Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky was the pen name of Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868-1936), a Russian and Soviet writer, journalist and supporter of socialism who was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author he travelled widely across the Russian Empire and changed jobs often, experience that fed his writing, and he knew Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. His best known early work is a group of romantic short stories from the 1890s, including Chelkash, Old Izergil and Twenty-six Men and a Girl, followed by the play The Lower Depths, the novel Mother and the autobiographical trilogy My Childhood, In the World and My Universities. He spent much of his life in exile, returned to the Soviet Union at Stalin's invitation in 1928, lived there from 1932 and was officially named the founder of Socialist Realism.