Statue of Maksim Gorkiy

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, popularly known as Maxim Gorky, 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 a short story collection Sketches and Stories, plays The Philistines, The Lower Depths and Children of the Sun, a poem The Song of the Stormy Petrel, his autobiographical trilogy My Childhood, In the World, My Universities, and a novel Mother. Gorky himself judged some of these works as failures, and Mother has been frequently criticized.