To Moscow! To Moscow! Recently I was in Russia as a guest of the British Council. My friend Damian Barr hosts a regular literary salon in London, and the idea was to put one on here, with the poet and essayist Linor Goralik, the novelist Alexander Ilichevsky, the publisher Dan Franklin and me. Extraliterary considerations: long johns. I asked my Russian friend Natasha, who’s from the Perm region, how cold I could expect Moscow to be in December. She made a hum-haw noise. ‘Actually you can’t know. Sometimes it can be pretty warm. It may even get up to minus five.’ She wasn’t trying to be funny. The great refrain of Chekhov’s Three Sisters has the advantage of not needing a Cyrillic keyboard to reproduce: ‘B Mockby!’ In English lettering, though, it sounds less like a cri de coeur than the name of a bureaucrat in an experimental novel of the 1950s. What does Bernard Mockby do with his life, I wonder? To what drab brown home in Metroland, to what stolid housecoated wife, does he return of an evening?
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‘Talk to Russian writers,’ Linor said matter-of-factly as we sat before the event in the Cvet Nochi bar, ‘and the conversation will always turn to dead dogs and drunkenness.’ The other Russian writer appearing with us — Alexander, a winner of the Russian Booker Prize — announced that he doesn’t normally drink but intended to make an exception tonight. A man of his word, he was good and zonked by the time he was helped to his stool onstage, announcing genially that he was too hosed to read in English. He said something about dead dogs, at one point, and Linor grinned at me. The salon was, by all of our estimations, a roaring success. I asked Alexander whether he was conscious of writing in a tradition. He announced that the Soviet era had produced no literature, and that by the end of the 20th century there were only two writers worth reading. Unfortunately, he went to have a lie-down before I could get him to write down their names.
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I was last here two decades ago, when I was studying Russian for A-level and lived for a couple of weeks with a family in the suburbs. My memories are of hulking residential tower-blocks standing isolated in a landscape of brown mud and grey slush, beneath a blank white sky. All around, as if only recently and tentatively invaded, were birch forests. Indoors, we drank a lot of black tea while a babushka circulated from room to room carrying jars of pickle. I was never able to figure out where, or if, she slept. Reading what we do about the encroachments of hypercapitalism, I expected the centre of Moscow to look like midtown Manhattan these days. It doesn’t. Sure, you can buy Gucci in GUM. But the vibe, to the outsider, is the same: buildings and roads on a greater-than-human scale, greyness, cold, nullity overhead. The principal innovation seems to be the traffic jam: eight lanes of gridlock everywhere you look — like Los Angeles with sleet and no ready access to anti-depressants. ‘The city is not user-friendly,’ one lifelong Muscovite, whose commute by car takes two-and-a-half hours, told me. ‘It welcomes nobody.’
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One of the most unsettling things about post-Soviet Russia is the way in which the country’s past is recycled as kitsch. At Ismailovo — the giant tourist-trap flea-market in the shadow of the grotesque hotels erected for the 1980 Olympics — there’s row on row of matryoshka dolls. Lenin nested in Stalin nested in Krushchev nested in Brezhnev nested in Andropov nested in Gorbachev is the old joke. Now, under the thin snow, you can get Osama bin Laden with a succession of other terrorists nesting in him. Or, adding copyright infringement to bad taste, SpongeBob SquarePants. An array of pewter busts — Lenin having been the essential desk ornament for the 1980s student — contains Marx, Trotsky, Stalin and a figure that at first I take for Dobby the house-elf from Harry Potter. Oh. Vladimir Putin. In all this I detect not commentary, but the absence of it.
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We left Moscow on the day of the elections. As we nosed through the traffic, the subject came up with our taxi driver. Was he going to vote? My command of the language is hopelessly decayed but I know the words ‘Sovyetski Soyuz’ — Soviet Union — when I hear them, and the language of the body is universal — he was managing the very Russian-seeming trick of driving and shrugging at the same time. His line: why vote when the outcome is already decided? It was, he said with grim good humour, like old times. B. Mockby lives.
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Sam Leith’s most recent book is You Talkin’ to Me?, a guide to rhetoric.
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