A stay in Moscow … and A Gentleman in Moscow

In my late 20s, I went to Moscow to study at the Moscow Circus School as an aerialist. Now that you know this, my enormous shoulders should make sense. Don’t ask me to show you any tricks, please: these days I’ve got a writer’s body. Ahem.

Moscow in the early 2000s left a deep impression on me. It felt a bit haunted. The crumbling concrete Soviet-era student lodgings retained a true melancholy. The rubbish chute spewed garbage on to the communal shower room floor. Our washing froze in buckets overnight. A stray dog died beside the entrance and was covered in snow only half a day later: our neighbours explained haltingly that it wasn’t the dogs they worried about, it was the homeless men who fell down drunk in the snow. Like the dogs, their bodies would be found in spring.

Ancient, destitute grandmothers lined the subways selling household tat or asking for coins. Someone pointed out that these scores of old women living in poverty were the last of a generation decimated by Stalin’s purges. There were no men LEFT to beg.

You could all-too-easily break an ankle skidding on the frozen tiled steps of those subways.

You could buy a two litre bottle of vodka for kopecks (pennies).

You could see the advancement of the luxury stores up Tverskaya Street, giving the new generation of millionaires somewhere to splash their fast-flowing cash. A new Russia had already emerged. It was hard to imagine that people like those grandmothers, people who had been left behind once already in late twentieth-century Russia, would be any better off for it.

I visited the incredible palaces and museums, took classes, bought ironic post-Soviet souvenirs and wondered just how many Russias lived in Moscow simultaneously.

My family contains writers and readers who have long admired the rich poetry and literature of Russia and Ukraine. Of course, it seems odd to write that sentence, a sentence that obliterates the cultural differences between these two countries, in the content of Russia’s current war of aggression on its neighbour. But I’m simply writing this to explain that in a family who loves Chekov, Bulgakov, Tolstoy and Akhmatova, it was really no surprise that one such family member should recommend I read A Gentleman in Moscow. Nor was it a surprise that I would fall in love with the book.

Let’s face it: Moscow was under my skin already, in her multi-layered and melancholic way. The simultaneous Russian identities that I glimpsed 20 years ago are at the heart of A Gentleman in Moscow, where the story takes place against a backdrop of decisive moments in Russian history, when a ‘new Russia’ sweeps in to replace the old.

Given my context, this was a book for cherishing: and cherish it I did.

So: to the book. Read that post here.

Tell me about the laces that have never left you!