Monument to Maxim Gorky

Monument to Maxim Gorky is a bronze monument in the public garden on Gorky Square in Nizhny Novgorod, unveiled on November 2, 1952. The seven-meter figure of Gorky was created by the sculptor Vera Ignatyevna Mukhina, and the pedestal was designed by the architects V. V. Lebedev and P. P. Steller ^[1][2]. Mukhina depicted the writer as a young man — as he walked the streets of his native city in the years when "The Song of the Stormy Petrel" was written; the figure, dressed in a kosovorotka (a traditional Russian shirt with a side-fastened collar), boots, and a cloak thrown over the shoulders, stands on a four-sided pedestal of black polished granite that "grows" out of a stylized rock ^[1][5]. It is a cultural heritage site of federal significance and the best known of the city's monuments to the writer ^[3][7]. The monument gave the square its present name — before that it was called May 1 Square ^[4].

The 1936 Decision

Soon after Gorky's death, on June 20, 1936, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) adopted joint Resolution No. 283 "On Commemorating Alexey Maximovich Gorky": it was decided to erect a monument to the writer at state expense in his homeland, in the city that already bore his name, and the Committee on Arts Affairs was instructed to organize a competition "involving the best talents." The client was the Gorky City Executive Committee ^[1]. At a memorial rally of the workers of the locomotive shop of the Sormovo Plant, it was resolved to appeal to the government with the same request ^[1].

Just three days later, the bureau of the Gorky Regional Committee was considering the question of the site. Valery Chkalov took part in the choice: together with the sculptor Isaak Mendelevich, who was also working on a design for a monument to Gorky, he picked out a spot on the edge of the Otkos near the Georgievskaya Tower of the Kremlin. After the pilot's death in December 1938, a monument to Chkalov himself was erected on that spot — and in Nizhny Novgorod local lore the version took hold that Chkalov had chosen the place for Gorky but ended up getting it himself ^[1].

The whole city debated the location. The sculptor Matvey Manizer proposed the Strelka — "like a lighthouse, which Gorky himself was for millions of working people all over the world"; the architect Aleksey Shchusev wanted the figure to tower over the city, "just as the monument to Michelangelo now towers over Florence"; the writer Anna Karavaeva and Academician Nikolay Semashko urged placing it at the Kremlin, with Semashko also proposing to rename the square after Gorky. The architect N. N. Kirillov, for the sake of the view, was ready to demolish part of the Kremlin wall and the Ivanovskaya Tower ^[1].

The monument will stand high up, on the hill, opposite the Oka Bridge. A wide marble staircase must be built up the hill. It will be a staircase more beautiful than the famous staircase in Odessa. On its sides should be placed figures of the heroes of Gorky's works. And the moment a person crosses the Oka, a majestic scene will rise before him

The Competition: Eight Sculptors and One Cloak

The competition ran in a single stream with the projects for Gorky monuments for Moscow and Leningrad — the chairman of the Committee for Arts Affairs, Platon Kerzhentsev, considered it impossible to single out the Nizhny Novgorod commission separately. He named March 1, 1938 as the submission deadline; V. I. Mukhina, S. D. Tavasiev, Yu. P. Pommer, R. A. Malko, V. A. Blinov, I. A. Mendelevich, A. V. Balashov, and A. P. Antropov worked on projects for the city ^[1]. The exhibition of competition entries was reviewed by the central newspapers in the spring of 1938; according to Nizhny Novgorod publications and local-history tradition, the competition, won by Mukhina, is more often dated to 1939 ^[1][2][3].

