sorrento for four weeks in 1930. The following year, Yagoda sent his brother-in-law,
Leopold Averbakh to Sorrento, with instructions to induce Gorky to return to Russia permanently.
Return to Russia ,
Joseph Stalin and Maxim Gorky celebrate the 10th anniversary of
Sportintern. Red Square, Moscow USSR. August 1931 Gorky's return from
Fascist Italy was a major propaganda victory for the Soviets. He was decorated with the
Order of Lenin and given a mansion (formerly belonging to the millionaire
Pavel Ryabushinsky, which was for many years the
Gorky Museum) in Moscow and a
dacha in the suburbs. The city of Nizhny Novgorod, and the surrounding province were renamed Gorky. Voroshilov also left a "resolution": "I am illiterate, but I think that Comrade Stalin more than correctly defined the meaning of A. Gorky's poems. On my own behalf, I will say: I love M. Gorky as my and my class of writer, who correctly defined our forward movement." As
Vyacheslav Ivanov remembers, Gorky was very upset:
Visits to Gulag camps for the Ryabushinsky family. The mansion today houses a museum about Gorky. In 1933, Gorky co-edited, with Averbakh and Firin, an infamous book about the
White Sea–Baltic Canal, presented as an example of "successful rehabilitation of the former enemies of proletariat". For other writers, he urged that one obtained realism by extracting the basic idea from reality, but by adding the potential and desirable to it, one added romanticism with deep revolutionary potential. For himself, Gorky avoided realism. His denials that even a single prisoner died during the construction of the aforementioned canal was refuted by
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who claimed thousands of prisoners froze to death not only in the evenings from the lack of adequate shelter and food, but even in the middle of the day. Most tellingly, Solzhenitsyn and
Dmitry Likhachov document a visit, on 20 June 1929 to
Solovki, the "original" forced labour camp (strictly the Solovetsky Islands), and the model upon which thousands of others were constructed. Given Gorky's reputation, (both to the authorities and to the prisoners), the camp was transformed from one where prisoners (Zeks) were worked to death to one befitting the official Soviet idea of "transformation through labour". Gorky did not notice the relocation of thousands of prisoners to ease the overcrowding, the new clothes on the prisoners (used to labouring in their underwear), or even the hiding of prisoners under tarpaulins, and the removal of the torture rooms. The deception was exposed when Gorky was presented with children "model prisoners", one of who challenged Gorky if he "wanted to know the truth". On the affirmative, the room was cleared and the 14-year-old boy recounted the truth – starvation, men worked to death, and of the pole torture, of using men instead of horses, of the summary executions, of rolling prisoners, bound to a heavy pole down stairs with hundreds of steps, of spending the night, in underwear, in the snow. Gorky never wrote about the boy, or even asked to take the boy with him. The boy was executed after Gorky left. Gorky left the room in tears, and wrote in the visitor book "I am not in a state of mind to express my impressions in just a few words. I wouldn't want, yes, and I would likewise be ashamed to permit myself the banal praise of the remarkable energy of people who, while remaining vigilant and tireless sentinels of the Revolution, are able, at the same time, to be remarkably bold creators of culture". In a collection of academic papers about Gorky by the
World Literature Institute of the
Russian Academy of Sciences published in 1995 it was noted that the story about the boy was first told by
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in
The Gulag Archipelago and that there were never details given about the boy's identity, and that the story isn't supported by documents: "In the Solovki Museum... information about the real boy was not found; this story is considered by some to be a legend”. This historical ‘review’ however needs to be tempered against the first person narrative of Dmitry Likhachov who, unlike Solzhenitsyn, was at Solovki. Regardless, Gorky visited the camp and was either blindly or knowingly ignorant of the true purpose and conditions of the infamous gulag"
Dmitry Bykov in his biography of Gorky wrote that whether or not did the boy exist, "mass consciousness is structured in such a way that the boy is needed, and it is no longer possible to erase him from Gorky's biography"; Gorky's biographer
Pavel Basinsky makes a similar statement that such "legends" represent "the essence of reality", but if the boy existed, it would be impossible for Gorky to "take the boy with him" even with his reputation of a "great proletarian writer": for example, Gorky had to spend over 2 years to free
Julia Danzas. Most tellingly of all is Gorky’s description of his 3-day visit “There is no impression of life being over-regulated. No, there is no resemblance to a prison; instead it seems as if these rooms are inhabited by passengers rescued from a drowned ship.” And later “If any so-called cultured European society dared to conduct an experiment such as this colony,” he wrote, “and if this experiment yielded fruits as ours had, that country would blow all its trumpets and boast about its accomplishments.”
