Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (Russian: Алексей Максимович Пешков; 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (Максим Горький), was a Russian and Soviet writer and socialism proponent. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.
Gorky’s most famous works are his early short stories, written in the 1890s («Chelkash», «Old Izergil», and «Twenty-six Men and a Girl»); plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and Children of the Sun (1905); a poem, «The Song of the Stormy Petrel» (1901); his fictional autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913–1923); and a novel, Mother (1906). Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and Mother has been frequently criticized; Gorky himself thought of Mother as one of his biggest failures. However, there have been warmer appraisals of some of his lesser-known post-revolutionary works such as the novels The Artamonov Business (1925) and The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936); the latter is considered by some as Gorky’s masterpiece and has been viewed by some critics as a modernist work. Unlike his pre-revolutionary writings (known for their «anti-psychologism») Gorky’s later works differ, with an ambivalent portrayal of the Russian Revolution and «unmodern interest to human psychology» (as noted by D. S. Mirsky). He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, both mentioned by Gorky in his memoirs.
Gorky was active in the emerging Marxist socialist movement and later supported the Bolsheviks. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov’s Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. During the World War I, Gorky supported pacifism and internationalism and anti-war protests. For a significant part of his life he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union (USSR), being critical both of the Tsarism and of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War and the 1920s, condemning the latter for political repressions. In 1928 he returned to the USSR on Joseph Stalin’s personal invitation and lived there since 1932 until his death in June 1936. After his return he was officially declared the «founder of Socialist Realism». Despite this, Gorky’s relations with the Soviet regime were rather difficult: while being Stalin’s public supporter, he maintained friendships with Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, the leaders of the anti-Stalin opposition executed after Gorky’s death; he also hoped to ease the Soviet cultural policies and made some efforts to defend the writers who disobeyed them, which resulted in him spending his last days under unannounced house arrest.
Early years
Born as Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880. After an attempt at suicide in December 1887 he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing.
As a journalist working for provincial newspapers he wrote under the pseudonym Иегудиил Хламида (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.
Political and literary development
Gorky’s reputation grew as a unique literary voice from the bottom stratum of society and as a fervent advocate of Russia’s social, political, and cultural transformation. By 1899, he was openly associating with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement, which helped make him a celebrity among both the intelligentsia and the growing numbers of «conscious» workers. At the heart of all his work was a belief in the inherent worth and potential of the human person. In his writing, he counterposed individuals, aware of their natural dignity, and inspired by energy and will, with people who succumb to the degrading conditions of life around them. Both his writings and his letters reveal a «restless man» (a frequent self-description) struggling to resolve contradictory feelings of faith and scepticism, love of life and disgust at the vulgarity and pettiness of the human world.
In 1916, Gorky said that the teachings of the ancient Jewish sage Hillel the Elder deeply influenced his life: «In my early youth I read…the words of…Hillel, if I remember rightly: ‘If thou art not for thyself, who will be for thee? But if thou art for thyself alone, wherefore art thou’? The inner meaning of these words impressed me with their profound wisdom…The thought ate its way deep into my soul, and I say now with conviction: Hillel’s wisdom served as a strong staff on my road, which was neither even nor easy. I believe that Jewish wisdom is more all-human and universal than any other; and this not only because of its immemorial age…but because of the powerful humaneness that saturates it, because of its high estimate of man.»
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.
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. It is not clear whether he ever formally joined, and his relations with Lenin and the Bolsheviks would always be rocky. His most influential writings in these years were a series of plays on social and political themes, most famously The Lower Depths (1902). While briefly imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress during the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, Gorky wrote the play Children of the Sun, nominally set during an 1862 cholera epidemic, but universally understood to relate to present-day events. He was released from the prison after a European-wide campaign, which was supported by Marie Curie, Auguste Rodin and Anatole France, amongst others.
Gorky assisted the Moscow uprising of 1905, and after its suppression his apartment was raided by the Black Hundreds. He subsequently fled to Lake Saimaa, Finland. 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. His experiences in the United States—which included a scandal over his travelling with his lover (the actress Maria Andreyeva) rather than his wife—deepened his contempt for the «bourgeois soul».
Capri years
From 1906 to 1913, Gorky lived on the island of Capri in southern Italy, partly for health reasons and partly to escape the increasingly repressive atmosphere in Russia. He continued to support the work of Russian social-democracy, especially the Bolsheviks and invited Anatoly Lunacharsky to stay with him on Capri. The two men had worked together on Literaturny Raspad which appeared in 1908. It was during this period that Gorky, along with Lunacharsky, Bogdanov and Vladimir Bazarov developed the idea of an Encyclopedia of Russian History as a socialist version of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.
In 1906, Maxim Gorky visited New York City at the invitation of Mark Twain and other writers. An invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt was withdrawn after the New York World reported that the woman accompanying Gorky was not his wife. 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.
