Maxim Gorky

Russian brief story writer, rawist, autobiographer and essayist, whose flavor was deeply interlocking with the tumultuous revolutionary hitch of his own country. Gorky ended his long life story as the preeminent spokesman for culture low the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin. Gorky conjecture the central principles of Socialist Realism, which became doctrine in Soviet literature. The rough, soci champion intended naturalism of Gorky was described by Chekhov as a destroyer pass over to destroy everything that deserved destruction. LIFEMaxim Gorky whose real name was Aleksei Maximovich Peshkov, was born on touch 16, 1868, in the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod, which in 1932 was renamed Gorky in his honor. His father, a cabinetmaker, died when Gorky was 4 historic period old, and the boy was raised in harsh circumstances by his agnatic grandparents, the proprietors of a dye works. From the age of 10 Gorky was virtu entirelyy on his own, and he worked at a great variety o f occupations, among them shopkeepers errand boy, dishwasher on a Volga steamer, and apprentice to an icon maker.At a very tender age he saw a great deal of the brutal, seamy side of life and stored up im wedgeions and flesh outs for the earthy and starkly realistic stories, novels, p records, and memoirs which he ulterior wrote. He was self-taught in many areas, including literature, philosophy, and history, both(prenominal) Russian and Western. In 1884 Gorky locomote to Kazan, dreaming of entering university. That didnt come to happen because of lack of money. preferably he enrolled in the revolutionary underground school. He attended lycee and university populist clubs, reading the relevant literature and fighting with police.At the same clipping he earned his living doing menial work. In December 1887 a series of misfortunes led him to a suicide attempt. After that, Gorky traveled well-nigh Russia in search of a job and experience. He traveled to the Volga Region, the Do n, Ukraine, Crimea, southerly Bessarabia (now dis unite of Moldova) and the Caucasus. He worked as a labourer in a village, a dishwasher, a railroad guard and a worker at a fishery, a salt-works and a repair workshop. At the same era he managed to get acquainted with people from arts circles, take part in clashes with police and earn an overall reputation as an shady individual.In his travels, he move ined prototypes for his future characters, which can be seen in his previous(predicate) works, where the characters were people from the bottom echelons of society. In 1895 he was appointed at the keystone Newspaper (Samarskaya gazeta), where he wrote daily articles for the gossip column By the mood (Mezhdu prochim), signing them as Iegudiil Khlamida. While at the paper he met Ekaterina Volzhina, an editor, whom he married a year later. In 1897 he suffered from aggravated terbium and moved to the Crimea together with his wife. subsequently they moved to the village of Maksati kha in Ukraines Poltava Region.That same year, his son Maksim was born. At the beginning of 1898 Gorky conked to Nizhniy Novgorod and in April 1901 Gorky was detained in Nizhniy Novgorod for having interpreted part in student unrest in St. Petersburg. Later he was expelled to Arazmus. Gorky was elected an honorary academic of polite literature. However, under Emperor Nikolay IIs order, the result of the election was annulled. In 1903 he broke up with his wife and in 1904, the Moscow Theatre Actress Maria Andreeva became his common righteousness wife. In 1905 Gorky was an active participant in the revolution.He was a conclusion associate of the social-democrats provided at the same time, on the eve of Bloody sunlight (a key moment in Russias history, which served as a foundation for the 1905 Revolution) he visited Sergey Witte, the author of the October Manifesto of 1905, and together with a group of intellectuals he tried to prevent the tragedy. After the revolution Gorky was arrested on charges of preparing a coup detat dtat, moreover both Russian and European cultural figures rose up to defend the writer. He was released and at the beginning of the pursuit year, emigrated from Russia.He went to America to collect funds to support the Russian Revolution. In 1913 Gorky returned to Russia. After the 1917 Revolution his business office became ambiguous on the one hand, he was supportive of the sweet authorities, but on the other hand, he kept to his own beliefs, thinking that plenty culture is to a greater extent important than class struggle. At the same time, he started working at the military personnel Literature (Vsemirnaya literatura) print house, founding the newspaper publisher New Life (Novaya Zhizn). Gorkys relations with the authorities gradually aggravated.In 1921 he left Russia, officially going to Germany for medical treatment, but in accompaniment escaping Bolshevik retribution. He lived in Germany and Czechoslovakia until 1924. Du ring this time he actively wrote articles for German magazines (The Acknowledgement of a Poet and the Russian Literature of Our Time, The Russian Cruelty, The Intellectuals and the Revolution). each(prenominal) the articles show his rejection of what had happened in Russia. Gorky actively strived to unify Russian artists working abroad. In the mid-1920s Gorky moved to Sorrento, Italy, where he started work