54 Facts About Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Maxim Gorky associated with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, both mentioned by Gorky in his memoirs.

Maxim Gorky 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.

Maxim Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and Mother has been frequently criticized; Maxim Gorky thought of Mother as one of his biggest failures.

Maxim Gorky was brought up by his maternal grandmother and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880.

Maxim Gorky started using the pseudonym "Gorky" in 1892, when his first short story, "Makar Chudra", was published by the newspaper Kavkaz in Tiflis where he spent several weeks doing menial jobs, mostly for the Caucasian Railway workshops.

Maxim Gorky wrote incessantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice than as a moral and political act that could change the world.

Maxim Gorky described the lives of people in the lowest strata and on the margins of society, revealing their hardships, humiliations, and brutalisation, but their inner spark of humanity.

Maxim 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.

Maxim Gorky publicly opposed the Tsarist regime and was arrested many times.

Maxim Gorky befriended many revolutionaries and became a personal friend of Vladimir Lenin after they met in 1902.

Maxim Gorky exposed governmental control of the press.

In 1902, Maxim Gorky was elected an honorary Academician of Literature, but Tsar Nicholas II ordered this annulled.

Maxim Gorky 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, Maxim Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to establish a theatre of his own.

Stanislavski believed that Maxim 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.

Maxim Gorky assisted the Moscow uprising of 1905, and after its suppression his apartment was raided by the Black Hundreds.

When visiting the Adirondack Mountains, Maxim Gorky wrote Mother, his probably most famous novel of revolutionary conversion and struggle; despite its success and political impact, various critics and Maxim Gorky himself were harsh of the book's value as of a work of art.

From 1906 to 1913, Maxim Gorky lived on the island of Capri in southern Italy, partly for health reasons and partly to escape the increasingly repressive atmosphere in Russia.

Maxim Gorky continued to support the work of Russian social-democracy, especially the Bolsheviks and invited Anatoly Lunacharsky to stay with him on Capri.

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 Maxim Gorky was not his wife.

Maxim Gorky distrusted it at first, but in Spring became cautiously optimist about it.

In Summer, Maxim 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.

Maxim Gorky described the former Okhrana headquarters, where he sought literary inspiration, as derelict, with windows broken, and papers lying all over the floor.

In July 1917, Maxim 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".

Maxim 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.

One contemporary recalled how Maxim Gorky would turn "dark and black and grim" at the mere mention of Lenin.

Maxim 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.

Maxim 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".

Maxim Gorky was a member of the Committee for the Struggle against Antisemitism within the Soviet government.

Maxim Gorky had a strong dislike of Gumilev, but he nevertheless promised to do something.

In July 1921, Maxim Gorky published an appeal to the outside world, saying that millions of lives were menaced by crop failure.

Maxim Gorky 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.

Maxim Gorky 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.

Maxim Gorky 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.

In contrast to his attitude to the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Maxim 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.

Maxim Gorky's return from Fascist Italy was a major propaganda victory for the Soviets.

Maxim Gorky was decorated with the Order of Lenin and given a mansion in Moscow and a dacha in the suburbs.

Maxim Gorky was appointed President of the Union of Soviet Writers, founded in 1932, to coincide with his return to the USSR.

On 11 October 1931 Maxim Gorky read his fairy tale poem "A Girl and Death" to his visitors Joseph Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and Vyacheslav Molotov, an event that was later depicted by Anatoly Yar-Kravchenko in his painting.

My father, who spoke about this episode with Maxim Gorky, insisted emphatically that Maxim Gorky was offended.

Maxim Gorky did not notice the relocation of thousands of prisoners to ease the overcrowding, the new clothes on the prisoners, or even the hiding of prisoners under tarpaulins, and the removal of the torture rooms.

The deception was exposed when Maxim Gorky was presented with children "model prisoners", one of who challenged Maxim Gorky if he "wanted to know the truth".

Maxim Gorky never wrote about the boy, or even asked to take the boy with him.

Maxim Gorky strongly supported efforts in getting a law passed in 1934, making homosexuality a criminal offense.

Maxim Gorky's attitude was coloured by the fact that some members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung were homosexual.

Paola Cioni noted that although there are traits of a conflict in the relations between Stalin and the state and Maxim Gorky, it is uncertain when this conflict was provoked by psychological motives, and when it was provoked by his political position.

Maxim 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, Maxim 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.

Later Maxim 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.

Maxim Gorky's person is only the pretext round which to gather a wonderful gallery of portraits.

In Kharkiv Maxim Gorky Park was renamed Central Park of Culture and Recreation in June 2023.

The monument of Maxim Gorky that been erected in 1977 was dismantled on 26 December 2022.

Maxim Gorky is depicted on postage stamps: Albania, Vietnam India, Maldives, and many more.