Editing Maxim Gorky (section)

===Capri years===
[[File:Villa Behring on Capri.jpg|thumb|Between 1909–1911 Gorky lived on the island of Capri in the burgundy-coloured "Villa [[Emil Adolf von Behring|Behring]]".]]
From 1906 to 1913, Gorky lived on the island of [[Capri]] in [[southern Italy]], partly for health reasons and partly to escape the increasingly repressive atmosphere in Russia.<ref name="kirjasto" /> He continued to support the work of Russian social-democracy, especially the Bolsheviks and invited [[Anatoly Lunacharsky]] to stay with him on Capri. The two men had worked together on ''Literaturny Raspad'' which appeared in 1908. It was during this period that Gorky, along with Lunacharsky, [[Alexander Bogdanov|Bogdanov]] and [[Vladimir Bazarov]] developed the idea of an ''Encyclopedia of Russian History'' as a socialist version of [[Denis Diderot|Diderot]]'s ''[[Encyclopédie]]''.

In 1906, Maxim Gorky visited New York City at the invitation of [[Mark Twain]] and other writers.   An invitation to the [[White House]] by President [[Theodore Roosevelt]] was withdrawn after the ''[[New York World]]'' reported that the woman accompanying Gorky was not his wife.<ref>Sorel, New York Times 5 March 2021</ref> After this was revealed all of the hotels in [[Manhattan]] refused to house the couple, and they had to stay at an apartment in [[Staten Island]].<ref name=":0" />

During a visit to Switzerland, Gorky met Lenin, who he charged spent an inordinate amount of his time feuding with other revolutionaries, writing: "He looked awful. Even his tongue seemed to have turned grey".{{sfn|Moynahan|1992|p=117}} Despite his [[atheism]],<ref>{{cite book|title=Political Economy of Socialist Realism|year=2007|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0-300-12280-0|page=76|author=Evgeniĭ Aleksandrovich Dobrenko|quote=Gorky hated religion with all the passion of a former God-builder. Probably no other Russian writer (unless one considers Dem'ian Bednyi a writer) expressed so many angry words about God, religion, and the church. But Gorky's atheism always fed on that same hatred of nature. He wrote about God and about nature in the very same terms.}}</ref> Gorky was not a materialist.<ref>{{cite book|title=Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography|year=1999|publisher=Greenwood Publishing Group|isbn=978-0-275-96605-8|page=86|author=Tova Yedlin|quote=Gorky had long rejected all organized religions. Yet he was not a materialist, and thus he could not be satisfied with Marx's ideas on religion. When asked to express his views about religion in a questionnaire sent by the French journal Mercure de France on April 15, 1907, Gorky replied that he was opposed to the existing religions of Moses, Christ, and Mohammed. He defined religious feeling as an awareness of a harmonious link that joins man to the universe and as an aspiration for synthesis, inherent in every individual.}}</ref> Most controversially, he articulated, along with a few other maverick Bolsheviks, a philosophy he called "[[God-Building]]" (богостроительство, ''bogostroitel'stvo''),<ref name="kirjasto" /> which sought to recapture the power of myth for the revolution and to create religious atheism that placed collective humanity where God had been and was imbued with passion, wonderment, moral certainty, and the promise of deliverance from evil, suffering, and even death. Though 'God-Building' was ridiculed by Lenin, Gorky retained his belief that "culture"—the moral and spiritual awareness of the value and potential of the human self—would be more critical to the revolution's success than political or economic arrangements.