MY CHILDHOOD

Gorky's childhood memories brush a very outspoken picture of `that close-knit, suffocating little world of pain and suffering, where the Russian man of the street used to live.' Despite this, Gorky considers his childhood as `a beehive to which various single obscure people brought the honey of their knowledge and thoughts on life; often their honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of knowledge was honey all the same.'

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. Gorky's most famous works are his early short stories, written in the 1890s; plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and Children of the Sun (1905); a poem, "The Song of the Stormy Petrel" (1901); his autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913–1923); and a novel, Mother (1906); and post-revolutionary works such as the novels The Artamonov Business (1925) and The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936), the latter is considered Gorky's masterpiece and has sometimes been viewed by critics as a modernist work. He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, both mentioned by Gorky in his memoirs.