Gorky, Maxim

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GORKY, MAXIM

(1868–1936), renowned writer and playwright.

Maxim Gorky (Maxim the Bitter) was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod during the reign of Tsar Alexander II and died in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Gorky was orphaned at an early age, and his formal education ended when he was ten because his impoverished grandparents could not support him. He was self-taught in many areas, including literature, philosophy, and history, both Russian and Western.

Gorky rose to prominence early in life and made his mark as a writer, playwright, publicist, and publisher in Russia and abroad. His literary career began in 1892 with the publication of the story "Makar Chudra." His articles and stories were soon appearing in provincial newspapers and journals. His ideas of the writer's involvement in the social, political, and economic problems facing Russia were close to those of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir G. Korolenko, who became his mentor and friend. Some of his literary works had important political significance,

such as the poem Burevestnik (The Stormy Petrel ), which in 1901 prophesied the oncoming storm of revolution. While visiting the United States in 1906 on a mission to win friends for the revolution and raise funds for the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP), he wrote the novel Mat (Mother ). Gorky's revolutionary ideology lay in his insistence on the inevitability of radical change in Russian society.

Disillusioned with the passivity and ignorance of the peasant, Gorky gradually abandoned narodnik (populist) ideology in favor of social democracy. He financed Vladimir Lenin's Iskra (The Spark ). At the same time he supported other parties, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Liberals.

The events of Bloody Sunday and the Revolution of 1905 induced Gorky to become involved, for the only time in his life, in revolutionary work. He wrote articles for the first legal Bolshevik newspaper, Novaia zhizn (New Life ), gave financial assistance, and criticized the tsar's October Manifesto for its conservatism. Warned of his imminent arrest, Gorky left Russia for the Italian island of Capri and did not return until 1913. Alienated by the Lenin and the RSDWP, Gorky joined a group led by Alexander A. Bogdanov, who shared his belief in mass education. With Bogdanov and Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, he organized a school for under-ground party workers. This was also the time of the emergence of a new religion called Bogostroitelstvo (God-building ), best defined as a theory of the divinity of the masses. Gorky's Ispoved (Confession ), written in 1908, served as an exposition of this belief and led to a break with Lenin.

On his return to Russia in 1913, Gorky devoted his time, ability, and resources to advancing Russian education and culture, projects brought to an end by World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Gorky was enthusiastic about the February Revolution, hoping that Russia would become a liberal democratic state. Soon after Lenin's return to Russia in April 1917, Gorky, writing in Novaia zhizn (New Life ), criticized the Bolshevik propaganda for a socialist revolution. These views appeared in articles called Nesvoevremennye mysli (Untimely Thoughts ). Russia, wrote Gorky, was not ready for the socialist revolution envisioned by the Bolsheviks.

Under Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Gorky saw it as his task to save Russia's cultural treasures and intellectual elite. In 1921, horrified by the cruelty and bloodshed of the civil war, he decided to leave Soviet Russia but not before he succeeded in obtaining American aid for the country's famine victims.

His second exile was spent mostly in Sorrento, Italy. Among his political writings of this period is the essay O russkom krestianstve (On the Russian Peasantry ), which appeared in 1922 in Berlin and during the 1980s in the Soviet Union. A bitter indictment of the Russian peasantry, it was resented by both the Russian émigré community and Soviet leaders. In 1928, under pressure from Josef Stalin, Gorky returned to the Soviet Union. The years from 1928 to 1936 were trying for him, for he could see but not speak of the realities of Stalinist Russia. He became an icon and cooperated with the regime, apparently believing that socialism would modernize Russia.

The cause of Gorky's death in 1936 is still debated, some maintaining that he died of natural causes, others that he was a victim of a Stalinist purge. Similarly, opinion in today's Russia is divided on the question of Gorky as a political activist. Gorky was a great political activist and writer of short stories, plays, memoirs, and novels such as Foma Gordeev, The Artamonovs, the trilogy My Childhood, In the World, and My Universities, and The Life of Klim Samgin.

See also: korolenko, vladimir galaktionovich; social democratic workers party; socialist realism; tolstoy, leo nikolayevich