Back to the Center

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Sveta and I travel to Moscow a lot. Since we arrived in Russia, she’s made six capital trips; I’ve made four. With one exception all of these visits has lasted all of a day. For example, last week Wednesday we boarded the train at 7:30 am and arrived in Moscow Thursday morning at 5 am. Perm lies two time zones ahead of Moscow, so we that means we rode for 24 hours. Our train left Moscow that evening at 8 p.m.

Train rides are not unpleasant. They offer rest, the chance to get that 15 hours of sleep that I need ever now and again, or to finish Moby Dick. The train is actually pleasant if you ride something other than economy class. Sveta and I rode “coupe,” the train equivalent of business class, back to Perm. With no toilet regime and, thankfully, two pleasant traveling companions, we had our own rail vacation. And I discovered it was Fedellah the Parsee, and not Ahab, whose corpse the doomed whalemen saw pinned to the leviathan.

But why do Sveta and I chose to experience Moscow at 12 hours a pop? Once because Sveta needed to take the GRE, but mainly because immigration visas require lots of visits to the Consulate.

And what do we do during those precious hours? We sit at this coffee shop near the American embassy, or in small plastic chairs inside the embassy. We stand outside the embassy, which is nearby the people’s shrine/memorial to Michael Jackson. We walk through the zoo, or through the halls of Polytechical museum. And we descend into the metro - the Moscow metro deep in the earth - where different trains take us to beautiful stations.

On this most recent Moscow visit we had just enough time pay a visit to the much talked about new station. A new station in the Moscow metro is no ordinary thing. A new station is always spectacle that sometimes rises to art.

The name of the new station: “Dostoevskaya.”

I admit, my impressions of the station had been largely formed by the pictures I had seen in the English-language newspaper on hand at the coffee shop near the American embassy. I knew, for example, that “Dostoevskaya” featured an oversized black and grey marble head of the great Dostoevsky. I knew too that the walls depicted famous scenes from his most famous novels. Including a famous ax murder.

Nabokov, in a backhanded compliment, wrote that Dostoevsky should have been a playwright - he had a hand for dramatic, overwrought, hyperventilating sequences of nightmare reality. And he did. But I suspect that the bleary-eyed commuter might not want to daily witness ax murders, suicides, the devil, and multiple variations of urban anomie depicted in black and grey marble on his way to work or, god forbid, way back home. On the whole Dostoevsky is better digested in the quietude of a 24-hour Kupey ride out to the provinces surrounded by bland pleasantness than in the dizzy subterranean rush beneath a city whose skyline changes weekly. Dostoevsky might best be experienced, however, in 5th period algebra II.

That was when I read and re-read lots of the man I once called “Dos.” Back in those days my brother Johnny and I thought it was real funny to say “Dos is boss.” It isn’t, but we were floored by everything we read. Now Russians frequently tell me it’s foreigners who love Dostoevsky, and maybe my ardor has cooled since my initial encounter. I haven’t felt the desire to re-read Dos in years, but Crime and Punishment will always be the first book that really consumed me. I remember reading the first part and not being able to sleep. In a feverish fit (what else would he inspire?) I ran six miles in the early morning. I had never before and have rarely since, drawn such energy from words on paper. I was Raskolnikov - Dos saw me! Reading that book was scary and liberating and in its own way great fun. I read on and found Dos could get even better. I also discovered a few years later when I was preparing to enter the University of Iowa that I needed to take remedial algebra II.

Of course Dostoevskaya was just an extra. The immigration visa - the reason for the majority of these day trips - Sveta got. So it was a happy ride back, pleasant blandness and all.

Soon, within the next two weeks, Sveta and I will be flying to the States. We don’t have jobs or any definite prospects. We did this two years ago. We know this mixture of excitement and anxiety and are looking forward. But I still look back. And I want to return to Perm sooner rather than later.

Happy early Fourth of July!

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