Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (March 16, 1868 – June 18, 1936), better known as Maxim was a Russian author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist. He was born in the city of Nizhny Novgorod and died in Moscow.
Gorky became an orphan at the age of nine and was brought up by his grandmother, an excellent storyteller. Her death deeply affected him, and after an attempt at suicide in December 1887, he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing.
Gorky was Lenin’s personal friend after they met in 1902. During World War I his apartment in Petrograd was turned into a Bolshevik staff room, but his relations with the Communists turned sour. In October 1921 Gorky emigrated to Italy on bad health grounds: he had tuberculosis.
Gorky’s return was motivated by the material interests. In Sorrento Gorky found himself without money and without glory. He visited the USSR several times after 1929 and in 1932 Joseph Stalin personally invited him to return from the emigration for good, an offer he accepted.
He was decorated by the Order of Lenin and given a mansion (currently Gorky Museum) in Moscow and a dacha in the suburbs. One of the central Moscow streets, Tverskaya, was renamed in his honor, as well as the town of his birth.
The largest airplane in the world in the mid-1930s, the Tupolev ANT-20, was also named Maxim Gorky. It was used for propaganda purposes and often demonstratively flew over Soviet capital.
With the step-up of Stalinist repressions and especially after the death of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Gorky was placed under unannounced house arrest in his Moscow house. He was supplied daily with a special edition of the newspaper Pravda containing no news about arrests or purges.
The sudden death of his son Maxim Peshkov in May 1935 was followed by the death of Maxim Gorky in June 1936. Both died under suspicious circumstances.
His hometown, the city presently named Nizhny Novgorod, was named Gorky after him from 1932 to 1990.
