Selected Letters

by Maxim Gorky, Maksim Gorky, Andrew Barratt (Editor)

This volume presents a collection of letters by one of the most important figures in the literary and intellectual life of Russia in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Covering the years between 1889 and Gorky's death in 1936, this selection allows Gorky to tell the story of
his life in his own words, and supplies a unique and fascinating commentary on the cultural and political developments in which he was so profoundly engaged. His letters are of considerable interest in terms of their representation of the development of Russian literature, the light they shed on
many writers and cultural-political figures of the period (including Lenin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Pasternak) and as period documents in their own right.

Hardcover

Published March 20, 1997

About the author

Russian writer Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (Russian: Алексей Максимович Пешков) supported the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and helped to develop socialist realism as the officially accepted literary aesthetic; his works include The Life of Klim Samgin (1927-1936), an unfinished cycle of novels.

This Soviet author founded the socialist realism literary method and a political activist. People also nominated him five times for the Nobel Prize in literature. From 1906 to 1913 and from 1921 to 1929, he lived abroad, mostly in Capri, Italy; after his return to the Soviet Union, he accepted the cultural policies of the time.