Maxim Gorky Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, later known to the world as Maxim Gorky, was born on 28 March 1868 (16 March O.S.) in Nizhny Novgorod, in the Russian Empire. Orphaned young, his father died of cholera and his mother died soon after, he was raised largely by his maternal grandmother, Akulina Ivanovna, whose storytelling and compassion he would celebrate throughout his life. Poverty forced him to leave school early and take whatever work he could find: errand boy, dishwasher, baker's assistant, stevedore, and railway cook. In the late 1880s he went to Kazan, where he audited lectures informally and fell in with circles of political discussion. The hardships of these years culminated in a suicide attempt in 1887, which he survived, later treating the episode as a grim turning point that deepened his empathy for the dispossessed.

Wandering Years and First Publications
Gorky spent the early 1890s tramping across the Volga and southern Russia, absorbing the speech and struggles of laborers, beggars, artisans, and drifters. He began publishing sketches and stories in provincial newspapers, adopting the pseudonym "Gorky" ("bitter") in 1892. His first notable success, Makar Chudra, appeared that year in Tiflis (Tbilisi). The pen name signaled not only an artistic brand but a moral stance: literature should tell the truth about a harsh world and the people who have to endure it. These early pieces, followed by collections of "sketches and stories", brought him into the metropolitan press and introduced him to editors and fellow writers.

Rise to Prominence
By the end of the 1890s Gorky was a national literary presence. His novel Foma Gordeyev (1899) and stories such as Chelkash and Twenty-six Men and a Girl combined romantic vigor with social observation. He helped to organize and lead the Znanie ("Knowledge") publishing cooperative, which circulated realist and socially engaged literature to a wide readership. In the theater he surged to international fame with The Lower Depths (1902), staged by the Moscow Art Theatre under Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. The play's stark portrait of life in a flophouse challenged audiences with its blend of compassion and disillusion. Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy, whom Gorky visited and corresponded with, praised and sometimes argued with the younger writer, and their encouragement mattered deeply to him. When Gorky's election to the Imperial Academy of Sciences was blocked in 1902 for political reasons, Chekhov resigned his own membership in protest and Tolstoy publicly objected, making the episode a landmark in the intersection of Russian letters and public life.

Revolution, Repression, and Exile
Politically Gorky aligned himself with revolutionary causes, supporting workers' movements during the upheavals of 1905. He was arrested, jailed briefly, and released after a public outcry. His prose poem Song of the Stormy Petrel became a kind of anthem for radicals. Plays such as Children of the Sun and Summerfolk probed the complacency of the intelligentsia in a time of crisis. In 1906 he traveled abroad, seeking support for the revolutionary movement; scandal in the United States over his personal life made headlines, and he eventually settled in Italy, chiefly on the island of Capri. There and later in Sorrento he continued to write, producing the novel Mother (1906, 1907), which presented a politicized working-class awakening and became one of his most influential books. His companionship with the actress Maria Andreeva and his long, complicated marriage to Ekaterina Peshkova, a noted human-rights advocate, formed the core of his personal life during these turbulent years.

Return, Autobiography, and the 1917 Revolutions
Gorky returned to Russia in 1913 under a general amnesty and turned to autobiographical writing. My Childhood (1913, 1914), My Apprenticeship (also translated as In the World, 1916), and My Universities (1923) blended fact and art to trace his formation from suffering and curiosity. In 1917 he supported the February Revolution but was sharply critical of the Bolsheviks' seizure of power and their methods. As editor of Novaya Zhizn (New Life) and in his Untimely Thoughts, he denounced terror, censorship, and the destruction of cultural institutions while maintaining a personal if strained relationship with Vladimir Lenin. Working with figures such as Anatoly Lunacharsky, he used his influence to protect artists and scholars and helped create institutions in Petrograd that provided food and shelter to the cultural community during civil war.

Years Abroad and Major Late Work
Ill and disillusioned, Gorky left Soviet Russia in 1921 for treatment in Germany and then settled again in Sorrento. He wrote essays on European culture and labored over The Life of Klim Samgin, a vast, formally complex, multi-volume novel chronicling the fate of the Russian intelligentsia from the 1870s to the eve of revolution. At the same time he continued to revise plays and stories and to champion Russian performers and writers abroad. His long friendship with the bass Fyodor Chaliapin, another native of Nizhny Novgorod, exemplified the artistic bonds he maintained across politics and geography.

Return to the Soviet Union and Cultural Authority
Invited and courted by the Soviet leadership, Gorky returned to the USSR for visits beginning in 1928 and resettled permanently in 1932. Joseph Stalin praised him as the "founder" of a new, socially responsible literature. Gorky presided over the 1934 First Congress of Soviet Writers, where "socialist realism" was codified as the official aesthetic; his speeches framed the writer as an engineer of human souls, responsible to the socialist state and to the masses. He lent his authority to ambitious public projects and to publications that celebrated industrialization and modernization, including a collective volume about the White Sea, Baltic Canal. This role brought him into close contact with cultural officials and security figures, and it also drew criticisms, during and after his life, that he had become too accommodating to power.

Personal Relations and Influence
Through decades of political change he sustained relationships with leading figures in Russian letters and public life. He was near Anton Chekhov in the latter's final years and continued to engage Leo Tolstoy in debates about art and morality. He supported young writers through publishing ventures and editorial work. With Lenin he shared a bond of mutual regard complicated by deep disagreements; with Stalin his ties were more instrumental and wary. In the theater his collaborations with Stanislavski helped shape modern acting and staging in Russia and abroad. Ekaterina Peshkova's advocacy for prisoners and the persecuted, and Maria Andreeva's prominence in the theater and public affairs, kept Gorky's household at the intersection of art, politics, and social relief.

Final Years and Death
The final phase of Gorky's life was shadowed by exhaustion, ill health, and mounting state repression. The death of his son, Maxim Peshkov, in 1934 was a heavy personal blow. Gorky died on 18 June 1936 at his dacha in Gorki near Moscow. The official diagnosis cited pneumonia and complications, but rumors and allegations of darker causes, including the involvement of security services, circulated widely and have never been conclusively resolved. He received a state funeral, underscoring his position as the most prominent writer of his generation within the Soviet system.

Legacy
Widely read for his stories, plays, and novels, and central to the formation of socialist realism, Gorky remains a figure of paradox: a fierce witness to the suffering and dignity of ordinary people; a writer whose early works electrified readers with their sympathy and vigor; an activist who defended culture during wartime hardship; and a cultural arbiter whose prestige served a state that silenced many others. The city of his birth was renamed Gorky in his honor in 1932 and later restored to Nizhny Novgorod in 1990, a symbolic arc that mirrors the shifting judgments of his time. His autobiographical trilogy stands among the finest life-writing in Russian literature, while The Lower Depths and Mother continue to resonate in theater and political fiction, ensuring that Maxim Gorky remains inseparable from the tumultuous history that shaped him.

Our collection contains 16 quotes who is written by Maxim, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Writing - Mother.