List-eria OR stantsia-spotting for the compulsive

A first draft at the stantsias visited by our tri intrepid pisateliy roughly in the order they were visited (all lists will be subject to revision, correction and expansion -- it is hoped the last action will actually make this entry interesting). With the intention of inducing mind-numbing stultification in the casual visitor, I've indicated stations that straddle two lines or are linked by points of intersection to other stations. One must be Completely Accurate.



Planernaya

Krasnopresnenskaya-Barrikadnaya



Kurskaya (circle and radial)-Chekalovskaya



Partisanskaya



Semyenovskaya



Ploshchad Revolutsiy-Teatralnaya-Okhotni Ryad



Shosse Entusiastov

Marksistskaya-Taganskaya (circle and radial)

Park Kulturiy (circle and radial)

Kievskaya

Belorusskaya (circle and radial)

Kitai-Gorod (two lines)

Marino

Baumanskaya



Pushkinskaya-Tverskaya-Chekhovskaya

Mayakovskaya

Komsomolskaya (circle and radial)



Cherkizovskaya



Borovitskaya-Biblioteka Imeny Lenina-Aleksandorvskiy Sad-Arbatskaya

Vorb'evy Gory

Universitet

Turgenevskaya-Chistye Prudy-Sretenskiy Bulvar



Rimskaya



Tretyakovskya (two lines)-Novokuznetskaya



Sviblovo

Babushkinskaya



VDNKH



Timiryazevskaya

Dimitrovskaya


Mendeleevskaya-Novoslobodskaya



Prospekt Mira (circle and radial)



Oktyabr'skaya


Leninski Prospekt



Sportivnaya



Frunzenskaya



Kropotkinskaya



Smolenskaya



Arbatskaya (other line)

Sokol



Rechnoy Vokzal

Myetro Lending Library

Here's a first, analphabete, bibliographically incoherent stab at listing some of the books etc that fed and continue to feed into the project. During the war the Metro stations were impromptu concert halls, meeting areas and, in one case at least, a library. These works line the shelves of our underground reading room.

Poetry

Mayakovsky poem ‘A Bit of Utopia’
Brecht, ‘The Moscow Metro Workers Take Possession of the Great Metro on April 27, 1935’
Valery Syutkin, ‘42 Minutes’ (song)
E Dolmatovsky, ‘Komsomol Volunteers’ (Комсомольцы-добровольцы)
Semion Kirsanov, ‘M’ (not found yet)
Demyan Bedny ‘Moscow’ (includes section about building the Metro ; not found yet)

Fiction

Alexander Khaletski, Metro (1985)
Andrei Platonov, Happy Moscow (posthumously published, 1991)
Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park, Pole Star, Red Square, and Stalin’s Ghost
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground and The Double, translated with intro by Jessie Coulson (Penguin Classics)
Sergei Lukyanenko, The Night Watch (UK publication, 2007)
Venedikt Erofeev Moscow Stations (1969)
Bela Illes story ‘Fire in the Metro’ (not found yet)
Il’f and Petrov kids story about the Metro (not found yet)
E Tarakhovskaya, M (1935) children’s book (not found yet)
Lev Kassil, Miracle Beneath Moscow (19??) (not found yet)
H.G.Wells, The Time Machine, intro by Marina Warner (Penguin Classics)
Pushkin, Fairy Tales, translated by Jacob Krup and Oliver Elton, edited by Elena Shabalova (P-2 Art Publishers, St Petersburg)
Moscow Metro Travel Guide, translated by Kate Cook, ed. Elena Krishtof (Knigi WAM)
Vladimir Nabokov, Nabokov's Dozen
Michael Frayn, The Russian Interpreter
Viktor Pelevin, The Blue Lantern
Mikhail Aizenberg, Say Thank You
Lev Rubinstein, Here I Am
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel, into by Jeremy Lewis (Penguin Classics)

Film

Komsomol Volunteers (Комсомольцы-добровольцы) (1957)
Metropolis (Fritz Laing, 1927)
Hammer and Sickle (Sergei Livnev, 1994)
Scientific Section of Pilots (Andrei E, 1996) serial killer on the metro
MMM (Eisenstein, never finished)
Pokrovvskie Vorota (1982)
Ironiya Sudbiy, Ili c Legkim Parom! (1975)
Troye v Lodke
Ballad of a Soldier, dir. Grigory Chukhrai (1959)

Travel

Jack Lindsay, A World Ahead
Alan Sillitoe, Road to Volgograd

Games

Metro-2 (based on an attempt on Stalin's life by the NKVD)
Metro-2: Death of the Leader (sequel)

ghost metro

Timetravel by Myetro

Morlockian reverberations continue to disturb the space-time continuum (AKA my head):

Tri linkniks

The lovely WAM book we picked up at Ismailovsky Market on routes around the Metro is mentioned here:
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/178681/

Tatanya Federova, who was a construction worker on the Metro and delivered a speech commended by Stalin, is interviewed here (where there's also a realplayer recording of her speech):
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentury/episodes/redflag/fedorovatranscript.html

Thirdly, the Metro completes its Biblical span with an anniversary celebrated here:
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/142275/

Tri coincidentals

Everyone knows creativity warps the space-time continuum or at least makes you pay attention to coincidences in a slightly more obsessive way than usual. Everyone, even dogs. When you're very focussed on a project, quite often little reinforcements will show up suggesting you're on the right track (excuse gratuitous rail-based punning), and this project has been no exception. Here are the three surviving members of The Coincidences, a super-smooth soul combo you may remember from 70s TOTP.