Izvestia named the projects of Mukhina and Shadr as the most serious works of the exhibition: both, the newspaper wrote, "took excellent account of the specific requirements of the monument" ^[1]. Closest to Mukhina came Ivan Shadr: the same unyielding man of the Volga, a similar pose and clothing, only younger and more impetuous. The critics tore the remaining projects apart: in Belashov's version Gorky echoed the well-known portrait by Valentin Serov; Korolev's lacked portrait likeness and placed the monument in the kremlin, contrary to the terms of the competition; Muravlin showed Gorky as "a peasant lad who had come to the city to earn a living"; Antropov "Ukrainianized the Volga man"; and Barshchevsky's turned out, in the critic's words, to be simply an illustration for a folk tale ^[1].

Mukhina knew Gorky personally. Her husband, the physician Alexey Zamkov, treated the writer, who, after the Voronezh exile, helped the family return and set up a laboratory for Zamkov, and later an institute. In 1935 Mukhina made a sculpture of the writer's son, Maxim Peshkov, for his tombstone, and even earlier a small statuette, "M. Gorky with a Book," based on her impressions of their meetings. Hence the portrait likeness of the monument-symbol, which is usually called "Gorky the Stormy Petrel" ^[1].

The concept was broader than a single figure. The complex was to include a sculptural "Burevestnik" and two compositions drawn from Gorky's works: Nilovna from the novel Mother, raising the banner, and Danko with his burning heart from "Old Izergil." The project for transforming the entire site was prepared by Mukhina's son, the architect Sergey Zamkov ^[1].

Mukhina has sculpted Gorky's head beautifully. This is, without question, the most successful portrait of Gorky. It conveys thought, strength of will, rebelliousness

His early works had an absolutely exceptional significance for us, the young people of that time; they were books of life and struggle for us, and "The Stormy Petrel" was our manifesto, our banner

The War, a Plywood Silhouette, and Seven Meters

In March 1941, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) allocated 400,000 rubles for preliminary work, and geological and topographic surveys were supposed to begin that spring at the site by the Oka Bridge. The war stopped everything. In January 1945, the Gorky Regional Committee asked the Deputy Chairman of the Sovnarkom, Nikolay Voznesensky, to return the same 400,000 rubles in order to resume the surveying, the investigations, and the preliminary design ^[1].

In August 1945, Mukhina, accompanied by her assistants Nina Zelenskaya and Zinaida Ivanova, came to the city to determine the site and the size. On the hill above the Oka they set up a plywood silhouette nine meters tall — the hill next to it "immediately shrank"; they set up one seven meters tall — and hit the mark. They found the size in four days ^[1].

By spring 1947, the seven-meter figure had been modeled, and in July the casting of thirteen tons of bronze was completed at the Monumentskulptura plant in Leningrad ^[1][2]. Sergey Zamkov did not live to see it: he was killed at the front, having managed to complete a design for the first pedestal for the Oka bank. "If fate allows me to continue the monument to Maxim Gorky, I will try to preserve everything from his architectural design," wrote Mukhina upon learning of her son's death ^[1][5].

We set up a 9-meter silhouette made of plywood — it turned out that the hill immediately shrank beside it. We set up a seven-meter one, and hit the mark. Everyone liked it, and so did we. We found the size at once. This is a very big matter

The Third Site: May 1 Square

After the war, the site began to drift again. In September 1947, the city authorities asked for permission to place it by the Minin Garden in the Kremlin, while a commission that came from Moscow insisted on the plot with the Skoba building — there, three buildings with a volume of 38,000 square meters would have had to be demolished and 148 families resettled, who had nowhere to be housed. In the end, they settled on May 1 Square in the city center ^[1].

The move is explained in different ways, and one legend persists among local historians: that one of the celebrated Moscow sculptors, in a quarrel with Mukhina, spread a rumor that before the Revolution the chosen site had been home to a place of ill repute, well known to Gorky and Chaliapin, and that the authorities, without checking, announced that "the people" did not want to see their fellow countryman "out on the outskirts." This version was retold in Gorkovsky Rabochy on December 9, 1989, by the art historian Nikita Voronov, citing the sculptor Aleksandr Kibalnikov; the authors of the compendium of Nizhny Novgorod monuments themselves do not believe it, noting that the square is one of the few truly large ones in the city ^[1].

