Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky, pen-name of Alexei Peshkov (1868-1936). Russian novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. His early life of terrible poverty is described in the trilogy Childhood (1913-14), In the World (1915-16), and My Universities (1923). Exiled for his support of the 1905, Revolution, he lived in Italy from 1906, where he suffered from tuberculosis. He returned to Russia in 1928 and became the first president of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934. Nizhny Novgorod, the town where he was born, was ‘renamed Gorky in 1932 but reverted to its original name in 1991.