1930s During the 1930s, the relationship of Gorky with Stalin's regime became rather ambiguous: while Gorky publicly supported it, this period was marked by certain conflicts with the official policies. Gorky was a strong and sincere supporter of such Stalinist policies as usage of forced labour, collectivization and "
dekulakization" and the show trials against the saboteurs of the Plan, but being a propagandist for such policies wasn't his main role; he was regarded as an "ideological asset" to personify the myth of the "proletarian culture" and bring literature, as Tovah Yedlin writes, under the control of the party, becoming officially praised as "the founder of
Socialist Realism in literature". More to it, Gorky strongly supported efforts in getting a law passed in 1934,
making homosexuality a criminal offense, his attitude coloured by the fact that some members of the Nazi
Sturmabteilung were homosexuals. The phrase "exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish" is often attributed to him. In
Pravda, he wrote: "There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear." However, in her political biography of Gorky, Yedlin also describes his various conflicts with the official cultural policies and the increasing pressure on him towards the end of his life; It is certain, however, that Gorky intervened on behalf of such politically persecuted individuals as the historian
Yevgeny Tarle and the literary critic,
Mikhail Bakhtin, succeeded in making possible for the writers
Yevgeny Zamyatin and
Victor Serge to leave the country, tried to intercede on behalf of
Karl Radek and Bukharin, and made Kamenev appointed as director of the publishing house
Academia; Gorky also made efforts to support the literary "
fellow travellers" and writers who had troubles with their works being published for ideological or artistic reasons or were disapproved by the official critic. For example, in letters to Stalin he defended
Mikhail Bulgakov, and partly because of Gorky, Bulgakov's plays
The Cabal of Hypocrites and
The Days of the Turbins were allowed for staging; Gorky took
Andrei Platonov to the "writers' brigades" after he was made unable to be published because of his work critical of the collectivization, although Gorky rejected his "pessimistic" texts; with Gorky's intervention, Bukharin became one of the keynote speakers on the Writers' Congress and proclaimed
Boris Pasternak, who was denounced by the Stalinist party critics as "decadent", to be "first poet" of the USSR. Such Stalin's closest associates as
Lazar Kaganovich opposed Gorky and Bukharin in their efforts against the increasing party control of literature, and Kaganovich in his letters to Stalin wrote about Gorky's ideological faults and the ostensible influence of the Opposition on him. For example, Kaganovich and several Politburo members visited Gorky and demanded his keynote speech for the Congress of Writers to be rewritten, and in his account of the visit, Kaganovich reported that Gorky's "mood [was] apparently not very good", and that the "aftertaste" with which Gorky was critical about some life aspects in the USSR "reminded [him] of
Comrade Krupskaya", Lenin's wife who supported the
Right Opposition, and that Kamenev seemingly had "an important role in shaping" Gorky's "moods"; Kaganovich also proposed to heavily edit Gorky's attack on the members of the Organising Committee and publish it so it wouldn't circulate illegally. Another act which concerned the Politburo was Gorky's support of the members of the
RAPP, the former party institution to control literature the members of which fell out of favour after its disbandment; Kaganovich wrote about Gorky supporting the RAPP-led campaign against Stalin's hand-picked leadership of the Organising Committee of the Union and demands to let
Leopold Averbakh, the leader of RAPP who was executed in 1937, speak at the congress. After his arrest in the beginning of 1935, Kamenev wrote a letter to Gorky: "We didn't talk with you about politics, and when I told you about the feeling of love and respect for Stalin..., about my readiness to sincerely work with him, that all feelings of resentment and anger burned out in me — I told the truth... I loved you from the bottom of my heart"; Gorky's secretary Kryuchkov didn't register the letter in Gorky's correspondence receipt book, but the hand-written copy in the Gorky archives contains the writer's characteristic annotations in red pencil; meanwhile, as Gorky's relationship with Stalin worsened, the latter stopped visiting him and replying to his phone calls, and their formal correspondence was almost entirely maintained by Gorky, with Stalin replying occasionally. During the officially organized
campaign against the composer
Dmitry Shostakovich, Gorky wrote a letter to Stalin in defense of the composer, demanding a "careful" treatment of him and calling his critics "a bunch of mediocre people, hack-workers" "attack[ing] Shostakovich in every possible way." Such sources as
Romain Rolland's diary demonstrate that because of Gorky's refusal to blindly obey the policies of Stalinism, he had lost the Party's goodwill and spent his last days under unannounced house arrest.
Death With the increase of
Stalinist repression and especially after the assassination of
Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Gorky was placed under unannounced house arrest in his house near Moscow in
Gorki10 (the name of the place is a completely different word in Russian unrelated to his surname). His long-serving secretary
Pyotr Kryuchkov had been recruited by Yagoda as a paid informer. Before his death from a lingering illness in June 1936, he was visited at home by Stalin, Yagoda, and other leading communists, and by
Moura Budberg, who had chosen not to return to the USSR with him but was permitted to stay for his funeral. The sudden death of Gorky's son Maxim Peshkov in May 1934 was followed by the death of Maxim Gorky himself in June 1936 from pneumonia. Speculation has long surrounded the circumstances of his death. Stalin and
Molotov were among those who carried Gorky's urn during the funeral. During the
Bukharin trial in 1938 (last of the three
Moscow Trials), one of the charges was that Gorky was killed by
Yagoda's
NKVD agents. According to several historians, Gorky and his son were poisoned by NKVD chief
Genrikh Yagoda on the orders from Stalin and possibly with the assistance of "Kremlin's doctors"
Pletnyov and
Lev Levin using substances developed at
a special NKVD laboratory in Moscow. == Legacy ==