Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky Максим Горький
Born	Alexei Maximovich Peshkov 28 March 1868 Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire
Died	18 June 1936 Moscow Oblast, RSFSR, Soviet Union
Cause of death	Assassination
Nationality	Russian

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March 1868 – 18 June 1936), better known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian writer and founder of socialist realism.

Early life

Gorky was born in 1868 and his father died shortly after he was born. He lived with his grandmother before becoming homeless, working as a proletarian on steamships and in factories. His early works My Childhood and My Universities were about proletarian life and he soon became a Marxist revolutionary. His 1900 story Tradesmen sold 25,000 copies in 15 days.

Revolutionary movement

Gorky purchased banned books for a library in Nizhny run by Narodnaya Volya. The local RSDLP committee helped him go into exile to avoid persecution by tsarist authorities. Tsar Nikolai Alexandrovich annulled his appointment to a literature department, and fellow writer Anton Chekov resigned in protest. Gorky was imprisoned during the 1905 revolution and left Russia afterwards.

Post-revolution

After the October Revolution, Gorky returned to Russia and wrote a history of the Civil War. He criticized futurists who believed all art was anti-proletarian and harmful to the masses. In 1932, he and Zhdanov were placed in charge of organizing a union of Soviet writers and combatting bourgeois and imperialist art. Gorky presided over the first congress of the Soviet Writer's Union in 1934. An anti-Soviet group of Trotskyists and Right-Oppositionists assassinated Gorky in 1938.