Neglinnaya: A radial street in the center of Moscow; until the end of the eighteenth century it was not a road but a river (narrow and shallow).
Yauza: A river in northeast Moscow.
association by similarity: The association of one thing with another thing that is similar to it.
associations by contiguity: The association of things that occur in proximity to each other in time or space.
separated only by thin walls, often plywood that doesn’t even reach the ceiling: “The partition (was) the central architectural feature of the communal apartment. Most (were) made of plywood . . . After the expropriation of property, the old rooms and hallways were partitioned and subdivided . . .A plywood partition was so much flimsier than a wall . . . It let through all the noises, the snoring, the fragments of conversation, the footsteps . . .” Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 146.
James: William James (1842–1910), an American philosopher and psychologist; the author of Talks to Teachers on Psychology, in which he describes the laws of contiguity and similarity: “When you recite the alphabet or your prayers, or when the sight of an object reminds you of its name, or the name reminds you of the object, it is through the Law of Contiguity that the terms are suggested to the mind. The Law of Similarity says that, when contiguity fails to describe what happens, the coming objects (in our thought) will prove to resemble the going objects, even though the two were never experienced together before. In our ‘flights of fancy,’ this is frequently the case.”
Bain: Alexander Bain (1818–1903), a Scottish philosopher and the author of the pioneering textbooks on psychology The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will.
Church of the Nativity at Putinki: Malaya Dmitrovka Street, 4. Commissioned by Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in 1649.
Izmailovo: The vast patrimonial estate of the Romanovs inherited in 1654 by Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, whose additions included three churches, a bridge and bridge tower, dams and mills, and many wooden manors.
Kolomenskoye: Another royal estate that flourished under Aleksei Mikhailovich; in 1649 the tsar added new wooden manors and a church, in 1657 more wooden manors, and in 1667 a wooden palace which, due to being worked on at different times, lacked the proper symmetry.
prospective: A drawing in perspective; also, a perspective view.
Zubov: Ivan Zubov (1677–1744), an engraver known for his long views of Izmailovo, the only images of that village by a Russian artist that survive.
Smirnoy: Smirnoy-Ivanov, the master palace carpenter under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich.
Potapov: Pyotr Potapov, an architect best known for the elaborate thirteen-domed Church of the Assumption on Pokrovka Street (c. 1699); it survived until 1936.
Postnik: Postnik Yakovlev, the builder of St. Basil’s Cathedral (1555–1561) on Red Square.
The maze of Moscow side streets made short work of the straight line: An American correspondent was similarly struck by the chaotic quality of Moscow in the 1920s: “Theoretically straight, the avenues have a wayward manner of changing course unexpectedly or narrowing sharply for no reason . . . Within the neat design of avenues and boulevards is the maze of side-streets, narrow, tortuous, often turning snakelike on themselves, and a mystery even to old Muscovites. The serpentine Moscow River, always intruding where it is least expected, adds to the tangle.” Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (London: George G. Harrap, 1938), 59.
an odd volume of Solovyov: One of the ten volumes of the Russian philosopher’s Collected Works (1911–1914).
On the doors . . .there was usually a note: The narrator is looking for a room. Most of the people for whom he has letters of introduction live in communal apartments.
Zabelin: Ivan Zabelin (1820–1908), a historian-archaeologist; the author of History of the City of Moscow (in Russian, 1905).
Martynov: Aleksei Martynov (1820–1895), a Moscow archeologist; the author of The Names of Moscow Streets and Side Streets, with Historical Explanations (in Russian, 1881).
Snegiryov: Ivan Snegiryov (1793–1868), a historian, ethnographer, and folklorist; the author of Moscow: A Detailed Historical and Archaeological Description of the City (in Russian, 1865).
the thirteen fever sisters: A folk explanation for the onset of colds and chills in winter. Every year on January 2 the hideous winged fever sisters (nine or twelve, not thirteen) are driven out of their underworld caves by Frost and Winter; they seek refuge in warm log huts where they attack the “guilty.” This pagan tradition was later linked to a Christian one, that of Saint Sisinnius, one of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste; his memory is celebrated in early spring (March 9), the height of the fever season.
Helicon: A Boeotian mountain known by the Greeks as the home of the Muses, a part of Parnassus.
Parnassus: A mountain near Delphi with two summits, one of which was consecrated to Apollo and the Muses.
