Maternal Capital
by Joshua Ellison · 01/21/10
In February, the city is filthy with almost-black snow. It drifts from the streets and overwhelms the sidewalks. Drainpipes pour water on the pavement that instantly turns to ice. No one lays down salt. In a few days, a half-dozen guys with shovels will show up, scraping away for hours without making any real progress. The passersby each have to find their own elusive footing; they try to keep themselves upright without making direct contact with the concrete. From the flat roofs, other men with shovels send the excess snow and ice hurtling downward without warning. The traffic moves incautiously through the intersections, spinning off more filth. Cars race forward, just to idle again in mid-block traffic.
But then, a black—always black—sedan or jeep will ride through, gleaming. There isn’t a speck of dirt or soot; even the tires are clean. This seems impossible when you look at the sputtering, gray Russian cars, or even the plentiful German and Japanese imports, none of which could make it a few feet without succumbing to grime. Somehow, though, these cars manage to stay pristine, unspoiled, unimpeded. They travel along their own privileged plane: above the pollution, the crowds, even the weather. Moscow is a place that won’t surrender or accommodate easily to fate, history, or nature. With a little luck and the right connections, anything can be made or unmade.
In the Soviet era, the city devoured itself to build monuments to the State. It was sheer laziness and disorder that saved even small parts of the old city, wrote the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński. “Old Moscow vanished from the face of the Earth,” he recorded, “and in its place rose heavy and monotonous, although powerful, edifices—symbols of the new authority.”
To Aleksander Pushkin, Moscow was a “faded dowager queen,” a place of maternal comfort, a link to the past, a keeper of common secrets. If Petersburg was the court—the seat of law, power, control—then Moscow was the kitchen: a place where the Russian unconscious was fed, a city of bread and feasts and plenty. Moscow was the repository of the Russian past and the capital of its soul, or so it’s remembered. The keeper of family lore, a place of arcane habits. It was a place that trafficked in the ineffable, which also means it traded in eternity and death, both as inseparable from the past as a mother’s embrace.
The big, messy, enveloping village was replaced by something more forbidding, harder, and inescapably masculine. Planners gouged out wide expanses and filled them in with imperial kitsch or numbing, geometric monotony. But the monumental architecture has its own kind of anxiety toward both the past and the future. The structures’ self-importance gives them away; they are too insistent on their own immortality. In Moscow, I understood exactly what W.G. Sebald meant when he wrote that “out-sized buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction.”
Some of the older buildings—like the nineteenth-century Europeanized facades in soft pastel colors, or the Gothic-Byzantine hybrids—have been revived quite elegantly. On the other hand, the new, post-Soviet constructions reflect what novelist Tatyana Tolstaya calls “the dreams and fantasies of people who made their fortunes yesterday and haven’t read anything but children’s books.” There is no common aesthetic. The effect is piecemeal and pastiche, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s something comforting in the idiosyncrasy and whimsy; something paradoxically unpretentious about structures with no agenda but to project success and stature.
