Gorky's most famous works are his early short stories "Chelkash", "Old Izergil", and "Twenty-six Men and a Girl" (written in the 1890s); plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and Children of the Sun (1905); a poem, "The Song of the Stormy Petrel" (1901); his fictional autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913–1923); and a novel, Mother (1906).

[4][5] Unlike his pre-revolutionary writings (known for their "anti-psychologism") Gorky's later works differ, with an ambivalent portrayal of the Russian Revolution and "unmodern interest to human psychology" (as noted by D. S.

He 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.

For a significant part of his life he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union (USSR), being critical both of the Tsarism and of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War and the 1920s, condemning the latter for political repressions.

Despite this, Gorky's relations with the Soviet regime were rather difficult: while being Stalin's public supporter, he maintained friendships with Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, the leaders of the anti-Stalin opposition executed after Gorky's death; he also hoped to ease the Soviet cultural policies and made some efforts to defend the writers who disobeyed them, which resulted in him spending his last days under unannounced house arrest.

[9] He started using the pseudonym "Gorky" (from горький; literally "bitter") in 1892, when his first short story, "Makar Chudra", was published by the newspaper Kavkaz (The Caucasus) in Tiflis where he spent several weeks doing menial jobs, mostly for the Caucasian Railway workshops.

Gorky wrote incessantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world.

[1] 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.

Both his writings and his letters reveal a "restless man" (a frequent self-description) struggling to resolve contradictory feelings of faith and scepticism, love of life and disgust at the vulgarity and pettiness of the human world.

The brutal shooting of workers marching to the Tsar with a petition for reform on 9 January 1905 (known as the "Bloody Sunday"), which set in motion the Revolution of 1905, seems to have pushed Gorky more decisively toward radical solutions.

While briefly imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress during the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, Gorky wrote the play Children of the Sun, nominally set during an 1862 cholera epidemic, but universally understood to relate to present-day events.

It was during this period that Gorky, along with Lunacharsky, Bogdanov and Vladimir Bazarov developed the idea of an Encyclopedia of Russian History as a socialist version of Diderot's Encyclopédie.

An invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt was withdrawn after the New York World reported that the woman accompanying Gorky was not his wife.

[19] During a visit to Switzerland, Gorky met Lenin, who he charged spent an inordinate amount of his time feuding with other revolutionaries, writing: "He looked awful.

[23] Most controversially, he articulated, along with a few other maverick Bolsheviks, a philosophy he called "God-Building" (богостроительство, bogostroitel'stvo),[1] which sought to recapture the power of myth for the revolution and to create religious atheism that placed collective humanity where God had been and was imbued with passion, wonderment, moral certainty, and the promise of deliverance from evil, suffering, and even death.

Though 'God-Building' was ridiculed by Lenin, Gorky retained his belief that "culture"—the moral and spiritual awareness of the value and potential of the human self—would be more critical to the revolution's success than political or economic arrangements.

An amnesty granted for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty allowed Gorky to return to Russia in 1914, where he continued his social criticism, mentored other writers from the common people, and wrote a series of important cultural memoirs, including the first part of his autobiography.

In 1915, he launched the publishing house Parus and the magazine Letopis to spread anti-war stance and "defend the idea of international culture against all manifestations of nationalism and imperialism"; among its prominent writers were the poets Sergei Yesenin, Aleksandr Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Gorky's best-known publication of the period were concerning antisemitism, written in response to the severe Tsarist repressions against the Jews, and an essay "Two Souls", which contrasted "the passive East" with "the active West" and promoted the values of European culture and progress and urged Russia to break free from the "Eastern-Asiatic" "soul" and encouraged the Russian bourgeoisie to participate "in the work of reform".

[34] 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.

He also wrote to the Soviet vice-premier, Alexei Rykov asking him to tell Leon Trotsky that any death sentences carried out on the defendants would be "premeditated and foul murder.

[41] He 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 (initially a spy for Yagoda) for the remainder of his life, Gorky's son Max Peshkov, Max's wife, Timosha, and their two young daughters.

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

On 11 October 1931 Gorky read his fairy tale poem "A Girl and Death" (which he wrote in 1892) to his visitors Joseph Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and Vyacheslav Molotov, an event that was later depicted by Viktor Govorov in his painting.

Most tellingly, Solzhenitsyn and Dmitry Likhachov document a visit, on 20 June 1929 to Solovki, the "original" forced labour camp, and the model upon which thousands of others were constructed.

"[55][56] Gorky was a strong and sincere supporter of such Stalinist policies as usage of forced labour, collectivization and "dekulakization" and the show trials against the saboteurs of the Plan, but being a propagandist for such policies wasn't his main role; he was regarded as an "ideological asset" to personify the myth of the "proletarian culture" and bring literature, as Tovah Yedlin writes, under the control of the party,[57] becoming officially praised as "the founder of Socialist Realism in literature".

[59] It is certain, however, that Gorky intervened on behalf of such politically persecuted individuals as the historian Yevgeny Tarle and the literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, succeeded in making possible for the writers Yevgeny Zamyatin and Victor Serge to leave the country, tried to intercede on behalf of Karl Radek and Bukharin, and made Kamenev appointed as director of the publishing house Academia; Gorky also made efforts to support the literary "fellow travellers" and writers who had troubles with their works being published for ideological or artistic reasons or were disapproved by the official critic.

Another act which concerned the Politburo was Gorky's support of the members of the RAPP, the former party institution to control literature the members of which fell out of favour after its disbandment; Kaganovich wrote about Gorky supporting the RAPP-led campaign against Stalin's hand-picked leadership of the Organising Committee of the Union and demands to let Leopold Averbakh, the leader of RAPP who was executed in 1937, speak at the congress.

"[65] Such sources as Romain Rolland's diary demonstrate that because of Gorky's refusal to blindly obey the policies of Stalinism, he had lost the Party's goodwill and spent his last days under unannounced house arrest.

[66] Before his death from a lingering illness in June 1936, he was visited at home by Stalin, Yagoda, and other leading communists, and by Moura Budberg, who had chosen not to return to the USSR with him but was permitted to stay for his funeral.