During a visit to Switzerland, Gorky met Lenin, who he charged spent an inordinate amount of his time feuding with other revolutionaries, writing: «He looked awful. Even his tongue seemed to have turned grey». Despite his atheism, 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), which sought to recapture the power of myth for the revolution and to create religious atheism that placed collective humanity where God had been and was imbued with passion, wonderment, moral certainty, and the promise of deliverance from evil, suffering, and even death. Though ‘God-Building’ was ridiculed by Lenin, Gorky retained his belief that «culture»—the moral and spiritual awareness of the value and potential of the human self—would be more critical to the revolution’s success than political or economic arrangements.
World War I and the Civil War
An amnesty granted for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty allowed Gorky to return to Russia in 1914, where he continued his social criticism, mentored other writers from the common people, and wrote a series of important cultural memoirs, including the first part of his autobiography. 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 on 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 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 of 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 break free from the «Eastern-Asiatic» «soul» and encouraged the Russian boureoisie 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 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. On the day after the October Revolution of 7 November 1917, Gorky observed 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. 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 (initially a spy for Yagoda) 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
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. Moscow’s main park, and one of the central Moscow streets, Tverskaya, were renamed in his honour, as was the Moscow Art Theatre. The largest fixed-wing aircraft in the world in the mid-1930s, the Tupolev ANT-20 was named Maxim Gorky in his honour.
He was also appointed President of the Union of Soviet Writers, founded in 1932, to coincide with his return to the USSR. On 11 October 1931 Gorky read his fairy tale poem «A Girl and Death» (which he wrote in 1892) to his visitors Joseph Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and Vyacheslav Molotov, an event that was later depicted by Viktor Govorov in his painting. On that same day Stalin left his autograph on the last page of this work by Gorky: «This piece is stronger than Goethe’s Faust (love defeats death)» 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:
They wrote their resolution on his fairy tale «A Girl and Death». My father, who spoke about this episode with Gorky, insisted emphatically that Gorky was offended. Stalin and Voroshilov were drunk and fooling around.
Visits to GULAG camps
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, 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 there was no other testimonies in support of it, 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 to be a legend.» 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.
Gorky also helped other political prisoners (not without the influence of his wife, Yekaterina Peshkova). For example, because of Gorky’s interference Mikhail Bakhtin’s initial verdict (5 years of Solovki) was changed to 6 years of exile.
Quotes on homosexuality
Gorky strongly supported efforts in getting a law passed in 1934, making homosexuality a criminal offense. His attitude was coloured by the fact that some members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung were homosexual. The phrase «exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish» is often attributed to him. He was actually quoting a popular saying. Writing in Pravda on 23 May 1934, Gorky said: «There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear.»
1930s
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». However, in her political biography of Gorky she also describes his various conflicts with the official cultural policies and the increasing pressure on him towards the end of his life; during his last years, he supported friendly relations with Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, the leaders of the opposition which were executed after Gorky’s death, and he could be sympathetic to the centrist and Right Opposition in general; both Bukharin and Kamenev had been friends with Gorky since 1920s. Paola Cioni noted that although there are traits of a conflict in the relations between Stalin and the state and Gorky, it is uncertain when this conflict was provoked by psychological motives, and when it was provoked by his political position. 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. Gorky was not a supporter of artistic pluralism and diversity among writers and agreed that some censorship had to be inevitable, often being dismissive and rigid of creative experiments; however, Gorky was concerned with the bureaucratization of the Union of Writers and tried to oppose the increasing pressure on writers and attacked the party-sanctioned authors and them achieving the highest ranks in the literary bureaucracy. 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. Later Gorky tried to defend an issue of Dostoevsky’s Demons which was prepared by Kamenev and came out after his arrest; the novel had a reputation of a «counter-revolutionary» work. As the conflict was becoming more visible, Gorky’s political and literary positions became weaker. Fyodor Panferov, one of the party-sanctioned leaders of the Socialist Realism writers earlier attacked by Gorky, published an answer to him, in which he dismissed his line of criticizing the officially acclaimed Socialist Realism writers while supporting such ostensible enemies of Communism as D. S. Mirsky. David Zaslavsky published an ironic response to Gorky’s article defending Demons, in which he accused Gorky in connivance in the formation of the «counter-revolutionary intelligentsia» and directly compared his «liberal position» with the ideological enemies, namely Kamenev and Zinoviev: «Next thing you know you’ll be calling for publication of White Guard writers», as Korney Chukovsky summarized in his diary; Gorky’s second answer to Zaslavsky was not published. 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 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 Gorki-10 (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.
In Soviet times, before and after his death, the complexities in Gorky’s life and outlook were reduced to an iconic image (echoed in heroic pictures and statues dotting the countryside): Gorky as a great Soviet writer who emerged from the common people, a loyal friend of the Bolsheviks, and the founder of the increasingly canonical «socialist realism».
