and earning his living in the mailing room of Wilshire's Magazine." Four days later the New York Times covered an event where Gorky spoke at length, and was supported by Mark Twain. In this report Peshkov is described as: "Kikolay Zavolsky Pieshkoff, the adopted son of Gorky". Unfortunately American opinion, at first charmed by the oratorical capacities of Gorky, to which Peshkov’s intermediation provided picturesque relief, changed quickly when it learned that the writer was travelling not with his wife, but with his mistress, Maria Andreieva. Persona non grata, Gorky was forced after being expelled from his hotel to find an improvised pied-a-terre in New York. In October, he left the United States bound for Italy, leaving Zinovy behind. After a year of wandering across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to New Zealand, Peshkov rejoined his adopted father in Italy in May 1907. This was the period of the “School of Capri”, which was an especially formative time for him since many intellectuals and artists (Chaliapine, for example), gathered there; in addition, there were Bolshevik revolutionaries in exile – Lenin, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Bazarov, etc. – generously hosted by the writer who assumed all the costs of these visits, in which political theory and action were in daily contact, threatening the Tsarist empire with the greatest danger. Zinovy, once again acting as Gorky’s secretary, organized this collective life, supervised the details, profiting as well from these unusual encounters to which he was a witness. He rubbed shoulders with Lenin, whom he bore little respect, whose relations with Gorky he later indicated were complicated by often divergent opinions. It was during October 1910, while staying at La Spezia with Alexander Amfiteatrov, that he married the daughter of a Cossack colonel five days after meeting her. He emigrated with her to the United States, where he struggled to find a situation. Shortly afterward, they were separated. From this short liaison, Peshkov had a daughter, Elizabeth. This wife, Lydia Bourago (1889-1966) was perhaps related to Colonel Alexander Bourago, hero of the 1878 war against Turkey, who died in 1883. She is sometimes referred to under the name of Vicomtesse de Combette. Her daughter, Elisabeth Peshkov, was married to Ivan Markov, Soviet ambassador to Rome, who was liquidated in 1937 by order of Stalin. In 1913 he returned to Capri, where he once again took up his activities with Gorky, who, shortly afterward, profiting