Three of Them

Three of Them is a 1901 novel by Maksim Gorky. The plot concerns Ilya Lunyev, a boy from an urban slum, who enters the middle-class milieu only to be disillusioned to find the same moral corruption.


Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, popularly known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian writer and political activist. He was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gorky's most famous works are his early short stories, written in the 1890s; plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and Children of the Sun (1905); a poem, "The Song of the Stormy Petrel" (1901); his autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood, In the World, My Universities (1913–1923); and a novel, Mother (1906); and post-revolutionary works such as the novels The Artamonov Business (1925) and The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936), the latter is considered Gorky's masterpiece and has sometimes been viewed by critics as a modernist work. He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, both mentioned by Gorky in his memoirs.