The house of V.V. Kashirin, Gorky's grandfather in Nizhni Mogorod (now Gorky) where the writer spent his early childhood. Maxim Gorky (Alexei Maximovich Peshkov), (1868 - 1936) was Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the Socialist realism literary method and a political activist and first President of the Union of Soviet Writers. Supplied By: SCRSS - Society for Co-operation in Russian & Soviet Studies