Alyosha Peshkov, the future writer Maxim Gorky, spent his childhood with his grandparents in Nizhny Novgorod. At 16, he went to Kazan to enroll at university and stayed in the city for four years. Forty years later, remembering the most memorable places in Kazan, the first one he named was the wooden house at 60 Ulyanov Street, which has survived to this day.

Marking it as number one on the map of Kazan, Maxim Gorky noted, “After arriving in Kazan, I stayed at the Yevreinovs’ house on the corner of Likhachyovsky Lane.” In the novel “My Universities”, he described in detail both the house he called his memorable university and the family that gave him a place to stay for his first two weeks in the new city.

He was invited by a student and his friend Kolya Yevreinov. He volunteered to help Alexey Peshkov study for the entrance exams to the Kazan Imperial University, but in the end, the young man with only two years of school behind him was not accepted. Gorky later wrote,

Nikolay, his brother Mikhail and their mother, “a quiet little woman”, lived on her meager widow’s pension. Peshkov understood her struggles to make ends meet and “the resourcefulness with which she daily deceived her sons’ stomachs, and managed to find food, too, for me, a young tramp not particularly appealing in appearance and behavior.” He avoided the humble meals at the house, wandering around and moonlighting on the pier. When the weather was not good, Gorky waited out in the cellar of a dilapidated house. There, “under the pounding of wind and rain”, he “came to the conclusion that [his] university career was a fantasy” and “that a voyage to Persia would have made more sense”, at least there he could try to find a way to breed “grain with kernels the size of apples.”

The drawing depicting the Yevreinovs’ house was made by a People’s Artist of the Republic of Tatarstan Magdalina Mavrovskaya. She had been exploring Maxim Gorky’s works for 30 years, starting when she worked as a graphic artist in the Kazan Museum. Mavrovskaya created a series of drawings “Gorky in Kazan” and a graphic series called “Visiting Gorky’s Favorite Places”.

Magalina Mavrovskaya always strove for authenticity and paid great attention to details. Her drawings can immerse the viewers in the atmosphere of the youth of Maxim Gorky, who began his great cultural journey and true life path in Kazan.