The cultural and political activities of the Russian author Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) made him known in the Soviet Union as the greatest Russian literary figure of the 20th century. Maxim Gorky, whose real name was Aleksei Maximovich Peshkov, was born on...

Maksim Gor'ky initially achieved renown as a short-story writer and went on to become a prominent novelist, dramatist, and memoirist. During his career, which straddled the final decades of the old Russian Empire and the first decades of the Soviet...

Tovah Yedlin. Maxim Gorky. A Political Biography. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999. xiv, 260pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95, cloth. Amidst the horrors of WWI Maxim Gorky wrote to Roman Rolland: "A man must learn that he is the creator and master of the...

GORKY, by Henri Troyat, translated from the French by Lowell Bair. Crown, 295 pp., $19.95 American biographies are usually obese. Like the German scholarship they emulate, they assume that seriousness is a concomitant of size. Henri Troyat's chronicles of Russian literary and social...

A new drama about the arms trade and an adaptation of a beloved war film are highlights of the coming season at Britain's National Theatre, artistic director Nicholas Hytner announced Thursday.Future productions include star turns for Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.Among the National's 2007-2008 shows...

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is a little relieved to be taking "The Lives of Others" outside Germany, where people responded emotionally and lavished the movie with seven Lolas (the country's equivalent of the Academy Awards).Now that it's arriving in the U.S., he's hopeful it will...

"The Short Story," in Maxim Gorky the Writer, Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 59-94. In the following essay, Borras studies the range of Gorky's short stories from those inspired by folk legends and the lives of vagabonds to his later tales concerned with "the disintegration of human personality."

"Gor'kii's 'Twenty-six and One'," in Moral Apostasy in Russian Literature, Northern Illinois University Press, 1986, pp. 99-116. In the following essay, Gutsche undertakes a psychological, thematic, and symbolic analysis of Gorky's story generally translated as "Twenty-six Men and a Girl."

"The Symbolist Contamination of Gor'kii's 'Realistic' Style," in Slavic Review, Vol. 47, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 227-38. In the following essay, Brown argues that Gorky's stories bear closer affinities to modernist/symbolist literature than to the realist works with which they are typically associated.