Maternal Capital
by Joshua Ellison · 01/21/10
As you walk up Tverskaya Street, leading away from Red Square, you may have to struggle to picture the rather austere Soviet streetscape that was replaced by neon, with expensive stores, hotels, and foreign banks. This part of town can be shockingly opulent. By any standards, and especially compared with Moscow’s rougher outer edges, the city center is an island of abundance and luxury. The key demographic here seems to be exceptionally tall women wearing animal skins. The more of the animal still attached, the better.
If you can see the old Tverskaya in your mind’s eye, or even if you cheat and look at an old picture, it’s easier then to imagine what many locals must feel when they walk this street. You can imagine feeling a part of your life has been painted over; even if you are turning the same corners, crossing the same intersections, wandering out of habit toward a shop or bar that doesn’t exist anymore. Being surrounded by young people who don’t remember any different might only add to that dislocation.
Everyone who writes about Moscow does so, in one way or other, as a stranger. Often the writer came here from somewhere else and, even after a lifetime, is still adjusting to the city’s codes. By 1900, three-quarters of the population had been born somewhere else. For artists especially, Moscow was, and is, a place of pilgrimage and aspiration. A Ukraine-born novelist, now almost thirty years in Moscow, told me over coffee, “We’re like the French: everyone is born in the provinces, but hopes to die in Paris.” For her, Moscow is a still a place without a coherent shape, easily mythologized but too difficult to know intimately.
Because it’s been through such enormous changes, catastrophes, and wild revisions, Moscow can also make strangers out of its natives and longtime dwellers. In a place that ruptures, breaks, and rebuilds at such a terrifying pace, any sense of belonging is always somewhat conditional, always inherently fragile.
Writers, especially, have found themselves with a new standing, with a new set of rules. “You can write what you want, but you won’t be read,” is how one author described the current arrangement. “Now a writer is just a writer. A respected professional, but with no prospects and no moral influence.”
Something else stands out about literature in contemporary Moscow: the city itself, as it is today, seems largely absent. There are plenty of works about the past and speculative writing about the future. But the Moscow of today feels largely vague and remote.
By no means an expert, I tested this impression as often as possible. A prominent editor who “discovered Russian literature after perestroika” thought writers were still slowly digesting the Soviet experience. I heard similarly from others: there is still so much to say that could not be said before or could not be understood before. The present is always changing but, in Russia, so is the past.
A few days later, the topic came up again with a group of younger writers. A poet, a Moscow native who had been tutored in English since childhood, suggested that fiction depends on a wellspring of shared experiences, of unspoken codes and familiar gestures, of unifying memories. In Russia today, he said, no common bonds exist. In the Soviet Union, there was a broadly shared culture into which one was initiated in childhood. Today it’s gone and nothing has replaced it, especially nothing resembling a shared vision of the future. Poetry was thriving, they agreed. Poetry is the language of the inner life, while fiction is a medium of empathy and commiseration.
This winter in Moscow, especially, it felt like more big changes were on the way. The Russian economy was, and still is, in turmoil. In decadent Moscow, the signs of recession were mostly muted, but many were expecting the worst. Rumors were spreading; more than one person had heard from friends that people were selling their possessions on the streets of other cities, like Petersberg. One writer I met, who described herself as a liberal, said that this climate was making it even harder to imagine an alternate path for the country. They knew just how bad the Soviet and authoritarian models could be, but they also saw that the Western alternatives were more vulnerable and imperfect than they once had imagined. Russian liberals had nowhere to turn, she said, neither East nor West, inward or outward.
