Maxim Gorky

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Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (;, but most Russians say , which is therefore found in reference books.}}  – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (), was a Russian and Soviet writer and socialism proponent. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.

Gorky's most famous works are his early short stories, written in the 1890s ("Chelkash", "Old Izergil", and "Twenty-six Men and a Girl"); plays ''The Philistines'' (1901), ''The Lower Depths'' (1902) and ''Children of the Sun'' (1905); a poem, "The Song of the Stormy Petrel" (1901); his autobiographical trilogy, ''My Childhood, In the World, My Universities'' (1913–1923); and a novel, ''Mother'' (1906). Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and ''Mother'' has been frequently criticized; Gorky himself thought of ''Mother'' as one of his biggest failures. However, there have been warmer appraisals of some of his lesser-known post-revolutionary works such as the novels ''The Artamonov Business'' (1925) and ''The Life of Klim Samgin'' (1925–1936); the latter is considered by some as Gorky's masterpiece and has been viewed by some critics as a modernist work. 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. Mirsky). He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, both mentioned by Gorky in his memoirs.

Gorky was active in the emerging Marxist communist movement and later the Bolshevik. 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). In 1932 he returned to the USSR on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and lived there until his death in June 1936. After his return he was officially declared the "founder of Socialist Realism". 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 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.