The change was hard on Mukhina: the figure, with its billowing cloak and gaze fixed on the distance, had been conceived "on a cliff," not amid urban buildings. She could not refuse — the statue was already being cast. The pedestal had to be redesigned for the three- and five-story surroundings; the Moscow architects Viktor Lebedev and Pavel Steller were brought in for this. Mukhina shortened the pedestal "by exactly the top stone" — nearly two meters — to bring the figure closer to the viewer and preserve its proportions ^[1][5].

The spot on the square was chosen not from a drawing but in person. In mid-December 1951 a full-size mockup was assembled from wood and plywood — two vertical silhouettes, front view and profile; for weeks the mockup was moved and rotated until it stood so that it was visible from all the streets crossing the square. On January 25, 1952, a commission headed by Mukhina and Steller approved the monument's position. The monument ended up at the intersection of eight streets, and the axes of all the streets adjoining the square lead to it ^[1][4].

Before that, the square itself was a city outskirt. The ravines on its site were filled in at the beginning of the 19th century, its outlines were drawn in 1842 by the architect Georg Kizevetter, the first buildings were a prison ostrog and the orphanage of Countess Kutaisova, and the square changed names so many times that not everyone remembers them: Novaya, Novo-Bazarnaya, Sennaya, Srednaya (the market was held on Wednesdays), Arestantskaya, Polevaya — and, finally, May 1 Square ^[2][4]. Gorky Street, running from the square, was then called Polevaya, and beyond it the city ended ^[2][10].

One cannot first make a monument and then look for a suitable place for it, nor move a finished monument from its rightful place to another with impunity, because its size and composition are born from the given location

Sennaya Square spreads out broadly, closed off by the yellow building of the convict companies and the lead-colored fire tower. Around the tower's wide-eyed lookout a fire watchman circles like a dog on a chain. The whole square is cut up by ravines; in one of them, at the bottom, stands a greenish slime

Construction: bronze from Leningrad, granite from Ukraine

Earthworks began in June 1948: a foundation pit seven meters deep and eight meters wide was dug and concreted, and by January 1949, 80 cubic meters of concrete had been laid into the reinforced-concrete base. The bronze figure had been brought from Leningrad back in April 1948. The work on the square cost 929,000 rubles, and the bronze figure itself cost 458,000 ^[1].

The pedestal was made of black labradorite from the Golovino deposit in Zhytomyr Oblast; the stone was quarried at the Siepchitsy quarry. In March 1949, the first granite block, weighing twelve tons, arrived in the city — fourteen stones were needed in all, some weighing up to thirty-two tons ^[1]. Then the money ran out, and from January 1949 to October 1951 construction stood idle ^[1].

Mukhina spent a month and a half looking for a contractor for the pedestal and in December 1951 found the Kiev trust "Stroymonument"; in those same days the bronze figure was being assembled in the arcade not by factory crews but by Sormovo workers — something the sculptor liked. In May 1952, granite workers from the restoration workshops of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR arrived from Kiev, but the work went slowly: for two weeks the Gorky landscaping department debated where to set up a workplace for the stonecutters and what to supply them with, while the "Stalmontazh" office delayed the lifting equipment ^[1].

In September 1952, Mukhina spent four days in the city. The figure already stood on the pedestal, firmly cemented in place and hidden by scaffolding; the statue's heel, which had broken off, was remade from scratch in plasticine, with help from the sculptor Andrey Kikin, the author of several other depictions of Gorky in the city. Mukhina ordered the front "rock" of the pedestal to be thinned considerably: it outweighed the statue, so that the pedestal seemed to slip out from under it. At the same time, the master craftsman Maloletov came up with the idea of removing tool marks by burning the surface with an oxyacetylene torch — the surface spalled off as gravel to a depth of two or three millimeters, leaving a clean fracture ^[1].

