Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) is a Russian writer and playwright, one of the most significant and well-known Russian writers and thinkers in the world. Gorky was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Having begun with romantically inspired novels, songs in prose and short stories, Gorky then turned to dramaturgy. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, he became famous for his works in a revolutionary spirit. Gorky is also the author of cycles of essays, autobiographical novels, plays, two major novels, and documentary stories. Maxim Gorky is in fact a pen name of Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, which first appeared in 1892 as a signature for the short story Makar Chudra.

This collection of short stories, named after the famous story Old Izergil, presents, perhaps, the best-known stories of Gorky, which reveal his many-sided writing talent. The main pathos of the writer’s works is the dream of "new people", fearless and free, possessing the highest intellectual and physical abilities, able to achieve overarching goals beyond the possible, including even immortality.