Maxim Gorky – Chișinău – 01
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Maxim Gorky in Chișinău – Moldova
There are a lot of advantages of walking around post-Socialist cities looking for statues and other monuments to VI Lenin – and other revolutionary, Bolshevik leaders. One is that you end up in parts of cities you would never think to visit if not on the search for an elusive statue. The other is that you are very likely to come across another monument/bas relief/statue of which you had no previous knowledge.
That was the case in one of the walkabouts in Chișinău.
Maxim Gorky – Chișinău – 02
Just looking to make sure I wouldn’t be run over by some careless driver I looked into what turned out to be student accommodation of the agricultural academy. There, directly opposite the entrance, was a statue of the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky – erected in 1977.
It is not in the best of conditions and its surrounding have a lot to be desired but he was there nonetheless. Perhaps not cared for but not desecrated either. Indicating to me that there was some sort of respect to the person as a writer – in a country (that is, all the post Socialist countries) where literacy (and education in general) was considered something to be treasured.
Maxim Gorky – Chișinău – 03
The privatisation of education (especially at University level) might have challenged some of those precepts by now but the power of the word and the book (although now, perhaps digital) has not gone away. In Tirana, for example, when the rest of the society was falling apart there was still an annual book fair and the country was publishing books, in the Albanian language, in numbers relative to population levels, which major English speaking countries could only envy.
Hence more than 30 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union a statue of the great Soviet writer still stands in a housing complex on the edge of Chișinău city centre.
Maxim Gorky – Chișinău – 04
But this is not a unique piece of art. Some of the more expensive (granite or marble) statues of the top leadership might have been individually made but many statues (including some of those of Comrades Lenin and Stalin) would have been massed produced.
So it is with the writer Maxim Gorky. The statue in Chișinău is exactly the same as the one in Family Park in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
For anyone interested in Soviet Literature, including some of the works of Maxim Gorky, visit Culture, science, literature and art in the USSR.
Location;
Strada Constantin Tănase 7
GPS;
47.02846 N
28.83934 E
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