I did not allow the patination to be done until Z. G. Ivanova arrived... I categorically forbade it. The figure must be lighter and green

The Unveiling on November 2, 1952

As construction neared completion, the leadership of the Regional Committee asked Central Committee secretary Georgy Malenkov for permission to put an inscription on the pedestal: "To the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky from the Government of the Soviet Union." Permission was not granted, and the short "M. Gorky" remained on the granite ^[1].

The unveiling was first scheduled for June 18, 1949, the thirteenth anniversary of the writer's death, and then for October 5, 1952, to coincide with the opening of the 19th Party Congress and the twentieth anniversary of the renaming of Nizhny Novgorod as Gorky. The stone could not be finished in time, the date was pushed to October 12–15 and then to October 26, and the monument was finally unveiled on Sunday, November 2, 1952, at twelve noon ^[1].

A large crowd gathered. The monument was unveiled, and a speech delivered, by A. D. Proskurin, chairman of the city executive committee; the writer Boris Polevoy, the oldest worker of Krasnoye Sormovo, the technologist N. A. Kudrin, the poet M. V. Shesterikov, and V. I. Razumov, Honored Artist of the RSFSR, also spoke. Pioneers and schoolchildren brought so many flowers that at the foot of the pedestal they lay like "little snowdrifts" ^[1].

The author was not at the ceremony: according to Leninskaya Smena, Mukhina was gravely ill at the time. Nikita Voronov wrote the opposite in a 1989 book — that the sculptor and the architects who had worked with her were present at the unveiling. In the reports of both local newspapers, the names of neither the sculptor, nor her assistants, nor the writer's relatives are mentioned at all. Mukhina died a year later, in 1953 ^[1].

There is also a second installment of this unveiling that did not make it into the reports. Vladimir Bebikhov, a ninth-grader who lived on the square, saw from his window how, on a bright Sunday in early August 1951, the police cordoned off the center of the square, speakers gave speeches, flowers and hydrogen balloons flew, and a cover slid off a plywood mock-up — and a couple of days later, at the Palace cinema, he watched the newsreel Novosti Povolzhya (News of the Volga Region) with a segment on the "unveiling of the monument," in which the mock-up looked like a real monument on screen. The local historian A. V. Kessel considered this a rehearsal of the unveiling; the second explanation is simpler — a report on achievements had to be delivered on schedule. Bebikhov's mother, a Party member, explained what he had seen in a single phrase: "That's how it has to be!" ^[2]

The writer looks at his wondrously transformed, native, beloved city. And it seems he sees, far off in the Zavolzhye, the bright lights of the Gorky Hydroelectric Station — the lights of communism!

How It Is Built

The bronze figure, seven meters tall, stands on a four-sided pedestal of black polished granite slabs, the lower part of which is worked into the shape of a rock. The mass of the pedestal is divided by seams into fourteen blocks of different sizes that make up the outer facing; the total weight of the structure is 468 tons, and the total height with the pedestal is about fourteen meters (the height of the pedestal itself is given in publications as both 6.7 and 7.7 meters) ^[1][2].

The pedestal is not made of stone inside: during a 2017 survey, specialists from the Nizhny Novgorod University of Architecture and Civil Engineering drilled two diamond-core test holes and found that the cracked slabs are cladding several tens of centimeters thick, while the whole structure is carried by monolithic reinforced concrete to which the figure is fastened with anchor bolts ^[5].

Mukhina showed Gorky as he walked through old Nizhny: a kosovorotka shirt, greased boots, long hair swept back, a cape over his shoulders. His hands are clasped behind his back, one gripping the other; the wind stirs the folds of the cloak and holds the figure's vertical line. Biographers read in the monument both the literary Danko and the revolutionary writer who "conveyed the untamable strength of a passionate and courageous nature" ^[1].