on the novel The Life of Klim Samgin (Zhizn Klima Samgina).The novel was never finished. In 1928 he journeyed to the USSR and spent the summer traveling close to the country. His impressions on the trip were published in the book Around the due north of Soviets (Po Soyuzu Sovetov). Three years later Gorky moved to Moscow. Having seen the results of Bolshevik linguistic rule while traveling, he set as his goal the promotion of the new cultural construction of the country. He initiated the creation of literary magazines and publishing houses. Later he organized and chaired the first all-Soviet meeting of Soviet writers. In may 1934 Gorkys son was killed.Some suspected the NKVD (the Peoples Commissariat of versed Affairs) was responsible for the killing. Two years later Gorky died himself. Speculations go along to surround his finis for years one popular theory suggested he was deliberately poisoned. Gorky is inhumed in Moscow. LITERARY CAREER Gorky rose to prominence early in life and made his mark as a writer, playwright, publicist, and publisher in Russia and abroad. His literary career began in 1892 with the publication of the story Makar Chudra. His articles and stories were soon visual aspect in provincial newspapers and journals.His ideas of the writers involvement in the social, semipolitical, and economic problems facing Russia were close to those of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir G. Korolenko, who became his mentor and friend. Some of his literary works had important political significance, such as the poem Burevestnik (The Stormy Petrel), whic h in 1901 prophesied the oncoming be prevail of revolution. While visiting the United States in 1906 on a direction to win friends for the revolution and raise funds for the Russian Social pop Workers Party (RSDWP), he wrote the novel Mat (Mother).Gorkys revolutionary ideology lay in his press on the inevitability of radical change in Russian society. He started to write for newspapers, and his first book, the 3-volume Sketches and Stories (1898-1899), established his reputation as a writer. Gorky wrote with sympathy and optimism about the gypsies, hobos, and down-and-outs. He also started to analyze to a greater extent deeply the plight of these people in a broad, social context. In these early stories Gorky skillfully mixed romantic exoticism and realism. Occasionally he glorified the rebels among his outcasts of Russian society.In his early writing career Gorky became friends with Anton Chekhov , Leo Tolstoy , and Vladimir Lenin. back up by Chekhov, he composed his most famo us play, The Lower Depths (1902), which took frequently of the material from his short stories. It was performed at the Moscow Art Theater under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky. The Lower Depths en wallowed a huge success, and was soon played in Western Europe and the United States. Gorky was literary editor of Zhizn from 1899 and editor of Znanie publishing house in St. Petersburg from 1900.Foma Gordeyev (1899), his first novel, dealt with the new merchat class in Russia. The short story Dvadsat shest i odna (1899, Twenty-Six Men and a Girl) was about lost(p) ideals. There were twenty-six of us twenty-six living machines locked in a damp wine cellar where, from dawn to dusk, we kneaded dough for making into biscuits and pretzels. The window of our basement looked out onto a ditch dug in front of them and lined with brick that was green from damp the windows were covered outside in fine wire netting and sunlight could non reach us finished the flour-covered panes.Ou r hirer had put the wire netting there so we could not evanesce hand-outs of his bread to beggars or those comrades of ours who were without work and starving. (from Twenty-Six Men and a Girl, 1899) The joy in the lives of the bakers is the 16-year old Tania, who works in the same building. A prominent ex-soldier, one of the master bakers, boasts of his success with women. He is challenged to seduce Tania. When Tania succumbs, she is mocked by the men, who have lost the sole(prenominal) bright spot in the darkness. Tania curses them and walks away, and is never over again seen in the basement.Gorky became involved in a secret printing press and was temporarily exiled to Arzamas, central Russia in 1902. On leaving Russia in 1906, Gorky spent seven years as a political exile, living in the first place in his villa on Capri in Italy. Politically, Gorky was a nuisance to his fellow Marxists because of his insistence on remaining independent, but his great influence was a brawny a sset, which from their point of view outweighed such minor defects. He returned to Russia in 1913, and during World War I he agreed with the Bolsheviks in opposing Russias participation in the war.He opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and went on to attack the victorious Lenins dictatorial methods in his newspaper Novaya zhizn (New Life) until July 1918, when his protests were silenced by censorship on Lenins orders. Living in Petrograd, Gorky tried to help those who were not unqualified enemies of the Soviet government. Gorky often assisted imprisoned scholars and writers, helping them survive thirstiness and cold. His efforts, however, were thwarted by figures such as Lenin and Grigory Zinovyev, a close ally of Lenins who was the head of the Petrograd Bolsheviks.In 1921 Lenin sent