Moscow of the Taverns: A cycle of poems (1924) by Sergei Esenin peopled with prostitutes, gangsters, and syphilitic accordionists.
Imaginists: A well-organized, publicity-savvy poetic movement (1919–1925) of which Esenin, Anatoly Mariengof, and Vadim Shershenivich were founding members. The Imaginists championed the “image in and of itself”; they promised to rid form of “the dust of content”; they maintained that “the only law of art, the only and incomparable method is to reveal life through the image and the rhythm of images.” During their brief heyday, the Moscow-based Imaginists owned a succession of literary cafés, two bookshops, and a cinema. When the state publisher Gosizdat balked at printing their provocative poetry collections, they started their own imprints, the most important of which (Imazhinisty) brought out forty books in four years.
Today this school lives cooped up in its cramped Hotel: Gostinitsa dlya puteshestvuyushchikh v prekrasnom (Hotel for Travelers in the Beautiful), a literary journal published by the Imaginists (1922–1924), a forum for their often conflicting ideas and radical pronouncements. Four issues appeared in all; two contained stories by Krzhizhanovsky (Istoriya proroka and Proigranny igrok).
“Homer nods”: Even the best of us have lapses. The phrase is from Horace’s Ars Poetica (first century BC): “I am aggrieved when sometimes even worthy Homer nods, but in so long a work it is allowable if drowsiness comes on.”
Lezhnev: Pseudonym of Isai Altshuler (1891–1955), the editor of the short-lived (1922–1926) socio-literary journal Rossiya. Called a “two-faced Janus” by Pravda for printing the writings of non-Communists, Lezhnev rebutted the charge in an article entitled “O zorkosti odnoglazoi i dvuglazoi” (On One-Eyed and Two-Eyed Vigilance). It ran in Rossiya (no. 3, 1922): “I will not defend Lezhnev,” wrote Lezhnev. “He is undoubtedly a muddleheaded man of vice. But his vice is not what you think. His vice is in trying to see things with both eyes, unseasonable as that may be, in aiming for a two-eyed vigilance, in accommodating both reflections of the present time in their proper historical perspective, in attempting to blend them into a single whole image so as to obtain that synthetic perception of an era without which you will be like a blind ram helplessly and pathetically knocking against a fence.” Three years later, Lezhnev printed Krzhizhanovsky’s “Postmark: Moscow” in Rossiya (no. 5, 1925) along with the second installment of Bulgakov’s The White Guard.
Mayakovsky: Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), the goggle-eyed poet, playwright, and maker of agitprop posters. From 1913 to 1915 he lived in Moscow’s Presnya district, a center of revolutionary activity in both 1905 and 1917.
Aleksei Tolstoy: A novelist, short-story writer, and playwright (1883–1945). “The eye of the artist, his observation beam,” wrote Tolstoy, “is straight and sharp; it sees only what it needs to see and sees what others do not.” Pisateli ob iskysstve i o sebe (Moscow-Leningrad: Krug, 1924), 11.
Chukovsky: Kornei Chukovsky (1882–1969), a children’s poet, literary translator, and critic then living in Leningrad (Soviet-era St. Petersburg).
“Aleksei Tolstoy only sees”: Chukovsky published a long appraisal of A.N. Tolstoy in the Leningrad journal Russkii sovremennik (no. 1, 1924). He maintained that the charm of Tolstoy’s always “featherbrained” characters lay in their “magnificent, bottomless stupidity,” that Tolstoy’s books contained not a single idea large or small, “not even one tiny thought.” Reprinted in Chukovsky’s Collected Works in Russian, vol. 8 (Moscow: Terra, 2004), 547–68.
Mr. Williams Hardisle, a stockholder in Trust D.E.: Trust D.E. (in Russian; Berlin, 1923), a satire by Ilya Ehrenburg, depicts the destruction of Europe by an American trust. The trust is underwritten by Hardisle, the jaded adventure-seeking son of an oil baron. He plans to marry in five years and wants to honeymoon in “a real desert without any people.” With Hardisle’s $7 billion, Trust D.E. turns Europe into just that.
Ehrenburg: Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), the Soviet writer and war correspondent, was at home in Western Europe where he mainly lived from 1908 to 1941.
