Selected Letters

This volume presents a collection of letters by one of the most important figures in the literary and intellectual life of Russia in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Covering the years between 1889 and Gorky's death in 1936, this selection allows Gorky to tell the story of his life in his own words, and supplies a unique and fascinating commentary on the cultural and political developments in which he was so profoundly engaged. His letters are of considerable interest in terms of their representation of the development of Russian literature, the light they shed on many writers and cultural-political figures of the period (including Lenin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Pasternak) and as period documents in their own right.