Trekhprudny Lane

I went looking for ghosts yesterday, and found several.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a course on the home: the built space, and our understanding of the word. We traced Western modes of living from itinerant European courts ("people pretty much camped in their houses") through the ornate nostalgia of the nineteenth century (gingerbread and inglenooks) to the "open plan" of the last half-century and our tendency now to gather around an island countertop in the kitchen. Terrific course. Witold Rybczynski's Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986) and The Grand Domestic Revolution by Dolores Hayden (1982) were two of the absolutely fascinating assigned texts. Partly because I'd spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe just before, and partly because I felt contrary, I wrote a paper on the Narkomfin building, designed by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinus in the late 1920s and built in 1932 a mere mile from where I live now. Yesterday, we finally went to have a look.

It was a building designed to teach the Soviet citizen how to live communally, how to transcend bourgeois notions of privacy and personal possession and participate more fully in community life. And it was a near-complete failure. By assigning each resident minimal and identical sleeping quarters, many without kitchen or laundry facilities and without much private space in which to gather or play, and by largely relocating the lives of young children to an on-site kindergarten and away from the nuclear family home, the architects hoped to encourage use of the shared kitchen, library, and leisure spaces. Instead, residents guerilla-wired their tiny spaces for cooking, communal areas went unused and were re-allocated, and with the arrival of Stalin, incoherent grandiosity (the style that prevails in Moscow architecture even today) replaced edgy modernist experiments like Narkomfin. 

Having seen only the architects' drawings and a few photos taken upon the building's completion in the thirties -- my undergrad years pretty much predated the internet -- I was shocked by the look of the place. Almost every door inside and out padlocked, and some strangely sealed like envelopes, with strips of paper stamped and signed. Traces left by that perennial Russian character, the inspector. 

But even through so many decades of accumulated rot, the design of the building shines feebly. Inside are the cleanest possible lines -- a wooden bannister atop a stucco wall with perfect curves, neat geometric tile floors, long airy strips of broken glass overlooking the decrepit courtyard. 

Zero, zero, absolutely zero ornament. Not a doorjamb, not a knob, not a light fixture with any trace of frivolous decoration. Okay, maybe the serifs on the apartment numbers. But they -- and the slightly diminished scale of everything; people must have been smaller -- reminded me just how old, and how revolutionary, the building is. Cantilevered, it seems to have sailed in and slowly come to rest in its place, "like an ocean liner," remarked an old gentleman who has lived for seventy-five years in an adjacent bloc and who accompanied us through. Like a sunken shipwreck. Weeds grow from mounds of cigarette ash on the windowsills.

The old man, one Vladimir Fyodorevich, pulled out a little black Moleskine with mousey writing inside and explained that so far this year, he has composed 4,065 riddles. He treated us to a few. 

It was strange to reread what I'd confidently written about Russia many years ago, working only from books. "Since the population of the capital city doubled between 1918 and 1936, the average living space allotted to a Soviet worker dropped from the already meager seven square meters to a desperate four and a half (Shvidkovsky 61)." Yes, fine, but how much more illuminating it was to walk through a space that the best architects dreamed up as a solution to this problem. Perhaps when my girls say they want to go to college, I'll send them traveling instead.

Since the leaves started falling and the weather turned damp and chilly, with brief bursts of sunshine that light up the golden domes and then quickly fade, Moscow is again at its most beautiful, and I remember our first walks, one year ago. 

The days are shortening fast. Already the little solar-powered hands on my wristwatch don't absorb enough light to glow all night; they disappear into the darkness by two or three in the morning. The powers above have not turned on the city's central heating yet, and this apartment seems perpetually cold, so I have been spending much of my time at home huddled: in a kitchen chair, in bed, in the girls' room. We've had a friend visiting from Paris all week, and each morning we all meet in the kitchen hugging ourselves, trying to preserve some warmth from bed. We found a cramped and scruffy cafe near the church where Pushkin got married and it's perfect for hiding on raw days. They are generous with cream toppings, art supplies, and that salty clear vegetable broth Russians make that fixes any malady.

Last Friday, a harvest festival at EB's detsky sad gave us a chance to stand, basically hypnotized, around an outdoor fire, and sing songs about hauling in the cabbages and apples and shaping big loaves of bread. To me, though, the old songs of abundance and merry work sounded as mournful and yearning as those we learned in March for maslenitsa, the painfully early folk rite of spring. 

We visited the Moscow Biennale, and it was a blast. More humor and glibness than substance, perhaps, but some of the pieces were very moving, like Sheeba Chhachhi's elegant temple to migration, both human and avian, using the garish plastic aquarium lamps for sale in ten thousand import dollar stores in cities around the world. And the phantom photos that appeared when we breathed on the tiny lidded mirrors by Jason Shulman. All in all, far too many animals, dead and alive, put to uses that benefit... whom? But it was a wonderland for the girls: literally anything could be waiting around the next corner.