Andy's holiday reading: the notes

Jerome K. Jerome, Sketches in Lavender Blue and Green (1897)
Short-stories, mildly amusing

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel (1990)
Very funny – though not as funny as Three Men on a Boat. Some useful lines: ‘We have been much interested, and often a little tired. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and arte sorry when ‘tis over.’ ‘I wish no-one to read this book under a misapprehension. There will be no useful information in this book.’ ‘In this book there will be no scenery. This is not laziness n my part; it is self-control.’ ‘few foreigners care to listen to their own irregular verbs recited by a young Englishman.’ ‘I am haunted by the suspicion you might skip all this.’

Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Ideas in 1905 (1905)
Essays, mostly humorous, including the one about Russia

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography (1963)
Wonderful stuff, although tragically dated. Contains the line, ‘Unfortunately justice is the train that’s nearly always late’. Also, ‘There are times when I am very sorry I did not become a footballer. The thud of the bouncing leather ball was, to me, the most intoxicating of all sounds. To outflank the defences of the other side by feinting and dribbling and then to land a dead shot into the net past the helplessly spreadeagled goal-keeper, this seemed to me, as it still does now, something very like poetry.’

Venedict Erofeev, Moskva-Petushki (‘Moscow to the End of the Line’ or ‘Moscow Circles’)
Samizdat novel about a drunken nightmare train journey to the suburbs. Starts at the Kursk station.

Martin Cruz Smith, Red Square (1992)
Plodding third Renko novel.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864).
I didn’t like this at all, but there are a couple of lines we might be able to use : ‘The final end, gentlemen: better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so, long live the underground!’ and ‘I longed to be left alone in the underground’

Martin Cruz Smith, Stalin’s Ghost (2007)
Dreadful fifth novel in the Renko series, re-using all the main elements of the earlier books. Stalin’s ghost is seen on the platform at Christye Prudy station. A body turns up in Izmailovo Park. And this: ‘For the workers who burned with ambition, for soldiers slack-jawed from hash, for those to old and too poor to wave down a car, for revellers going home with a split lip and broken glass in their hair, for lovers who held hands even wearing gloves, and for the souls who had simply lost track of
time, the illuminated red M of the Park Kultury Metro was a beacon on the night.’

Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Complete Plays of Mayakovsky (Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, Mystery-Bouffe, The Bedbug and The Bathhouse)
Fantastic. Just brilliant. Also completely bonkers. The Bedbug and The Bathhouse are time-travelling comedies, (influenced by the ideas of Nikolai Fyodorov about science and nature) in which the future is used as a stick with which to beat the failings of the present. Very slapstick. Mad scientists. There is no mention of a bathhouse in The Bathhouse, although when the play was attacked by critics, Mayakovsky erected a huge banner in the theatre: ‘It’s hard to get rid of / The swarms of bureaucrats: / Not enough bathhouses, / Not enough soap.’ In The Bathhouse the Phosphorescent Woman says, ‘You and we came toward each other like two crews of workmen digging a tunnel, until we met – today.’

Andrei Platonov Moskva Chestnova (‘Happy Moscow’) (written in the 1920s but not published until 1999)
Very interesting novel, part allegory, part satire – also influenced by Fyodorov. The heroine, who was orphaned during the Revolution is called Moscow. And she is always happy (hence the title). More crazy scientists. Moscow helps build the Metro:
‘Her life was still long, what stretched out ahead of her was almost immortality. Nothing frightened her heart, and somewhere in the distance, ready to defend her youth and her freedom, cannons were dozing, the way a thunderstorm sleeps in the clouds during winter. Moscow looked to the sky; the wind was moving about like a living being, stirring the murky mist that humanity has breathed up during the night. // On Kanchevskaya Square, behind the plank fence surrounding the excavations, the compressors of the metropolitan railway were snorting away. A placard hung by the workers’ entrance: KOMSOMOLETS, KOMSOMOLKA! HELP BUILD THE METRO! YOUR FUTURE WORLD NEEDS A GREAT RAILWAY! // Moscow Chestnova believed, and went in through the gates; she wanted to take part in everything and she was filled by that indeterminacy of life which is just as happy as its definitive resolution.’

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog (written 1925, not published until 1987)
Almost perfect. More mad scientists inspired by Fyodorov. They transplant the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into a dog. The dog Sharik becomes Comrade Sharikov, a talking bi-ped and an easy joke about the limitations of science and progress (he still behaves like a dog, chasing cats and stealing sausages).

Sergei Lukanenko, The Night Watch (1998)
Daft and pedestrian supernatural thriller about the forces of Light and Dark that keep watch over Moscow. First in a trilogy. Some of the action takes place on the Metro (because Dark Magic doesn’t work so well underground). Occasional lines like: ‘I love the metro at night, but I don’t know why. There’s nothing to look at except the same old dreary adverts and the same old tired human auras, the rumble of the engine, the gusts of air coming in through the half-open windows, the jolting over the rails. The numb wait for your own station. // But I love it anyway.’

Viktor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2004)
My favourite Pelevin so far. The usual Bulgakov tricks of people becoming animals. The Russian FSB is run by werewolves. Russian prostitutes are were-foxes. Good satire, missed with the usual chunks of Buddhism. The were-fox telling the story does not appear to care for ‘metaphysical blockbusters in which good allows evil to feed, because evil allows good to feed, and so on’ - ie Lykyanenko. Best of all is the suggestion that the first dog into space was a were-dog – the Cheka agent Sharikov! (this is why the MS of Bulgakov’s story was suppressed for so long)

You say 'bradyashki', we say 'brodyagi'

As the song says 'potaeto, potahto, tomaeto, tomahto/ let's retitle this blog'. A Russian friend has pointed out that our previous title, 'Tri Bradyashki na Metro' was barely Russian -- 'brodyazhka' a diminutive for 'brodyaga' often refers to female vagrants, while 'na Metro' is more of a Ukrainian construction. So our title actually implied 'Three big girls' blouses who might as well be on the Kiev metro for all they know'. This, whilst being more accurate than we realised, clearly will not do. But I'd still like to keep a distinction between the name of this site, now firmly both Muscovite and masculine, and the title of the impending book, which remains 'Troye v metro' -- Three Men on the Metro.

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/