This image is the cover for the book The Man Who was Afraid, Classics To Go

The Man Who was Afraid, Classics To Go

(Excerpt): "About sixty years ago, when fortunes of millions had been made on the Volga with fairy-tale rapidity, Ignat Gordyeeff, a young fellow, was working as water-pumper on one of the barges of the wealthy merchant Zayev. Built like a giant, handsom

Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist.[2] He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[3] Around fifteen years before success as a writer, he frequently changed jobs and roamed across the Russian Empire; these experiences would later influence his writing.Gorky was active with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party, but later became a bitter critic of Lenin as an overly ambitious, cruel and power-hungry potentate who tolerated no challenge to his authority. 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 died there in June 1936.. (Wikipedia)