We took a day trip, our first in Russia. (Plenty of excursions have turned out to be day trips in the past six months, but this was our first fully intentional day trip, and a chance to get out of the city while the sun was shining.) We caught a packed train in the morning. A procession of child musicians and small-goods hawkers walked up and down the aisles almost without pause... we stopped at every single station we passed, including one named "Truth" and another "Platform Kilometer 43," on which four dogs sat waiting. Trees! Sunlight sparkling on snow! EB thought the clumps of ice still caught in the birch branches were flowers. Eventually we disembarked at a deserted platform amid snowy pines, relieved ourselves in the woods, and walked the rest of the way to a small estate where a nineteenth-century railroad magnate had created an artists' colony devoted to reviving Russian folk forms. The ceramic stoves and heavy painted beams suggested coziness, but cordons prevented us from really entering most of the rooms, much less losing ourselves in the aesthetic for a moment. It was bureaucratically complex, with a dozen buildings requiring their own tickets, each of which is clipped with scissors in a different place. One must purchase separate permissions for taking photos inside and taking them outside. Very little is left of the merry, magical spirit of camaraderie that is said to have marked the place a century ago. The old women who zealously guard the artifacts on display in each cabin certainly helped squash it. "Shut the door! It's cold!" they snapped almost to a one as we maneuvered the stroller under the low carved lintels.
It took all of our stamina. The pictures are from the empty train back to Moscow.
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