He stands upright, hands clasped behind his back, his face and chest turned into the oncoming wind, which stirs the cloak thrown over his shoulders. The large folds of the cloak create a beautiful silhouette for the monument and enrich the deliberately austere vertical of the figure. The back and the hands, one gripping the other, are very expressive. This gesture betrays an enormous inner agitation, restrained by an effort of will

So that the pain for trampled human dignity would show through in his stern face, in his eyes fixed on the distance, in the clenched fist held back by the other hand. He is like a taut string; he himself is a child of the gathering storm...

The square around it: an arboretum instead of fountains

The square began to be laid out to a design by the same Lebedev and Steller even before the monument was installed; in 1953, staff of the Botanical Garden of Gorky University completed the plantings, including chestnuts, unusual for these parts ^[1][2]. The idea of fountains with figures of Gorky's heroes was discussed, but instead the square received a collection of plants, whose saplings were bought from nurseries and arboretums across the country: a cork tree, Manchurian walnut, English oak — no fewer than fifty rarities amid a surrounding of lindens. For this reason the square itself is recognized as a cultural heritage site of regional significance, as a monument of landscape art ^[4]. In total, 1,195 trees and shrubs grow in the square, and the only cork tree in the urban environment of Nizhny Novgorod stands right here ^[10][5].

The greenery of the square twice became a cause for rallies. In the late 1980s, opponents of building the Metro by the cut-and-cover method pitched tents in the square: that method of construction threatened the trees and the entire look of the square. The station was postponed, and when it was eventually built by the open method, the site was moved farther away and the square was not harmed; the first metro station in the upland part of the city opened in 2012 ^[4].

In 2021, for the city's 800th anniversary, the square was refurbished: the contractor was the company "Moskovskoye Naslediye" (Moscow Heritage), and 74.682 million rubles were allocated for the work. The asphalt was replaced with cobblestones, new benches and trash bins were installed, ramps appeared by the stairs, the wires were moved underground, and openwork white structures bearing quotations from Gorky were set up around the square. The space itself could not be reconstructed — the square is a protected site ^[9][4].

Protection and restorations

The monument was placed under state protection by Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR No. 1327 and has the status of a cultural heritage site of federal significance ^[1][7]. In 1997, on the initiative of the city culture department, the sculpture was restored and the missing granite slabs were put back in place ^[1].

In 2010, a crack appeared on the monument. In 2014, the city authorities announced a competition for its restoration with an initial contract price of three million rubles — there were no takers. The regional Ministry of Culture then submitted an application to the federal center: the site is federal, so the money should be federal too. In March 2017, the regional minister of culture, Sergey Gorin, announced that funding had been approved and that the work would be completed by the end of the year — as part of preparations for the 150th anniversary of the writer's birth ^[7].

The work was carried out by the company "Fregat" under the author's supervision of the Nizhny Novgorod restoration organization "Asgard," and the survey was performed by specialists from the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering. The pedestal, made of polished slabs and slabs "in the manner of rock," was restored, and the bronze was cleaned of oxides, etched, and coated with a protective compound ^[6]. The cracks turned out to be a defect of the facing, not of the load-bearing structure: the black granite came from a deposit whose rock develops cracks from internal stresses of natural origin. That the pattern of cracks had not changed for decades was established in a homely way: the daughter of one of the researchers was going through her grandmother's postcards with views of the city of Gorky and found a photograph about thirty years old showing the very same cracks of the same size ^[5].

The renovated monument was unveiled on November 4, 2017. The color was a separate challenge: before the restoration, the figure had stood green with patina ^[5][6].

We were very lucky that we found a person who still remembers Mukhina — and he advised us on the color. The sculpture had been patinated and coated with wax. The wax is absorbed over three months, so we will only see the final color in April–May — it will be slightly darker than it is now. If the monument is looked after according to all the rules, it will not need any further restoration for 20–30 years

Other monuments to Gorky in the city

Mukhina's monument is not the only one in the city: there are more than ten images of the writer in Nizhny Novgorod, and they should not be confused ^[1][3].

