Maxim Gorky: The Tramp Who Became a Soviet Institution
In December 1887, a nineteen-year-old Russian named Alexei Peshkov tried to kill himself. He survived, walked out of Nizhny Novgorod, and spent five years crossing the Russian Empire on foot — factory floors, steamboat galleys, dock yards, the roads of the south. When he finally published a story in 1892 he signed it with a word rather than a name: *Gorky*, bitter. It was less a pseudonym than a warning label about the contents.
The Boy Called Bitter
He was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on March 28, 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, and orphaned at eleven, after which his grandmother raised him. Formal education barely touched him. What he had instead was work — factories, steamboats, odd jobs — and the peculiar education of watching Russia from underneath it. Nearly every major Russian writer before him had looked at the poor from a landowner's window. Gorky had no window. He came up out of the room being described.
Five Years on the Road
The tramping years, from 1888 to 1892, are the source of everything that followed. Gorky was not gathering material in the way a novelist gathers material; he was living the only life available to him and happened to be paying attention. "Makar Chudra" appeared in 1892. Three years later came "Chelkash," the story that made him. It takes a harbour thief as its subject and treats him — as Britannica notes, blending Romanticism and realism — with an unprecedented sympathy, neither pitying nor picturesque. "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl," set among bakery workers, is often regarded as his finest short story. When the collection *Sketches and Stories* appeared in 1898 the success was sensational and immediate. Russia had found a writer who wrote from inside the class everyone else wrote about.
The Lower Depths, and the Tsar's Veto
*Foma Gordeyev* followed in 1899. Then, in 1902, came *The Lower Depths*, staged by Konstantin Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre — a play set in a flophouse, populated by drunks, thieves, a dying woman and a consoling pilgrim, with almost no plot and no redemption on offer. It became, and remains, the most performed Russian play in the world outside Chekhov's.
The same year, the Imperial Academy elected him an honorary member. Tsar Nicholas II objected, and the election was annulled. Gorky's politics were never a private matter; he opposed Tsarism openly, and after the 1905 revolution he did something few celebrated writers do — he funded the revolutionaries directly, bankrolling the Bolsheviks out of his royalties. In 1906 he made a controversial fundraising tour of the United States, and then settled on Capri, where he stayed from 1906 to 1913. *Mother*, published in 1906, is his single major novel of revolutionary awakening. It became the most politically consequential book he ever wrote and, by critical consensus, not close to his best.
Untimely Thoughts
The most creditable episode of Gorky's life is the one Soviet biographies buried. Having helped fund the Bolsheviks, he turned on them almost as soon as they took power. Through his newspaper he published the essays collected as *Untimely Thoughts* (1918), denouncing Bolshevik repression while it was happening, in print, in Petrograd, to Lenin's face. He simultaneously did what he could to keep Russian letters alive, founding the World Literature publishing house to give starving writers translation work and rations. It is the clearest evidence that his sympathy for the powerless was not a literary pose. It is also the last time he used his voice that way.
Sorrento, and Stalin's Invitation
Ill and increasingly unwelcome, he left Russia again, living in Sorrento from 1922 to 1932. Abroad he produced his most sustained work: the autobiographical trilogy *My Childhood*, *In the World* and *My Universities* (1913–1923), which turned the orphan and the tramp into literature; *The Artamonov Business* (1925); and the vast, unfinished *The Life of Klim Samgin*, which occupied him from 1925 until his death. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and never won it.
Stalin personally invited him home in 1928. He returned for good in 1932, and the Soviet state made him something no writer had ever been: an institution. He became president of the Union of Soviet Writers and was officially declared the founder of Socialist Realism, the doctrine that would govern what every Soviet writer was permitted to produce. His conduct in that role was contradictory. He protected Mikhail Bulgakov and Mikhail Bakhtin when they needed protecting. He also co-edited the 1933 volume on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, which presented forced labour as rehabilitation — a book written by a committee of famous authors about a project built by prisoners.
After Sergei Kirov's assassination in 1934 he was effectively confined at Gorki-10 outside Moscow; his secretary, Pyotr Kryuchkov, was an NKVD informant. His son had died in May 1934. Gorky himself died on June 18, 1936, of pneumonia. At the 1938 Bukharin show trial the prosecution alleged that the NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda had murdered both men using preparations from a special poison laboratory — a charge produced by a machine that manufactured charges, and therefore proof of nothing except how useful a dead Gorky was.
Why Maxim Is Called a Genius
The defensible claim is about observation, not invention. Gorky brought into serious literature an entire population it had never taken seriously — dock thieves, tramps, bakery hands, flophouse residents — and rendered them without the two available falsifications of his era, sentimental pity and picturesque squalor. Britannica singles out the sympathy of "Chelkash" as unprecedented; scholars describe him as a rigorous observer and have compared his standing to Thomas Mann's. Five Nobel nominations register how seriously Europe took him. The gift was a kind of moral steadiness of gaze: the ability to look at a man who has nothing and neither look away nor arrange him into a symbol.
The counter-case is real. He invented no form and advanced no technique; scholarly opinion holds his early short stories to be his best work and his later novels distinctly uneven, and *Mother* — the book the twentieth century actually read — is the weakest thing he is famous for. Much of his stature was manufactured by a state that needed a proletarian Tolstoy: by 2013 more than two thousand streets in Russia still bore his name, and his birth city was renamed for him. Most damning, the man whose entire gift was seeing clearly lent his name to a volume recasting a labour camp as a school. His stature is real; it was also, for two decades, subsidised.
Legacy
Outside Russia his reputation now rests almost entirely on *The Lower Depths*, which is still staged everywhere, and on the autobiographical trilogy; most of his writing has never been translated into English. Inside Russia he remains inescapable, in street names and monuments and a city that carried his pseudonym for half a century. He is the rare writer who is difficult to read because of what was built on top of him — and whose best pages, the ones about men sleeping rough on the Volga, still read as though nobody had told him what literature was supposed to look like.
Achievements
- Order of Lenin — 1932
- Griboyedov Prize — 1903
- Notable work: Mat'
- Notable work: The Lower Depths
- Notable work: My Childhood
- Notable work: Twenty-six Men and a Girl
