“Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, famous throughout the world as the writer Maxim Gorky, died on the morning of June 18, 1936, not far from Moscow in an old estate once belonging to the nobility and made available for him by Stalin. This was that very same home in which Lenin had passed away twelve years earlier. Was this a stunt drummed up by the most masterly and malevolent of all playwrights that history has ever known? What kind of chance happening could be at work: the mustachioed leader knew full well about the relationship between the first Bolshevik tyrant and the ‘founder’ of Socialist Realism. In sending the writer to the next world in that very same home, where Vladimir Ilyich, who had banned him from Soviet Russia, died twelve years previously, Stalin clearly demonstrated his particular brand of love for both of them, as well as an undying passion for sinister metaphors.”—Arkady Vaksberg