Maxim Gorky bibliography
Novels
Orphan Paul (Luckless Pavel; Горемыка Павел, 1894)
Foma Gordeyev (Фома Гордеев, 1899, also translated as Foma Gordyeeff and The Man Who Was Afraid)
Three of Them (Трое, 190, also translated as The Three and Three Men)
Mother (Мать, 1906)
The Life of a Useless Man (Жизнь ненужного человека, 1908, also translated as The Spy: A Story of a Superfluous Man)
A Confession (Исповедь, 1908)
Городок Окуров, 1908
The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin (Жизнь Матвея Кожемякина, 1910)
The Artamonov Business (Дело Артамоновых, 1925)
The Life of Klim Samgin (Жизнь Клима Самгина, 1927-1936). Published in English as Forty Years: The Life of Clim Samghin
Bystander (1930, Part 1)
The Magnet (1931, Part 2)
Other Fires (1931, Part 3)
The Specter (1938, Part 4)
Novellas
Konovalov (Коновалов, 1897)
The Orlovs (Супруги Орловы, 1897)
Creatures That Once Were Men (Бывшие люди, 1897)
Varenka Olesova (Варенька Олесова, 1898)
Лето, 1909
Short stories
«Makar Chudra» (Макар Чудра, 1892)
«Emelyan Pilyai» (Емельян Пилай, 1893)
«The Siskin That Lied and the Woodpecker That Loved the Truth» (О чиже, который лгал и о дятле – любителе истины, 1893)
«Old Arkhip and Lyonka» (Дед Архип и Лёнька, 1893)
«My Fellow Traveller» (Мой спутник, 1894)
«About a Little Boy and a Little Girl Who did not Freeze to Death. A Christmas Story (О мальчике и девочке, которые не замёрзли. Святочный рассказ, 1894)
«The Song of the Falcon» (Песня о Соколе, 1894)
«One Autumn Night» (Однажды осенью, 1895)
«A Mistake» (Ошибка, 1895)
«Conclusion» (Вывод, 1895)
«Old Izergil» (Старуха Изергиль, 1895)
«Chelkash» (Челкаш, 1895)
«The Affair of the Clasps» (Дело с застёжками, 1896)
«On a Raft» (На плотах, 1896)
«The Khan and His Son» (Хан и его сын, 1896)
«Malva» (Мальва, 1897)
«Boles» (Болесь, 1897, translated also as «Her Lover»)
«Comrades» (Товарищи, 1897)
«In the Steppe» (В степи, 1897)
«The Green Kitten» (1897)
«Mischief-Maker» (Проходимец, 1897)
«Goltva Fair» (Ярмарка в Голтве, 1897)
«Mischievous Lad» (Озорник, 1897)
«Boredom» (Скуки ради, 1897)
«Heartache» (1897)
«An Adulterous Wife» (1897)
«An Insolent Man» (1897)
«Chums» (Дружки, 1898)
«A Rolling Stone» (1898)
«Cain and Artyom» (Каин и Артём, 1898)
«A Reader» (1898)
«Twenty-six Men and a Girl» (Двадцать шесть и одна, 1899)
«Waiting for the Ferry» (1899)
«Red» (1899)
«Concerning the Devil» (1899)
«The Hungry Ones» (1899)
«Commonplace People» (1903)
«Soldiers» (1905)
«Prison» (Тюрьма, 1905)
«Three Days» (1905)
«Bukoyomov» (Букоёмов, Карл Иванович, 1905)
«The Story of Filipp Vasilyevich» (Рассказ Филиппа Васильевича, 1905)
«The Kingdom of Tedium» (1906)
«Mob» (1906)
«An Incident From the Life of Makar» (1912)
«In Old Russia» (1913)
«The Master» (1913)
«First Love» (1923)
«The Birth of a Man» (1923)
«In a Mountain Defile» (1923)
«Kalinin» (1923)
«The Deadman» (1923)
«Hodgepodge» (1923)
«An Evening at Shamov’s» (1923)
«An Evening at Panashkin’s» (1923)
«An Evening at Sukmomyatkin’s» (1923)
«Light-Grey and Light-Blue» (1923)
«A Book» (1923)
«How They Composed a Song» (1923)
«Bird’s Sin» (1923)
«A Silver Ten-Copeck Piece» (1923)
«Happiness» (1923)
«A Hero» (1923)
«A Clown» (1923)
«Onlookers» (1923)
«Timka» (1923)
«A Light-Minded Man» (1923)
«Strasti-Mordasti» (1923)
«By Changul River» (1923)
«A Jolly Chap» (1923)
«A Romantic» (1923)
«A Little Girl» (1923)
«A Fire» (1923)
«A Theft» (1923)
«Bandits» (1923)
«Complaints» (1923)
Stories of 1922-1924 (Рассказы 1922—1924 годов, 1925)
«The Hermit» (Отшельник, 1922)
