Orloff and His Wife

The author was born "Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov" on March 16, 1868, in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia -- which was later renamed in his honor after his death (ordered by Stalin himself, it is rumored). The bitterness of his early life led him to choose the name Maxim Gorky (which means "the bitter one") as his pseudonym.Although jailed periodically for association with revolutionaries and for his own ou...