The earliest is considered to be a plaster sculpture by Nikolay Koloyarsky, an instructor at the art school: he modeled Gorky seated on a bench in 1937, for the writer's seventieth birthday and the naming of the city after him, and in June 1938 it was installed in a kindergarten on the site of the present-day monument to Yakov Sverdlov. The plaster stood for about a year ^[1][3].

In Kulibina Park, a figure by Andrey Kikin had stood since 1938 — in a long shirt, with folded arms; art historian L. I. Pomytkina calls it the first monument to Gorky in the country. The war prevented the plaster from being recast in a durable material; in 2012 the crumbling sculpture was dismantled and disappeared — it turned up in a courtyard on Rozhdestvenskaya Street, with the writer's head lying separately in a storage room. The sculptor Aleksey Shchitov restored the figure and cast it in bronze; the three-meter monument was installed on September 15, 2021, in the Kovalikhinsky Garden, next to the house where the writer was born and the apartment where he worked on the play "The Lower Depths." The location was chosen by the whole city ^[1][3][8].

In the courtyard of the Kashirin House museum stands "Alyosha Peshkov" — a marble boy with a book on a pier bollard, by the same Kikin, who worked on it in 1955–1957; pupils of neighboring schools posed for him. Before that, from the end of May 1949 until 1960, a bust of Gorky by Mukhina stood in the museum's garden, a gift to the "house" from the automobile plant that sponsored it ^[1][3].

On the Fedorovsky Embankment, Gorky sits on a rock in a work by Ivan Shmagun: he made the sculpture "Gorky on the Volga" in 1957 for an exhibition in Moscow, then it was installed in Zelenyy Town by the Teachers' Rest House, and in 1972 it was moved to the upper terrace of the embankment. Nearby is a granite stele in the shape of an open book with the writer's words. A copy of this sculpture, hammered out of copper by Nizhny Novgorod craftsmen, was sent in 1984 to the sister city of Magdeburg ^[1][3].

Another Gorky greets deputies in the City Duma building in the Kremlin — the only image of the writer painted in gold, also by Kikin, 1955. In Dubki Park stands a stern Gorky in a long cloak by Evgenia Blinova: the original was shown in 1939 at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in the Gorky Region hall, after which it stood in the Kremlin for several years and in 1955 moved to the park. In May 1 Park there is an aged, slightly weary Gorky with a book; one version holds that its author is the sculptor Aleksey Kotikhin, whose works stand nearby. Near the Gorky Children's Railway is the composition "Gorky and the Children" by Nikolay Chugurin, which replaced an earlier group by Aleksandr Kolobov from 1940; its copy has stood since 1953 in the Avtozavodsky District in front of Lyceum No. 36. On Mokhovye Hills, where the friends stayed at the dacha of the architect Malinovsky, "Gorky and Chaliapin" by Aleksandr Gorshkov was installed in 2012 ^[1][3].

My joy and pride is the new Russian man, the builder of a new state. Comrade! Know and believe that you are the most necessary person on earth. By doing your own small task, you have begun to create a truly new world

Signs of the Times

While the question of where to put the monument was still being decided, proposals poured in to Gorkovskaya Kommuna" from all over the region, and some of them have survived in the archive. A collective farmer, Ya. G. Katkov, from the village of Ivachevo in Fominsky District, proposed adapting the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on the Strelka as a museum to the writer: the small domes would be replaced with figures from his books — "Mother," "The Stormy Petrel," "Chelkash" — the large one converted into a globe, and on top of the globe Gorky would be placed with a pen in his raised hand, from the tip of which a giant electric lamp would hang: "This will be the Beacon of Culture of the proletarian writer." He attached a cost estimate as well — 4 million 200 thousand rubles for developing the site ^[1].

