Large 9.5" tall x 7" wide size. Artistic rendering showing him in his trademark fedora, in a thoughtful pose. Of the wide array of official Soviet portrait sculptures, this one stands out as unusual for being a civilian and in a relaxed pose and dress. Likewise, it is a complicated casting, with an open space under the forearm, which requires a special mold that will release it. Uncommon.

Statue is in cast metal with heft. Artist signature "Torich" and 1975 date on the reverse. Condition is excellent showing little age.

Maxim Gorky (meaning Maxim the Bitter one) pen name of Aleksey Maximovich Pyeshkov, 1868-1936. Gorky is considered the father of Soviet literature and the founder of the doctrine of socialist realism.

Instilled by his grandmother with a love of romantic tales, Gorky began a nomadic life at 12, wandering the Volga area. He educated himself, an experience he describes in My Universities (1923).

He held dozens of menial jobs, publishing his first story in 1892. His articles exposed local corruption and he soon lost his job.

In 1898 Gorky's collection Sketches and Stories was published by a radical press and the author was an immediate sensation. These romantic tales concern the vigor and nobility of the Russian peasants and workers. About 1900 he turned to writing novels of social realism. Of these, Mother (1906) had the greatest impact on Soviet literature. Describing the awakening of revolutionary feeling in an ill- treated peasant woman, it became the prototype of the revolutionary novel.

At this time Gorky became close friends with Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov, about both of whom he later wrote superb Reminiscences. Gorky donated most of his income to the revolutionary movement. He was arrested frequently but treated carefully because of his popularity. The Czar rescinded his election to the Academy of Sciences in 1902, whereupon Chekhov and Korolenko resigned in protest.

Gorky wrote 15 plays, two of which, heavily censored, were very successful at the Moscow Art Theatre. One of them, The Lower Depths (1902), a study of the wretched lives of derelicts, remains a classic. His plays, at first modeled on Chekhov's, emphasized characterization over plot.

After the failure of the 1905 revolution, in which he took part, Gorky sought to raise funds for the movement abroad. Following an initial positive reception in the United States (1906) he was insulted in the press, which portrayed him as a man of questionable morals. Gorky held a grudge against the United States, which he expressed in later writings. Settling in Capri (1906-13), he set up a Bolshevik propaganda school before he returned to Russia in 1914.

Exhausted from his work as head of the State Publishing House, by bouts with tuberculosis, and a lung damaged in a suicide attempt, he sought rest abroad (1921) and returned in 1928. When Gorky returned to Russia he was greeted as a great Soviet hero while earning the reputation of selling out to Joseph Stalin's brutal regime.

His final, unfinished work, often considered his masterpiece, is The Life of Klim Samgin (1927-36), a four- volume novel of Russian social conditions from 1880 to 1917. Gorky's death at 68 remains mysterious; he may have been assasinated by the NKVD on Stalin's orders.

Gorky's work exerted a profound influence on Soviet intellectual thought.