Pilnyak: Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938), the dominant figure in Soviet literature following the publication of his novel of the Russian Civil War, The Naked Year (1922), a collage of discordant images, disjointed scenes, and often conflicting ideas.
Pasternak journeys in vain from Moscow to Marburg: Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), a poet and writer. As a philosophy student at Moscow University in 1912, Pasternak went abroad to study with Hermann Cohen at the neo-Kantian Marburg School. “But from his very first day in Marburg he realized that the city delighted him aesthetically, not philosophically, that he rejoiced in it as an artist, not as a thinker, and that he had come here not to continue his studies in philosophy, but in order to bid them farewell.” Dmitry Bykov, Boris Pasternak (Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 2007), 67.
Tikhonov: Nikolai Tikhonov (1896–1979), a Soviet poet, writer, and literary official. His “Ballad of the Blue Packet” (1922), a celebration of the early post-revolutionary years, contains the line: “But the men in the Kremlin never sleep.”
October: The Bolshevik coup of October 1917.
a Leningrad, no, a Petersburg man of letters: A Soviet, no, a Russian man of letters (i.e., born and educated before 1917).
Ringing at the front entrance for the fortieth minute: The narrator evidently lives in a building that is locked at night by an old custodian who sleeps on the ground floor but is rather deaf so doesn’t hear the bell when someone is locked out.
Moscow Synopsis: Actually Kiev Synopsis. The first textbook of Russian history (Kiev, 1674), it contains many myths and spontaneous inventions.
Upon a shore of desolate waves . . .: The first lines of the prologue to Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale” (1833). Peter the Great is standing on the banks of the Neva contemplating the city he will build to defy the Swedes and break a window to the West. Alexander Pushkin: Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, trans. Walter Arndt (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984).
“And Vasily the Greek said to the prince . . .”: A slightly distorted version of one of the founding legends of Moscow: a prince, Danilo Ivanovich, accompanied by a wise and prescient Greek, goes in search of a site on which to build his capital city.
Monroe: Paul Monroe (1869–1947), an American educator who worked in China; the editor of the Cyclopedia of Education (1910–1913).
Hanlin Yuan: Created in the eighth century, this academy was entrusted with composing state history, biographies, court papers, patents, epitaphs, prayers, etc. Closed in 1911 when the Qing dynasty fell.
Sokolniki: An ancient pine forest in northeastern Moscow associated with writers (e.g., Chaadayev, who wrote the third of his Philosophical Letters there, and Tolstoy, who staged a duel in War and Peace there).
“I discovered a fifth element: mud”: Napoleon said this, but about Poland, while fighting the Russian army there in 1806–1807: “Dieu, outre l’eau, l’air, la terre et le feu, a crée un cinquième élément: la boue.”
I have in my pencil box almost all of pencil Moscow: Blue (editors); red (censors); indelible (party apparatchiks); fragile graphite (writers now writing); unsharpened striplings (future writers); stubby ends (finished writers).
in the middle of . . . Arbat Square there stood a large wooden theater: Built by Karlo Rossi in 1807 and said by contemporaries to have resembled the Parthenon; destroyed by fire in 1812.
Mademoiselle Georges: Marguerite Georges (1786–1867), a celebrated French actress. She performed in St. Petersburg (1808) and Moscow (1809, 1812) before the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, whose mistress she had been.
Semyonova: Ekaterina Semyonova (1786–1849), an extraordinarily beautiful, if poorly educated Russian actress who excelled at classical tragedy. Where Georges had technique, Semyonova had feeling. (Pushkin preferred the “incomparable” Semyonova to the “soulless” Georges.)
one strangely lingering spectator: A bronze statue of Nikolai Gogol, seated and brooding at the head of Prechistensky (now Gogolevksy) Boulevard, facing Arbat Square. (In 1952, Stalin had him removed to a nearby courtyard.)
like some bumpkin, in a forest of three pencils: Presumably the blue-and-red pencil (editor-censor), the indelible pencil (party apparatchik), and the graphite pencil (Soviet writer writing of and for the proletariat).
Granat’s Encyclopedia: A serially issued Russian encyclopedia that survived the transition to Soviet rule owing in part to the leftist sympathies of its publishers, Alexander and Ignaty Granat. Volume 28 of the seventh edition, prepared shortly before October 1917, contains a long article on Marx and Marxism by Lenin.