On September 8, 1937, Vladimir Razzhivin, a twelve-year-old fifth-grader at the Khmelevitsy village school in Shakhunsky District, sent in his own drawing of the monument with an honest note: "I am, of course, not a sculptor or an artist, I drew it as best I could." The chairman of the Regional Executive Committee, Yuly Kaganovich, replied to the schoolboy personally: "I received the design for the monument to A. M. Gorky that you sent. It shows that your mind works quite well. Study hard, and you will make a good architect" ^[1].

The renaming of the city brought the writer no joy. He wrote to the local historian Fyodor Khitrovsky: "Today for the first time I wrote on an envelope Gorky instead of N. Novgorod. It is very awkward and unpleasant," — and immediately joked about what would have happened had he kept his first pseudonym, Yegudil Khlamida ^[10]. The city's name was restored in 1990, while the square and the street remained Gorky's ^[10].

In June 1956, the bone carvers V. Borkunov, Z. Zakharov, and A. Sysoev carved a tiny copy of Mukhina's monument and gave it to the residents of Greenwich, England — together with a deer as the city's emblem and an openwork casket with bas-reliefs on a historical theme. They worked at a workshop of artistic bone and horn carving attached to the meat-processing plant ^[1].

The cinema has passed the monument by: it appears constantly in documentaries about the city, but never made it into feature films, although the surrounding buildings were filmed — the "Melodiya" shop in "The End of Operation 'Resident'," and the city's first fast-food restaurant on the square in "Zhmurki" ^[4].

Nearby

• Maxim Gorky — the writer whose name was borne by a city, a square, and a street
• Gorky Square — the square where the monument stands
• Gorky in the 1950s — the city in the years when the monument was being built and unveiled
• Gorky State Museum — the museum collection that holds versions of the writer's sculptures
• Monument to Alyosha Peshkov — a marble boy with a book in the courtyard of the "Kashirin House"

Sources

1. heritage-institute.ru — B. S. Izvekov, Yu. A. Zakunov. "Monumental Monuments of Nizhny Novgorod and the Axiology of Inheriting Historical Memory" (archive)
2. opentextnn.ru — "Open Text" — memoirs of V. A. Bebikhov, who lived on 1 Maya Square, about the construction and opening of the monument — Bebikhov V. A. The Monument to A. M. Gorky on Gorky Square in the City of Gorky (archive)
3. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — a route through all the city's monuments to Maxim Gorky, April 3, 2023 — What Secrets Do Nizhny Novgorod's Monuments to the Famous Writer Hold? (archive)
4. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — the history of Gorky Square from ravines to improvements for the city's 800th anniversary, August 6, 2021 — 11 Interesting Facts About Gorky Square That You Didn't Know (archive)
5. NN.RU — an account of the monument's history and restoration with the participation of NNGASU specialists Anna Gelfond and Aleksey Kritsin, December 6, 2017 — 10 Facts About the Monument to Maxim Gorky (archive)
6. nn.rbc.ru — RBC Nizhny Novgorod on the completion of the monument's restoration, November 4, 2017 — Restoration of the Monument to Maxim Gorky Completed in Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
7. web.archive.org — TASS on federal funding for the restoration, the 2010 crack, and the competition that never took place in 2014, March 22, 2017 (copy in the web archive) (archive)
8. GIPERNN — GiperNN on the installation of a bronze monument to Gorky in Kovalikha Park, based on a plaster figure by A. V. Kikin, September 16, 2021 (archive)
9. V gorode N — the V gorode N news agency on the improvement of Gorky Square for the city's 800th anniversary, August 9, 2021 — What the Improvement of Gorky Square in Nizhny Novgorod Looks Like (archive)
10. nnstories.tilda.ws — an essay on the monument and the park: the makeup of the arboretum, the history of the square, and Gorky's own attitude toward the renaming of the city — 15 Facts About the Creation of the Monument to Gorky, the Proletarian Writer (archive)