Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (Russian: Максим Горький), was a Russian writer and political activist. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.

Gorky's most famous works are his early short stories, written in 1890s ("Chelkash", "Old Izergil", "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl"), plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and Children of the Sun (1905), a poem The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), his autobiographical trilogy My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913–1923), and a novel Mother (1906). Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and Mother has been frequently criticized (Gorky himself thought of Mother as one of his biggest failures).