OBITUARY

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 144, 19 June 1936, Page 9

OBITUARY

MAXIM CORKY (Received June 10, 9.20 a.m.) MOSCOW, June 18. Maxim Gorky, author and Soviet publicist, who had been ill for some days, is dead.

Maxim Gorky was tho pen-name of the Russian author Alexci Maximovitch Peshkov. He was born at NizhiNovgorod in 1868 and his father, an upholsterer, died when the boy was five years old. His mother married again and he grew up in the family of , his maternal grandfather, a dyer, whose affairs did not prosper. At nine years old the boy was put to work and in the next fifteen years he was engaged in many trades. In search of work he travelled through all east and south Russia from the city of his birth to the Danube and to Georgia. At the same time he contrived to obtain an education and read omnivorously. At an early age, too, he began to write. While at Tiflis, where he was working in the railway workshops, he published a story in a local j paper and used ' the signature which later became famous. He then became a provincial journalist and in 1895 had a tale accepted by a leading St. Petersburg review. Two years later these stories appeared in book form and met with immediate success. He found himself ranked with Tolstoy and before long his fame had moved across frontiers. His play "The Lower [ Depths" ran for almost two years in Berlin. From 1899 he was associated with the Social Democrats and this brought him police persecution which only served to increase his popularity at home. By 1905 he was taking an active part in revolutionary work and in the following year left his native land to conduct an anti-Tsarist campaign abroad. In 1907 he settled in Capri and about the same time formed a friendship with Lenin. He was back in St. Petersburg in the year before the World War and started a review.

WAE AND AFTER. The war provoked a pacifist attitude on his part and in 1917 he gave his support to the Bolsheviks, though this support was not unqualified. After their victory he became the official spokesman for culture in the new regime and did much to alleviate the suffering of intellectuals as well as to preserve cultural treasures. In 1922 he was forced by his health to go abroad and after a stay in Germany settled in Sorrento where he lived for years. In 1928 he went back to Russia and was given a great reception.

His literary work falls into three periods. First he wrote the short stories which made him famous, taking his subject matter from tramps and social outcasts and using a method compounded of realism and romantic gusto. After the end of the century he wrote more ambitious books, novels and plays, aiming at giving a broad picture of Kussian life and suggesting a solution for social problems. These are defective in construction and contain (a common Russian trait) long conversations on the meaning of life. The plays are extremely formless. The third period began with the publication of his "Childhood", the first part of an auto-biographical trilogy which was continued into other works and recollections, including the well-known "Eecollections of oTlstoi", considered to be a volume of exceptional value. Ten years ago he commenced writing fiction of a more usual type.