In this short but captivating chamber work, Ford fuses both popular and romantic art-song idioms to evoke a deeply poignant, fleeting moment in the sonic ambience of an imaginary café named after Russian literary giant Maxim Gorky. A bridge between the cultural past and the emerging "social realist" aesthetic, Gorky's mysterious death in 1936 was attributed to a so-called "Trotskyite plot." A large park in Moscow is named in his honor.