Postcard made in the Soviet Union with the picture of the Maxim Gorky statue in Moscow. Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868-1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky was a Russian writer and political activist. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he traveled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing.
Gorky was active in the Marxist communist movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Lenin and Bogdanov’s Bolshevik wing of the party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to the USSR on Joseph Stalin’s personal invitation and lived there until his death in June 1936. After his return he was officially declared the “founder of Socialist Realism”.