Yekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova, née Volzhina, was Maxim Gorky’s first and only official wife and the mother of his children — a son Maxim and a daughter Katya. Yekaterina was born into a noble family, graduated from a gymnasium and worked as a proofreader at the Samara Gazette. There in the editor’s office, she met an aspiring writer Maxim Gorky, whose real name was Alexey Peshkov. By that time, he had already published over 500 articles and feuilletons, including a sketch called “Grandmother Akulina”, which became his first essay for the future novel “My Childhood”.
Yekaterina was eight years younger than Gorky and treated him with great respect and devotion, which she carried with her for the rest of her life. A year after they met, they got married, and a year later their son Maxim was born. The Peshkov family did not last for long; their daughter Katya died at the age of five when Gorky was already in another relationship. Their son Maxim died two years earlier than his father. Yekaterina Peshkova found solace in helping people: during World War I, she worked for the Red Cross, and after the Russian Revolution, she headed an organization that helped political prisoners.
Yekaterina outlived her husband by almost 30 years and worked as a consultant for the archives connected with him at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Yekaterina Peshkova donated some of her family archives to the Kazan Gorky Museum for safekeeping. She attended and gave lectures at Gorky Scientific Conferences in Kazan and kept correspondence with the museum director. Yekaterina Peshkova donated the dress to the museum in the 1960s.
The dress is made of muslin, a transparent lightweight cotton fabric. From the middle of the 19th century, this fabric gained popularity among young noblewomen, who wanted to create a romantic and mysterious look. Muslin dresses and blouses, usually of delicate cream colors, were decorated with frills, flounces, ruffles, and embroidery. In Russian literature, the weightless fabric went down as a metaphor for a vulnerable and pampered young woman. In 1865, the critic Dmitry Pisarev published an article in the “Russkoye Slovo” (A Russian Word) magazine entitled “The Romance of a Muslin Girl”, where he noted,
