Maksim Gorky, 1868-1936
Biographical note
Russian/Soviet author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist.
He began using the pseudonym Gorky (literally "bitter") in 1892, while working in Tiflis newspaper Кавказ (The Caucasus). 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 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 brutalization, but also their inward spark of humanity.
From 1906 to 1913 and from 1921 to 1929 he lived abroad, mostly in Capri, Italy; after his return to the Soviet Union he accepted the cultural policies of the time, although he was not permitted to leave the country.
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Works
Novels
The Man Who Was Afraid (Foma Gordeyev)
(Фома Гордеев) / translated with an introduction by Herman Bernstein [1899]- Three of Them (Трое) [1900]
- Mother (Мать) [1906-7]
- Okurov City (Городок Окуров) [1908]
- The Artamonov Business / Decadence (Дело Артамоновых) [1927]
Short Story Collections
- Through Russia / translated by C. J.
Hogarth
- The Birth of a Man
[1912]
- The Icebreaker
- Gubin
- Nilushka
- The Cemetery
- On a River Steamer
- A Woman
- In a Mountain Defile
- Kalinin
- The Dead Man
- Twenty-Six and One and other stories
[1902]
- Twenty–Six and One (Dvatsat
shest' i odna') [1899]
- Tchelkache (Челкаш)
[1895]
- Malva [1897]
- Creatures That Once Were Men, and other
stories / translated from the Russian by J. M. Shirazi and others, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton [1905]
- Creatures that Once Were Men
[1897]
- Twenty-Six Men and a Girl
(Dvatsat shest' i odna') [1899]
- Chelkash (Челкаш) [1895]
- My Fellow-Traveller
- On a Raft
Short Stories
- Philip Vasilyevich's Story [1909]
- Makar Chudra (Макар Чудра) [1892]
- Starukha Izergil [1895] Vanha Igergil
- Konovalov [1897]
- Buyshye lyudi [1897]
- Notch [1897]
- Chums [1898]
- Cain and Artyom [1898]
- Red [1900]
- Evil-Doers [1901]
- Going Home [1912]
- Lullaby [1917]
- The Hermit [1923]
- Karamora [1924]
- One autumn night
- Comrades
- In the Steppe
- The Green Kitten
- A Rolling Stone
- Her Lover
- Because of Monotony
- The Man Who Could Not Die
- Pesnia o Burevestnike, 1901 (short story)
- Song of a Falcon (Песня о Соколе) [1902]
Drama
- The Philistines (Мещане), 1901
The Lower Depths: A Play in Four Acts (На дне) / trans. by Laurence Irving [1902, 1912]- Summerfolk (Дачники), 1904
- Children of the Sun (Дети солнца), 1905
- Barbarians, 1905
- Enemies, 1906
- Queer People, 1910
- Vassa Zheleznova, 1910
- The Zykovs, 1913
- Counterfeit Money, 1913
- Yegor Bulychov and Others, 1932
- Dostigayev and Others, 1933
Non-Fiction
- Song of the Storm-Petrel
- The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin (Жизнь Матвея Кожемякина)
- The March of Man [1905]
- A Confession (Исповедь), 1908
- Life of Klim Samgin (Жизнь Клима Самгина), epopeia, 1927-36
- Trilogy (autobiography)
- My Childhood (Детство) [1913–1914]
- In the World (В людях) [1916]
- My Universities (Мои университеты), 1923
- Untimely Thoughts, articles, 1918
- Personal Recollections of Anton Pavlovitch
Chekhov
- Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy /
trans. by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf
