The first of Russia's great proletarian writers, Alexey Maximovich Peshkov (1868-1936) adopted the pen name of Gorky, meaning "bitter." Drawing on his own experiences in the lowest social echelon, Gorky portrayed the wretched lives of down-and-outers, instilling his tales with heartfelt protest against a world that both tolerated and fostered the miseries of the underclass. In The Lower Depths, his dramatic masterpiece of 1902, Gorky presents a grimly...

Maxim Gorky's powerful drama about the social ferment that culminated in the 1917 Russian Revolution is set on an estate in provincial Russia in 1905. In a sunlit-dappled garden, some factory owners and their wives discuss the unrest amongst the workers. Rather than submit to a strike, they decide to close down the factory. When an owner is slain in a scuffle with a workman, the ensuing investigation uncovers the socialist fervor that is sweeping...

Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian. After his father, a paperhanger and upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, and with his grandmother, a tender mountain of a woman and a wonderful storyteller,

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