NIZHNY NOVGOROD: “The last two times we had these many foreigners coming to Russia, they were with Hitler and Napoleon,” goes one of the many jokes that were heard around Moscow over the last month. The World Cup has seen Russia open its doors to the world like never before and the people coming here have discovered not only the country’s present reality but have also received a healthy dose of its history and culture.
Figures previously consigned to the shadows of the iron curtain are now being brought back to life — Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Lev Yashin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the list goes on. For the city of Nizhny Novgorod, the cultural icon is Maxim Gorky. At every turn, the moustachioed writer stares back at you. There are lanes, statues, buildings all named after Gorky — it was not for nothing that the city, in the Soviet era, was named Gorky.
It was only given back its original name in 1990. The Nizhny Novgorod museum of literature is not exactly along the beaten tourist path though the main attraction, the Nizhny Kremlin, is less than a kilometre away. The old building, once home to Russian aristocrats, is one of the many buildings in Nizhny where Gorky — born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in the city in 1868 — has been kept alive. One of the first things you see is the wooden table that Gorky used to write on, and as you move on, his life begins to unravel itself.
On the wall, there are first editions of his many books — The Mother, Children of the Sun, a collection of articles he wrote for the Pravda — as well as handwritten manuscripts by Gorky himself. Another room is full of memorabilia from his involvement in the 1905 Revolution, including an Edison Mimeograph that Gorky exported from the US to massprint pamphlets during the time. Another room lends rare insight into his personal life. There are pictures of his children as well as letters and various items used by his wife. Officials at the museum say that the number of visitors has increased ever since the World Cup began. “We used to get 50 visitors a day at best. But ever since the World Cup began, we have been getting more than a 100 at least every day.”
A few kilometres away is the house of the Vasily Kashirin where Gorky grew up. Also close to the city is the Nizhegorodsky prison where Gorky was jailed during the 1905 Revolution and the last apartment where he lived before moving away to Moscow — it was here that he wrote a number of his plays and first started working on The Mother. And in the heart of the city, there is the Gorky Square where a statue of the writer stands tall.
But perhaps the greatest monument to the man is the city itself for every innocuous bylane, every fading building might very well be a setting from his numerous works. The factories of Sormovsky by the river Volga were the inspiration for The Mother. The Ploschad Gorkogo neighbourhood and his grandfather’s home provide the setting for much of his autobiography My Childhood.