Gorky, Who Wanted to Fly

The boy Alyosha looks out the window. Behind the glass is the endless sky. Seagulls are soaring, and steamers are sailing along the Volga. Oh, how he wishes he could fly away far from this dark, scary house! It seems that if he just stepped out onto the high bank of the river, spread his arms, and flew, flew away from here... So when Grandpa suggests to Alyosha to "go among the people," he disagrees. He will go to the birds!

This is how the story of Alexei Peshkov’s ascent begins — in the near future, Maxim Gorky, a writer, public figure, and a true rock star of his time. In childhood, he catches siskins, in his youth, he delivers baskets of buns, in which secret notes flutter back and forth. As he grows up, he begins to dream of the elevation of the spirit and the birth of a new, winged person. He becomes a writer and achieves sky-high circulation.

The illustrator and writer Katya Gushchina was born and raised in Nizhny Novgorod, attending school around the corner from the Kashirin Museum, where Gorky spent his childhood years. Even back then, she knew by heart the stories about the contemporary Gorky and his winged dreams. For the second book in the series of graphic novels about Russian writers, Katya studied literary works, diaries, photographs, and testimonies from contemporaries about her fellow countryman — and narrated Gorky’s biography through episodes of flights, falls, and longings, like a bird in a cage.