There is a prominent square in this central Russian municipality dedicated to the revolutionary writer Maxim Gorky, for whom the city was once named.
For much of the past month World Cup visitors have been pouring through the park, taking pictures of the massive 23-foot statue of Gorky at its center and visiting the museum housed in the Art Deco mansion where he spent his last five years. And while Gorky probably wouldn’t have thought much of the tournament or the tourists, as a master of the social realism literary style he would have found inspiration in World Cup quarterfinals that have reduced to a class conflict between soccer’s bourgeois and its proletariat.