An innocent abroad: a Dutch tour operator in 1980s Russia

‘One morning in late October 1988,’ begins The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street, ‘this dapper-looking guy from Leiden asked me if I might be able to deliver 7,000-odd Bibles to the Soviet Union.’ It’s the kind of line you might hear in a bar when you accidentally catch the eye of the resident storyteller — a tale so implausible it could just be true. Where on the scale between fact and fiction Pieter Waterdrinker’s memoir lies is impossible to tell, and beside the point: his engrossing 400-page account of post-Soviet disorder grips you and doesn’t let go.

We meet the author — who may be the successful Dutch novelist himself, a projection of him, or most likely a composite version of the two — living in Saint Petersburg with his wife Julia and three cats on Tchaikovsky Street, named not after the composer but ‘some communist or other’. This is characteristic of Waterdrinker’s informal, unpolished style, nimbly translated by Paul Evans. His prose is supercharged with cantankerous remarks (Lenin is ‘a son-of-a-bitch from Simbirsk’) and sweeping philosophical quips (happiness is ‘the absence of unhappiness’).

Grudgingly he agrees to write a book to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution — he uses the money to fund his brother-in-law’s boat — and decides to focus on Tchaikovsky Street, where he and Julia are the latest, and it turns out the last, of a long line of illustrious former residents, including the symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius and Dostoevsky’s widow. Rasputin, ‘that holy fool’, lived just around the corner. And so the book becomes three stories folded in one: his witnessing of Russia’s capitalist boom after the Soviet collapse; his present life in Saint Petersburg; and a brief history of the revolution.