Maksim Gorky

Born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod in 1868, he took the pen name Maxim Gorky, with "Gorky" meaning "bitter." Orphaned young and raised in hardship, he worked a long list of jobs before turning those hard years into fiction filled with tramps, laborers, and other people often ignored in literature.

He became famous in the 1890s with short stories and later wrote major works including The Lower Depths, Mother, and his autobiographical trilogy. His writing was closely tied to the social and political upheavals of his time, and he was associated with revolutionary circles while also having a complicated relationship with Soviet power.

Gorky spent parts of his life in exile, including years in Italy, and returned to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He died in 1936, but his influence remained enormous in Russian and Soviet culture, both as a novelist and playwright and as a public literary figure.