March 18, 1868
В Nizhny Novgorod, was born into a family of commoners Alexey Peshkov — proletarian writer No. 1 Maksim Gorky. The "stormy petrel" of the revolution and a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born to crawl can not fly
At 3, he survived cholera and lost his father. At 11, he lost his mother. He was raised by his grandparents and earned his own living. He only managed to complete two grades. He was well-read but semi-literate (many of his errors were later corrected by his wife).
Until the age of 26, he was a tramp and mastered dozens of professions: bartender, baker, apprentice in an icon-painting workshop, guard and weigher on the railroad, barge hauler, loader, carpenter, dyer, builder, and clerk for a lawyer.
At 18 I couldn't get into Kazan University. He became interested in Marxism and attended revolutionary circles. He was under police surveillance and often spent time in prison.
He "wandered around Rus'" extensively, visiting the Volga region, the Don, Ukraine, and the Caucasus. In 1892, he published the story "Makar Chudra" in a Tiflis newspaper, using the pseudonym "Gorky" for the first time.
I can’t write in literature - Peshkov
In 1894 he moved to Samara, where he began to earn money by writing articles and became famous as a journalist.
In 1901, he wrote his famous "Song of the Stormy Petrel." A year later, he wrote the play "At the Bottom." He was admitted as an honorary academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the fine literature category, but his status was revoked following protests from Nicholas II.
In the early 1900s, he found himself at the center of literary life, hosting famous writers, artists, and actors. He introduced the fashion for moustaches and wide hats.
And you will live on earth
How blind worms live:
They won’t tell tales about you,
They won't sing any songs about you.
("The Legend of Marco")
In 1905, after "Bloody Sunday," he was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress and was released on bail thanks to public support. That same year, he joined the RSDLP and met Lenin. He traveled around Europe and America, collecting money for the “Bolshevik treasury”; he edited Pravda.
He received the February and October Revolutions coolly. He openly criticized the Bolsheviks' methods and the "Red Terror."
Lenin considers himself entitled to carry out a cruel experiment on the Russian people, which is doomed to failure from the start.
In 1918, his newspaper, Novaya Zhizn, was closed. Afterwards, he continued to help scientists and writers, securing food rations for them and providing them with work. He supported about 30 household members in his apartment. He stood up for Romanovs and victims of repression (including Gumileva).
In 1921, he left Russia. According to one version, he was deeply affected by the execution of Gumilyov; another, Gorky's home was regularly searched, and Lenin personally advised him to leave. A third version states that he had ideological differences with the Soviet government.
In 1928, at Stalin's invitation, he came to the USSR to celebrate his 60th birthday. After a series of trips around the country, he wrote laudatory essays.
Everywhere, at all points of the land of the Union of Soviets, bold, great experiments are being made, a new life is being built
In 1929, during his second visit, he visited Solovki and extolled the Soviet system of prisoner re-education. This episode is still held against him to this day.
In 1933, he finally returned to the USSR (he had spent more than 18 years abroad in total). He supported Stalin's collectivization and the subsequent repressions.
"Humans" still demand to be fought against. The GPU exists not as a sporting institution operating for its own pleasure, but out of political necessity. As a dyed-in-the-wool humanist, I recall this fact with a sour tear in my soul.
(from personal correspondence)
He headed the Writers' Union and was declared the "founder of socialist realism" and "the father of Soviet literature." He was the most published writer in the USSR (second only to Pushkin и Tolstoy).
He died in 1936, at 68, in the Moscow region. Gorki. The official version is complications from a cold. The unofficial version is murder (in 1938, the head of the NKVD confessed to it). Henry Berry and Kremlin doctors, but their testimony was obtained under torture, and most historians reject this version).
