India on Maxim Gorky
A commemorative postage stamp on the Birth Centenary of Maksim Gorki, a Russian and Soviet writer, founder of socialist realism literary method :
Issued by India
Issued on Mar 28, 1968
Issued for : The Posts & Telegraphs Department considers it a privilege to honour this great literary exponent of socialist realism by issuing a special postage stamp to commemorate his birth centenary.
Type : Stamp, Mint Condition
Colour : Plum
Denomination : 15 Paise
Overall Size : 3.34 X 2.46 cms
Printing Size : 2.99 X 2.1 cms
Perforation : 13½ x 14
Watermark : Printed on unwatermarked paper
Number Printed : 20,00,000
Number per issue Sheet : 54
Printing Process : Photogravure
Designed and Printed at : India Security Press
Name : Alexei Maximovich Peshkov
Born on Mar 28, 1868 at Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
Died on Jun 18, 1936 at Leninsky, Moscow Oblast, Russia
About :
- Born in 1868 of obscure parents, Alexie Maximovich Peshkov (Maxim Gorky in later life) rose from an orphan and a tramp to the very pinnacle of success as a Russian writer. His early life among the lowly and exploited people of Nizhni Novgorod where he was born, brought him into intimate touch with the brutal reality of living conditions in pre-revolutionary Russia. In the midst of his own hard life, he took a keen interest in books and read whatever came to his hands, for Gorky had hardly had any formal schooling worth the name.
- The dark and dreary existence of the people around him had a profound effect on him. This led to two things. One was his involvement in revolutionary activities into which the seething discontent all over Russia erupted at the time. Another effect was that his literary genius was aroused by the enormity of suffering that he saw everywhere. Soon he became a tremendously popular writer. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1902 but the Czar annulled his election. His role as a revolutionary led to his imprisonment more than once. He had to leave his country after the failure of the 1905 Uprising. He visited England and the United States before he returned to Russia in 1913. It was now that he became friendly with Lenin who too was in exile at that time.
- The greatness of Gorky as an author is that he transforms the workaday lives of the common people into literature of the highest kind. In this, he set the trend for progressive writers in Soviet Russia and elsewhere. Lenin has said that Gorky “was an outstanding literary genius who has done much……on behalf of the world proletarian movement“. His writings have been widely translated and include stories, plays, novels and autobiographical works; perhaps, the best known is his novel “Mother“. Although he adopted the pseudonym of ‘Gorky‘ (meaning ‘the bitter one’), the totality of his message does not reflect embitterment. Amidst the cruelties and injustices that he found, Gorky sensed an aspiration for better things and a higher life, an aspiration that found fulfilment in the October Revolution of 1917. Gorky was held in the highest esteem in post-revolutionary Russia and continued to write until his death in 1936.