1. Three Men on a Boat: one of our initial impulses was to echo the famous comic novel, not just because we were going to bumble (or 'bummel' as J would put it) around in a vagon much as they did on a lodka, but also because we knew that this particular novel was translated into Russian because of its innocuous content, and well read during the Soviet period.

Therefore we were delighted, in our search through the underpass booths of Moscow for Soviet musicals and film versions of Bulgakov's novels, to happen upon, in the booth by Ploshchad Revolutsii, a Russian adaptation of the JKJ book which was also a musical. We were, however, a little disturbed when Andy switched on his TV that very evening and found the same film just happened to be playing. Unless they show it every night, freaky.

2. One of the analogies we'd been playing with since our arrival was the Morlock/Eloi dichotomy in Wells' Time Machine, not just to describe the underground/overground bumbling free aspect of our trip, but, as Wells intended, to replay the sharp division of industrialised society into mob and aristos, unter- and ubermensch, workers and bosses, that the Metro subverts and inverts with its buried palaces for the people.

Therefore I was a little astonished, on arriving at Sheremetevo Airport for the return flight, to wander into the DVD shop and find, not only was The Time Machine playing (unfortunately the Guy Pierce rather than the Rod Taylor version), but it was conveniently at that point in the movie when the Elois were raided by the Morlocks. Even more appropriately, I'd been the one having Morlock dreams. Freaky and deaky.

3. One of the recurrent fascinations of our trip was the story of Metro 2, the shadowy second system that served the Politburo and the KGB and, it was rumoured, was still in use and still being extended. I remember ten years ago being told a line ran from the Party bosses' dachas by Sparrow Hills, straight to the Kremlin. We'd grilled a few enthusiasts about this, scanned the fan site, and discovered there was a computer game called Metro 2.

Therefore we were delighted to discover through further 'research', that Metro 2 the game features a plot to assassinate Stalin which is supposed to take place around... where else but where we had ended up staying, quite by chance of course: Ismailovo. Freaky, deaky and their younger brother, Zekey.

Interim Report

We have just returned from Moscow where we spent 10 days exploring the city and its underground railway network. We visited over a third of the 176 stations on the Moscow Metro, went to the Moscow Metro Museum, interviewed the Director of the Museum and the grandson of one of the original Metro architects.

We watched the Communist Party demonstration in Revolution Square on May Day, supporters at a football game (Lokomotiv Moscow nil, Spartak Nalchik nil), worshippers celebrating Orthodox Easter, old men in a Banya (bath-house) and boat trippers on the Moscow River. We also visited the Bulgakov Museum, the Patriarch Ponds, Tsaritsino Park, Red Square, the VDNK Park, the Vernissage, the Gagarin Monument, the Sparrow Hills and the OGI collective. We met with artists Dima Topolsky and Aleksandra Paperno, with Tanya Ilyina from the British Council, and with the publisher and editor Tom Birchenough.

We have returned with copious notes and books, hundreds of photographs and many hours of audio recording. The next stage is to write the poems over the next six months. Even if we only write half what we have planned, we are confident that it is going to be a very strong book indeed.

Byelskaya

Boiling squirrel links:

Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4489792.stm

A red squirrel tsar has been appointed by Scottish Natural Heritage to help increase numbers:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3713744.stm

As the man from American Inventor says, another breakthrough in the war between mankind and squirrels:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=558348&in_page_id=1770

Vichod

This year (2008), from St George's Day (April 23rd) through the Orthodox Easter(April 28th), May Day and up to the election of Putin's successor (May 3rd), three British poets went on a short trip round and round the underground. This blog charts the results: notes, photos, sounds, drafts, links and factoids.

*

The Moscow Metro offers a singular perspective on the Russian psyche. Constructed over thirty years, largely during the Stalinist period, to provide transport, shelter, warmth, and a peculiarly Soviet grandeur, these 'People's Palaces' are at once stunning feats of architecture - packed with the minutiae of period iconography to the point of kitsch - and fascinating temples to the quotidian, where all Muscovite life rushes before you.

Its stations are named after the central principles and events of Russian society; they are named after its great writers, artists and scientists. They are constructed using marbles and materials from all over the vast hinterland of Mother Russia. The Metro is at once a microcosm of Russia itself, and a symbol of the infernal and purgatorial circles through which the Russian people have passed.

In the year of yet another significant transition in Russian life, when Putin officially hands over the reins of power to his successor, Medvedov, this project by three British poets will attempt to circumnavigate not just Moscow, but the cycles of cultural history which the Metro represents and continues to evoke.

This is a project which, like the Metro itself, combines multiple levels and appeals to a broad audience. The structural principle of the journey allows for both individual vignette and continuing narrative. The successive layers of the Metro, floor beneath floor, is echoed in the transition between forms - history, non-fiction, drama and poetry are all represented.

Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers variously write, edit and translate poetry ; they make films and public art; they are reviewers and anthologists, critics and cultural historians. They are also completely out of their depth, idealists abroad, babes in the abyss. Like their predecessors in that boat on the Thames (Jerome K Jerome’s novel is known as трое в лодке in Russia), these three Brits are adrift in a very foreign medium, and their collective response - poetic, comic, political, dramatic - will offer a unique insight into a culture poised between retrenchment and convulsive change.