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Early years

Born as Alexei Maximovich Peshkov on 28 March 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880. After an attempt at suicide in December 1887 he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing.

As a journalist working for provincial newspapers he wrote under the pseudonym Иегудиил Хламида (Jehudiel Khlamida). He started using the pseudonym "Gorky" (from горький; literally "bitter") in 1892, when his first short story, " Makar Chudra ", was published by the newspaper Kavkaz (The Caucasus) in Tiflis where he spent several weeks doing menial jobs, mostly for the Caucasian Railway workshops. The name reflected his simmering anger about life in Russia and a determination to speak the bitter truth. Gorky's first book Очерки и рассказы (Essays and Stories) in 1898 enjoyed a sensational success and his career as a writer began. Gorky wrote incessantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world. He described the lives of people in the lowest strata and on the margins of society, revealing their hardships, humiliations, and brutalisation, but also their inner spark of humanity.