According to Gorky, socialist realism should first of all be written in a language that the proletariat (worker) can understand, appeal to all segments of society, and be about the daily life of ordinary people.
Born on March 28, 1868, Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, known as Maksim Gorky, lost his parents at a young age. He started using the surname Gorky, which means pain, in 1892. He is raised by his grandmother and grandfather. His grandfather's house was a house full of beatings and misery.
Gorky may only go to school for a few months, but his passion for books doesn't stop until he dies. His grandfather, who did not send him to school, asked him to work when he was only eight years old and bring money home. He works in many jobs such as shoemaker, dishwasher, porter, and baker on ships. At the age of eighteen, he runs away from home, at the age of twenty-one he even attempts suicide by putting a bullet through his heart because he thinks he is ugly and has no talent. The bullet doesn't hit your heart.
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March 1868 – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian writer and socialist political thinker and proponent. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he traveled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.
When he left home, he carried the stories of the prostitutes, the poor, and the lowest strata of society, whom he met while working in various jobs in the Caucasus and Southern Russia for a few years.
In 1892, he started working for the Caucasus Newspaper in Tbilisi. After his first stories were published in magazines, his fame spread rapidly with Twenty-Six Men and a Girl (1899), which is considered one of his best stories. The striking fusion of realism and human-like warmth in the story is a novelty for world literature.
Gorky met Chekhov and Tolstoy in 1899-1900. These giant writers were interested in Gorky's talent from the beginning and highly valued this young writer who came out of the public.
Gorky directly participated in the events of 1905. He was arrested for a statement he wrote after the labor movement known as Bloody Sunday. He was released after demonstrations were held for him in Russia and Western Europe. He contributed to the organization of workers in Yeni Yaşam Newspaper, the publication organ of the Bolshevik Party, which he entered in 1905. He financially supported the armed workers' unions. In 1906, he secretly left Russia and went to America. Despite the reaction of the US press, he was calling to support the Russian revolutionaries from here, and later he wrote his impressions here as travel notes.
He continued his literary life, which he accelerated after this period, with a series of novels and stories. His novel Ana, written in 1906 and dedicated to the Russian Revolution, made him famous in Russia and around the world. In his main novel, he was inspired by the workers' movement that took place in Sormov in 1902, and he got to know the worker Zalamov (Pavel in the novel), who is known for his speech defending workers' rights in these events, and his mother. In the novel, Pavel and his mother are told about the misery of Russian workers and peasants, their hard-working conditions, their efforts to organize against oppression in a factory in the face of hunger, and the oppression and oppression of the Tsar.
My Universities, dated 1923, begins with Gorky's arrival in Kazan to get the university education he had dreamed of since his childhood. All the characters in Gorki's book, who showed excellent resistance to life despite all the negativities he experienced, who did not feel crushed because he could not go to school, and who made up for this deficiency with a great effort to read, learn and observe, leave their mark on the reader with the reality and simplicity of their psychology.
Klim Samgin's Life 40 Years, completed between 1925 and 1936, is Gorky's most important and at the same time the most discussed work. The book reveals the spiritual and intellectual life of the period, which started with contradictions, fights, and intellectual conflicts, starting from the mid-1870s until the 1917 Revolution. In the novel, large masses of people, especially the Hodinka tragedy, the looting of the bread shop, the demonstration in front of the Winter Palace, the march to the statue of the Savior Tsar, and the funeral of the Bolshevik Bauman are portrayed in a realistic language. Klim Samgin's Life 40 Years novel is Gorky's most important work, which demonstrates his mastery of the way he narrates common and major events.
He died on June 18, 1936, in Moscow at the age of 68 due to heart and lung failure. It is buried in Red Square in Moscow. Another great writer of the era, Romain Rolland, says: “No one except Gorky was fortunate enough to fuse the world culture of the age and the revolution in such a splendid way.”