Gorky into exile under the pretext of Gorkys needing specialized medical treatment abroad. In the decade ending in 1923 Gorkys sterling(prenominal) masterpiec e appeared. This is the autobiographical trilogy Detstvo (191314 My Childhood), V lyudyakh (191516 In the World), and Moi universitety (1923 My Universities). The title of the last volume is sardonic because Gorkys only university had been that of life, and his wish to study at Kazan University had been frustrated.This trilogy is one of the finest autobiographies in Russian. It describes Gorkys puerility and early manhood and reveals him as an acute observer of detail, with a dash for describing his own family, his numerous employers, and a panorama of minor but memorable figures. The trilogy contains many messages, which Gorky now tended to imply rather than preach openly protests against unprovoked cruelty, continued emphasis on the importance of toughness and self-reliance, and musings on the mensurate of hard work.Gorky finished his trilogy abroad, where he also wrote the stories published in Rasskazy 19221924 (1925 Stories 192224), which are among his best work. From 1924 he lived at a villa in Sorrento, Italy, to which he invited many Russian artists and writers who stayed for lengthy periods. Gorkys health was poor, and he was disenchant by postrevolutionary life in Russia, but in 1928 he yielded to pressures to return, and the enough official celebration there of his 60th birthday was beyond anything he could have expected.In the following year he returned to the U. S. S. R. permanently and lived there until his death. His return coincided with the establishment of Stalins ascendancy, and Gorky became a prop of Stalinist political orthodoxy. agreement published in the 1990s mingled with Gorky and Stalin and between Gorky and Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the Soviet secret police, shows that Gorky gradually lost all illusions that freedom would prevail in the U. S. S. R. , and he consequently adjusted to the rules of the new way of life.He was now more than ever the undisputed leader of Soviet writers, and, when the Soviet Writers Union was founded in 1934, he became its first president. At the same time, he helped to found the literary method of Socialist Realism, which was imposed on all Soviet writers and which oblige themin effectto become outright political propagandists. Gorky remained active as a writer, but almost all his later fiction is bear on with the period before 1917. In Delo Artamonovykh (1925 The Artamonov Business), one of his best novels, he showed his continued interest in the rise and fall of prerevolutionary Russian capitalism.From 1925 until the end of his life, Gorky worked on the novel Zhizn Klima Samgina (The Life of Klim Samgin). Though he completed four volumes that appeared between 1927 and 1937 (translated into English as Bystander, The Magnet, Other Fires, and The Specter), the novel was to remain unfinished. It depicts in detail 40 years of Russian life as seen through the look of a man inwardly destroyed by the events of the decades preceding and following the turn of the 20th century.There were also more playsYegor Bulychov i drugiye (1932 Yegor Bulychov and Others) and Dostigayev i drugiye (1933 Dostigayev and Others)but the most generally admired work is a set of reminiscences of Russian writersVospominaniya o Tolstom (1919 Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy) and O pisatelyakh (1928 About Writers). The memoir of Tolstoy is so spicy and free from the hagiographic approach traditional in Russian studies of their leading authors that it has just abouttimes been acclaimed as Gorkys masterpiece.Almost equally impressive is Gorkys study of Chekhov. He also wrote pamphlets on topical events and problems in which he glorified some of the most brutal aspects of Stalinism. Assessment. After his death Gorky was canonized as the supporter saint of Soviet letters. His reputation abroad has also remained high, but it is in question(predicate) whether posterity will deal with him so kindly. His success was partly due, both in the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent abroad , to political accident.Though technically of lower-middle-class origin, he lived in such poverty as a child and young man that he is often considered the greatest proletarian in Russian literature. This circumstance, coinciding with the rise of working-class movements all over the world, helped to give Gorky an immense literary reputation, which his works do not wholly merit. Gorkys literary style, though gradually improving through the years, retained its original defects of excessive striving for effect, of working on the refs nerves by the piling up of emotive adjectives, and of care to overstate.Among Gorkys other defects, in addition to his weakness for philosophical digressions, is a certain coarseness of emotional grain. But his eye for physical detail, his natural endowment for making his characters live, and his unrivaled knowledge of the Russian lower depths are grave items on the credit side. Gorky was the only Soviet writer whose work embraced the prerevolutionary a nd postrevolutionary period so exhaustively, and, though he by no means stands with Chekhov, Tolstoy, and others in the front rank of Russian writers, he remains one of the more important literary figures of his age.