«Unrequited Love» (Tale of Unrequited Love, A Story of Unrequited Love, Рассказ о безответной любви, 1923)
«The Story of a Novel» (Рассказ об одном романе, 1923)
«Karamora» (Карамора, 1923)
«An Enigma» (An Incident, Анекдот, 1923)
«The Story of a Hero» (Рассказ о герое, 1924)
«The Rehearsal» (Репетиция, 1924)
«The Sky-Blue Life» (Голубая жизнь, 1924)
«A Story About the Unusual» (Рассказ о необыкновенном, 1924)
«Murderers» (1925)
Plays
The Philistines (translated also as Smug Citizens and The Petty Bourgeois; Мещане, 1901)
The Lower Depths (На дне, 1902)
Summerfolk (also, Vacationers; Дачники, 1904)
Children of the Sun (Дети солнца, 1905)
Barbarians (Варвары, 1905)
Enemies (Враги, 1906)
The Last Ones (Последние, 1908)
Children (translated also as The Reception, Дети, 1910)
Queer People (Чудаки, 1910)
Vassa Zheleznova (Васса Железнова, 1910/1936)
The Zykovs (Зыковы, 1913)
Counterfeit Money (Фальшивая монета, 1913)
The Old Man (also: The Judge, Старик, 1915, revised 1922, 1924)
Workaholic Slovotekov (Работяга Словотеков, 1920)
Somov and Others (Сомов и другие, 1930)
Yegor Bulychov and Others (Егор Булычев и другие, 1932)
Dostigayev and Others (Достигаев и другие, 1933)
Poetry
«A Maiden and Death» (Девушка и смерть, 1892)
«The Song of the Stormy Petrel» (Песня о Буревестнике, 1901)
«A Ballad of Countess Helene de Corsi» (1923)
Short-story collections
City of the Yellow Devil (Город Жёлтого дьявола, 1906)
Tales of Italy (Сказки об Италии, 1911–1913)
Through Russia (По Руси, 1923)
Stories 1922-1924 (Рассказы 1922—1924 годов, 1925)
Autobiography
My Childhood (Autobiography Part I, 1913–1914); In the World (Autobiography Part II, 1916); My Universities (Autobiography Part III, 1923)
Fragments from My Diary (1923)
Non-fiction
«The Black Hundred Pogromists» (not dated)
«Russian Tsar» (1905)
«Magnificent France» (1905)
«My Interviews» (1905)
«Fair France» (1905)
«One of the Kings of the Republic» (1906)
«Pillar of Morality» (1906)
«The Masters of Life» (1906)
«A Priest of Morals» (1906)
«On the Jews» (1906)
«On Zionism» (1907)
«January 9th» (1907)
«Cynicism» (1908)
Self-Taught Writers (1911)
«The Karamazov Spirit» (1913)
«On the Bolsheviki» (1918)
Untimely Thoughts (1918)
My Recollections of Tolstoy (1919)
«Leonid Andreyev» (1922)
The Times of Korolenko (1923)
«N. E. Karonin-Petropavlovsky» (1923)
«A. P. Chekhov» (1923)
«Leo Tolstoy» (1923)
«M. M. Kotsyubinsky» (1923)
«N. A. Bugrov» (1924)
About S. A. Tolstaya (1924)
Days with Lenin (1924)
V. Lenin (1925)
«Sergei Yesenin»
«N. F. Annensky» (1924)
«About Garin-Mikhailovsky» (1925)
«About Cockroaches» (1925)
«Notes of a Leader» (1925)
«L. B. Krasin»
«Ten Years» (1927)
«New and Old» (1927)
«My Greetings» (1927)
«To Anonymous and Pseudonymous Writers» (1927)
«Our Achievements» (1928)
«Culture» (1928)
«To Mechanical Citizens of the Soviet Union» (1928)
«The Red Army» (1928)
«Benefits of Literacy» (1928)
«Literary Beginners» (1928)
«Literature of the Peoples of the USSR» (1928)
On Guard for the Soviet Union (1930)
«Women» (1930)
«Wise Folk» (1930)
«Humanists» (1930)
On Literature (1930)
«A Hurricane Destroying the Old World» (1931)
«Facts of Life» (1931)
«Under the Red Banner» (1931)
«To Participants in the Civil War» (1931)
Talks on the Craft (1931)
Literary Technique» (1932)
Socialist Realism (1933)
«Prose» (1933)
«On Plays» (1933)
Soviet Literature (1934)
«Proletarian Humanism» (1934)
A History of Woman (1934)
«Literary Curiosities» (1934)
The I.V. Stalin White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal (1934)
Culture and the People (1935)
«The New Man» (1935)
«On the Issue of Demons» (1935)
