In the ice-cold heart of a Russian winter, Moscow’s new money throws off its designer overcoats to party in Cruce, a glittering club in an old industrial building by the river. In the latest bars, roubles melt. On white leather sofas, bling reigns.
But there is another city: the old lanes of Arbat that inspired the Muscovite poet and folk singer Bulat Okudzhava; the footpaths where the Rostovs walked in War And Peace; Georgian restaurants where the diners at the other tables know the songs the guitarists are singing and join in; cheap food markets, piled with pickles and honey and salted fish.
Unlike Paris or London, Moscow has never had a large bourgeoisie. It is gold or it is iron and there is little cushioning in between. There are few cities of such contrasts or of such power and will exerted in architecture: from the imperial supremacy of the Kremlin, to the Soviet supremacy of Stalin’s grandiose blocks, to the corporate supremacy of the modern high-rise business district.
Writers have always grown here, too. In winter, they seem closer. Inside a small pink townhouse, it is 1890. Lamplight glows over a green baize-covered desk. Here, Anton Chekhov changed from a jobbing writer of short stories to respected author and winner of the Pushkin Prize. The pen with which he wrote The Cherry Orchard lies in a case.
The city is filled with the perfectly preserved open houses of great writers: Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Bulgakov, among others, and you can visit all of them. Bulgakov’s gives the eeriest feeling of deja vu: anyone who has read The Master And Margarita will recognise the stair and the courtyard across which Margarita flew.
Gorky’s house is perhaps the saddest and most beautiful. In 1928, Stalin lured Russia’s literary wunderkind back from Italy and installed him in this vast and elegant art-nouveau masterpiece with a KGB man for a secretary. In 1934, he was banned from leaving the country. Two years later, he died in suspicious circumstances. “It is a beautiful cage,” says Galina, my translator, gesturing at the otherworldly subaquatic design of the interior.
Stalin also established the residential settlement of Peredelkino, in the countryside on Moscow’s outskirts, as a writers’ colony. Writers were the cultural stars of the Soviet Union and this was its 1930s Hollywood. Now the new rich are building their houses here, but some of the original buildings have been kept as museums.
The simple wooden homes where world-famous books were produced by great writers at humble desks are modestly beautiful and deeply moving.
Marina Iskander, daughter of the Abkhaz novelist Fazil Iskander, leads us up a snowy path to Boris Pasternak’s house. Here the author planted vegetables and saplings as his halfwritten poems caught the breeze through the open window. “At Peredelkino they all were preoccupied with their gardens,” Marina says.
“There was a writer over there, a very good one, Boris Pilnyak, who was shot in 1938. He was very fond of flowers; he had excellent flowers.”
Peredelkino conveniently contained all the writers in one place, where the KGB could keep an eye on them. Work that did not correspond with Stalinist ideology was banned from publication.
In the late 1930s, the dream of Peredelkino became a nightmare as Stalin’s purges took root and spread. Some of the writers were coerced into signing death warrants for their colleagues. Residents disappeared. Somewhere far away from the birches and verandas of Peredelkino, they were shot. Their houses were reallocated to writers of a more politically correct persuasion.
“What criminal beauty is here,” said the dissident poet Anna Akhmatova, when she visited in 1937. But life went on and people continued to share meals, to make the best of things, to work and to live. Here Pasternak sat down to write Doctor Zhivago in the monastic upstairs study where he also slept. His tweed cap and his everyman’s raincoat hang on the peg.
Published abroad, the book won Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. Downstairs is the table where he was dining with his family and fellow writers when he heard the news; an old photograph shows them here in the room and he is making a toast, everyone is smiling: him, his wife and the widow of the executed poet Talitze.
The authorities forced him to refuse the prize and the novel remained banned in the Soviet Union. Two years later, Pasternak died in the room next door, on a single bed, under an embroidered blanket. His death mask hangs on the wall.
The next day we drive to Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy’s idyllic pre-revolution estate out past Tula, and we lunch on borscht and blinis in the estate village before walking up to the small white manor. Tolstoy had gambled away the main house in the course of his dissolute youth – it was removed, stone by stone, to a neighbouring estate. As a mature man, he lived in this remaining wing with his wife and children, and here he developed his philosophy and wrote.
“His love for Russia and for the land is really his love for Yasnaya Polyana and for this land, here,” Galina says. In its high-windowed cellars he wrote War And Peace, as well as his romantic epic,
Anna Karenina. The avenue of silver birches is found in his great book and the relatives whose portraits adorn the walls indoors were his models for Prince Bolkonsky and the rest. His desk is here, with the incongruously tiny child’s chair on which he sat. Raw pages of
War And Peace lie open, heavily annotated in his hand: he reworked the book eight times. …more>>
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