The article examines metaphors from M. Gorky’s play “The Lower Depths” in the printed and electronic media texts of the last decade. In the contemporaty political discourse they are represented in a wide range of structural and functional vatiations: exact quotation; truncated quotation; quotation with the replacement of one part or the introduction of an additional component into the construction; cognitive function, clarifying the nature of a particular social phenomenon or object; emotive-evaluative and modeling functions, clarifying the meaning of a certain social phenomenon or aiming at its discrediting; hypothetical and polemical functions, characterizing civilizational processes. The article reveals that the onym «Gorky» is less spread than Gorkian metaphors in the contemporary as well as in the entire post-Soviet media. In the early Soviet journalism the situation was the opposite. It is noted that in the 1920s Gorkian metaphors were negatively applied to the personality of the writer himself; the 1930s were characterized by the unprecedented frequency of the usage of the onym in order to glorify the writer, while his creative work was quite neglected. Meanwhile, elements of direct and implicit polemics with the author of «The Lower Depths» in contemporary media, and the «Gorky.media» Internet project reveal certain convergence of the onym with the metaphor. The article states that the attention to Gorky’s rhetoric in the media environment is mostly related to the peculiarities of the writer’s creative personality (artist and public figure in one person) as well as to his genre and style preferences (maxims, aphorisms, allegory, symbol, journalistic techniques).