“... masters’ (Reactionary views on women’s emancipation!). These underlinings could have provided Maxim Gorky with fine material for one of his diatribes contrasting Dostoevskian decadence with Soviet life-affirmation. It was typical of Stalinist police practice that not only Nina, the true anti-Soviet in the family, was arrested, but also her ...”

“... is almost absent from his account of Mozart’s life. But at least – unlike Lenin, who told Maxim Gorky that he couldn’t ‘listen to music too often, it affects the nerves, makes you want to say kind, silly things’ – he shows no discomfort in its presence. In the liveliest of these books, the conductor Jane Glover focuses mainly on family ...”

“... the local newspaper. Then it was picked up by Pioneer Pravda. But the real breakthrough came when Maxim Gorky spoke to the Communist youth organisation in 1933 of ‘the heroic deed of Pioneer Pavlik Morozov, the boy who understood that a person who is a relative by blood may well be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be ...”

“... Isaac Sinani, a member of the Karaite sect (the Karaites refuse the rabbinical tradition), he met Maxim Gorky, whose early stories he admired, and Ivan Bunin, with whom he became quite intimate and who left an uncompleted book about Chekhov among his papers. He resigned his membership of the Russian Academy of Sciences when ...”

“... Arshile Gorky is better known for his role in 20th-century American art than he is for his actual work. The collective memory, besides noting that his art reputedly links 1930s Surrealism to 1950s Abstract Expressionism, is rather vague about his pictures: were they realistic? Abstract? Easier to remember that he committed suicide, that he was a romantic character, that he was a liar ...”

“... from a lamp post if they do. A few hours later they do, and he doesn’t. A book that says – of Maxim Gorky! – ‘there was nothing striking about his features’ (just as it does, incidentally, and with more justice, about Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘features, not in themselves striking’) isn’t going to raise the bar for perspicacity or ...”

“... Bunin’s The Village (1910), its portrayal of rural existence was so hopelessly bleak that for Gorky, who had painfully worked his way out of that kind of environment, it raised ‘the question of whether Russia is to be or not to be’. A new myth of the peasantry, however, soon found artistic expression in the Ballets Russes. The workshops of Abramtsevo ...”

“... years ahead, publishing detailed research on these silos as early as 1905. Around the same time, Maxim Gorky was lurking around New York, at first in ecstasies, presented with this vision of ultramodern progress – ‘Socialism should first be realised here, that is the first thing you think of when you see the amazing houses, machines etc’ – but ...”

“... nine weeks, from 17 June 1936 until the end of August, Gide travelled through the Soviet Union. Maxim Gorky died around the time of his arrival (some people said he’d been killed by Stalin); Gide spoke at his funeral on 20 June in Red Square, standing on the podium beside Bulganin, Molotov, Stalin and Zhdanov, the cultural commissar who had put in ...”

“... paradise. To one side of the inhabitants of the Almanach de Gotha, they included Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky and the Pasternak family, Ellen Key and Klara Liebknecht, Paula Modersohn-Becker, the young Balthus and his mother, Baladine Klossowska (with whom, though she came from Breslau, he corresponded in French), Lord Kitchener and Walther ...”

“... Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union, to attend festivities around the centenary of Maxim Gorky’s birth. (In The Call of the Tribe, he misremembers the event as being in honour of Pushkin.) As Aguirre and Buynova point out, many Latin American writers travelled to the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Some were continuing the tradition of ...”

“... feelings about the Russian canon remain complicated. She loves Gogol and early Chekhov. She hates Gorky and Tolstoy (‘a graphomaniac’). She admits few influences and even fewer heirs (she says she hasn’t heard of Vladimir Sorokin or Victor Pelevin). Asked to name five great novels, she refused: ‘I’m not a reader, I’m a writer.’Her work has its ...”

“... either of them, and scarcely spoke to them now. Later in life Rilke wasn’t sure he ought to meet Gorky because the fellow was a socialist, and offered the opinion that ‘a Russian is as suitable for revolution as a cambric handkerchief for mopping up ink.’ This in 1907. In 1919, in tune with the times, Rilke was a supporter of the Russian Revolution and ...”