Arosev: Alexander Arosev (1890–1938), a party and government official and a writer. Arosev was on the board of the Moscow-Leningrad publishing cooperative Krug, which brought out his story collection Belaya Lestnitsa (The White Staircase) in 1923.
Alexander Grin: Born Alexander Grinevsky (1880–1932); the author of Scarlet Sails (1923) and other fantastic tales set in his imaginary country of “Grinlandia.”
Andrei Bely: Symbolist poet and writer (1880–1934). In the early 1920s Bely lived briefly and unhappily in Berlin. He described his impressions of this “bit of Europe” in a book called One of the Dwelling-Places of the Kingdom of Shadows (1924).
Pyotr Nikolaevich Miller: A historian and archaeologist (1867–1943); the curator of the Old Moscow Museum (1919–1926).
All Saints Fire: So called because it began in the All Saints Church; it destroyed the entire city of Moscow in a matter of hours.
Kitai-Gorod: A settlement first of traders and artisans, then of boyars and clergy, outside the Kremlin’s eastern wall. A stone wall was built around this settlement (1535–1538) by Ivan the Terrible’s regent mother, Elena Glinskaya, to guard against further incursions by the Tatars and the Lithuanians.
Oprichnina: A special administrative elite, armed forces, and royal domain created by Ivan the Terrible.
the manuscript of Dead Souls: Part two, which Gogol first burned in the summer of 1845.
Johann Georg Korb: The secretary of the embassy sent by Emperor Leopold I to Peter the Great in Moscow (1698–1699). Korb kept a journal, later published in Vienna (undated) as Diarium itineris in Moscoviam. The edition was destroyed at the request of the Russian government, making surviving copies a bibliographical rarity. Korb’s journal first appeared in Russian in 1866–1867.
Neglinnaya River: Now runs through a pipe under Neglinnaya Street.
Pyotr Sheremetev: A Russian count (1713–1788) famous for his eccentricities, love of the arts, and fantastic wealth. He turned Kuskovo, his summer residence near Moscow, into a small Versailles.
Catherine the Great wrote to Voltaire: Their correspondence (in French) began in 1763, soon after Catherine’s accession to the Russian throne, and ended with the French philosopher’s death in 1778; translated into Russian by Ivan Fabian, the letters were published in Moscow in 1803.
the water of life and death: In Russian folklore, the water of death (also called healing water) heals fatal wounds, knits the severed parts
of a dead body back together, but does not revive it; for that one needs the water of life.
“The Internationale”: An anthem of international socialism—and of the Soviet Union (1918–1943).
that mansion behind the acacias: Stankevich Street, 6. In the nineteenth century this mansion was owned by Alexander Stankevich, brother of Nikolai, the Moscow University–educated thinker for whom the street (formerly Chernyshevsky Lane) was renamed in 1922.
Stankevich: Nikolai Stankevich (1813–1840), a thinker and founder of a famous Moscow discussion circle devoted to questions of philosophy and ethics. Stankevich held that the main task of the Russian intelligentsia was to promote ideas of humanism. Sick with tuberculosis, he spent his last years abroad, where he died.
Atropos: The eldest of the three Fates in Greek mythology; where Clotho spun the thread of life and Lachesis measured it out, Atropos cut it with her “abhorrèd shears.”
Bely’s “Arbat”: Andrei Bely’s reminiscence of this once village-like street in the middle of Moscow where he grew up in the 1880s and ’90s; first published in Rossiya (no. 1, 1924). Krzhizhanovsky began living on the Arbat in 1922.
Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker: Maroseika Street, 5. The church on this site was originally built of wood (1468) by Ivan III (in thanks when that year’s great fire did not spread to the Kremlin), then rebuilt in stone (1697).
the little wooden church at Solomennaya Storozhka: Designed by F. O. Shekhtel (1916); closed in 1935 and dismantled in the 1960s.
Praises to the Virgin at Bashmachki: A tall stone church (c. 1700) on Volkhonka Street with five domes, not counting the one on its “Gothic” belfry; razed in 1932.
Krutitsky Tower: A seventeenth-century gate tower attached to what was then the Metropolitan’s Residence. The tower is faced with some two thousand enamel tiles of different colors. In 1788 Catherine the Great abolished the Krutitsky diocese; for the next two centuries it served mainly as a military barracks.
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