Maxim Gorky Audiobooks

The third volume of Gorky's autobiographical trilogy, an education taken on the road

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Who is Maxim Gorky?

Maxim Gorky was the pen name of Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, born in 1868: a Russian and Soviet writer, journalist and lifelong champion of socialism, nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before he wrote a word of note he tramped across the Russian Empire, moving from job to job, and that hard apprenticeship in ordinary life became the raw material of his books. He knew Tolstoy and Chekhov personally, and wrote about both in his memoirs.

His politics shaped his life as much as his prose. An open opponent of the Tsarist regime, he was for a time close to Lenin’s Bolshevik wing, yet criticised the Bolsheviks sharply in the Civil War years and spent long stretches in exile. He returned to the USSR in 1928 at Stalin’s personal invitation and was declared the founder of Socialist Realism, though his final years were uneasy ones, ending in 1936 with the writer under unannounced house arrest.

His most celebrated work includes the early short stories of the 1890s, the play The Lower Depths, the novel Mother and his autobiographical trilogy: My Childhood, In the World and My Universities.

Maxim Gorky in audiobooks

My Universities is the third volume of Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy, and the title is typically wry: his universities were not lecture halls but years of wandering and hard graft across the Russian Empire, taking his education from the people he worked alongside. That grounding gives the book a directness well suited to audio – memoir as lived experience rather than literary self-portrait.

For UK listeners it doubles as a window onto Russia before the revolution, from a writer who knew Tolstoy and Chekhov, sided with and sparred against the Bolsheviks by turns, and ended his days uneasily inside the state he had helped argue into being. Few audiobooks come with that hinterland.