Gorky

Maxim Gorky—the most famous Soviet writer—has been immortalized in the names of cities, streets, airplanes, and has almost disappeared from cultural everyday life in the new, post-Soviet era. For many years he was praised as the “storm petrel of the revolution,” a devoted adherent and propagandist of communist ideas—and then, for the same reason, he was condemned. Meanwhile, he was never a one-hundred-percent Bolshevik: his creative method doesn’t fit into the narrow framework of “socialist realism,” and his biography is far from the standards of proletarian morality.

In this book by the well-known writer, poet, and historian of literature Dmitry Bykov, Gorky appears as an outstanding person—a master of Russian prose—witness and chronicler of great historical events. The book is published to mark the 80th anniversary of the writer’s death, who played an outstanding role in the history of the “Lives of Remarkable People” series.