Maxim Gorky rose from homelessness to become the most celebrated writer in Russia. He championed the Bolshevik revolution, then watched it devour his friends. Stalin courted him, caged him in luxury, and may have ordered his murder.

This episode follows Gorky from the slums of Nizhny Novgorod to his strange gilded imprisonment as the Soviet Union’s official literary patriarch, examining the impossible bargain he struck with power.

• How his early life of poverty and wandering shaped his realist fiction
• His volatile relationship with Lenin and the Bolsheviks
• The Solovki visit and the propaganda trip he could not refuse
• The suspicious circumstances surrounding his death in 1936