Birth of Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky was born on 16 March 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod. A Russian and Soviet writer, born Alexei Peshkov, Gorky took his pen name, which means bitter, after a childhood of poverty and a youth spent wandering Russia in many odd jobs. His early stories and the play The Lower Depths, about the poor of a night shelter, made him famous, and his novel Mother became an important text for the revolutionary movement. He supported the revolutionary cause but criticized the Bolsheviks after 1917, and spent many years abroad, mainly in Italy. After his return to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s he was celebrated as a founder of socialist realism and became the first head of the Union of Soviet Writers.

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