Page "Maxim Gorky" Paragraph 8

From 1900 to 1905, Gorky ’ s writings became more optimistic.

He became more involved in the opposition movement, for which he was again briefly imprisoned in 1901.

In 1904, having severed his relationship with the Moscow Art Theatre in the wake of conflict with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to establish a theatre of his own.

Both Constantin Stanislavski and Savva Morozov provided financial support for the venture.

Stanislavski saw in Gorky's theatre an opportunity to develop the network of provincial theatres that he hoped would reform the art of the stage in Russia, of which he had dreamed since the 1890s.

He sent some pupils from the Art Theatre School — as well as Ioasaf Tikhomirov, who ran the school — to work there.

By the autumn, however, after the censor had banned every play that the theatre proposed to stage, Gorky abandoned the project.

Now a financially successful author, editor, and playwright, Gorky gave financial support to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ( RSDLP ), as well as supporting liberal appeals to the government for civil rights and social reform.

The brutal shooting of workers marching to the Tsar with a petition for reform on 9 January 1905 ( known as the " Bloody Sunday "), which set in motion the Revolution of 1905, seems to have pushed Gorky more decisively toward radical solutions.

He now became closely associated with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's's Bolshevik wing of the party, with Bogdanov taking repsonsibility for the transfer of funds from Gorky to Vpered. It is not clear whether he ever formally joined and his relations with Lenin and the Bolsheviks would always be rocky.

His most influential writings in these years were a series of political plays, most famously The Lower Depths ( 1902 ).

In 1906, the Bolsheviks sent him on a fund-raising trip to the United States, where in the Adirondack Mountains Gorky wrote his famous novel of revolutionary conversion and struggle, ( Mat ’, The Mother ).

His experiences there — which included a scandal over his traveling with his lover rather than his wife — deepened his contempt for the " bourgeois soul " but also his admiration for the boldness of the American spirit.

While briefly imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress during the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, Gorky wrote the play Children of the Sun, nominally set during an 1862 cholera epidemic, but universally understood to relate to present-day events.