Evaporation
My first few visits back to Moscow felt like heaven.
Then something happened, with me and with Moscow. First
I began noticing fresh cracks on the walls of buildings
in the very centre of the capital, in previous epochs
impeccably restored. Then I noticed the disappearance of
many historical buildings. Then – evaporation of the
whole quarters. In fact, the whole capital was
evaporating together with the Moscovites. The people now
looked like guests in their own house. The tasteless,
unbelievably ugly concrete fakes were gradually
replacing the old architecture, and not somewhere on the
outskirts but in the very heart of Moscow. I felt more
and more suffocated, spiritually and physically,
sneezing and coughing in the Moscow streets. There were
still oasises: museums, art galleries, churches, book
shops, and I ran from one into another trying not to
breathe in deeply in between.
This could not continue endlessly of course. During my
last visit I spent most of the ten days shamefully
inside our apartment drinking wine to calm myself down.
Outside was the nightmare of ugliness and suffocation.
All I saw was the exhibition of the icons of nun
Iuliania in the Andronikov monastery and also the old
towns, Zaraysk with Colomna. My friends took me to
Zaraysk because I wanted to see the birthplace of my
favourite sculptor, Anna Golubkina. The town was
deteriorating, a few elderly enthusiasts still kept the
house-museum of Golubkina’s family. Kolomna, about the
beauty of which I often heard from my grandfather, met
me with very fine, slender churches above the river and
some huge ugly glassy shape next to them – a gigantic
jelly fish squashed on the green grass. “This is the Ice
Palace”, said my friend “Yeh they spoiled the view but
it is OK, everything is OK in Russia”. I was a foreigner
you see.
I did not know yet that in the Andronicov monastery
where I admired the icons of nun Iuliania the cemetery
was already half-destroyed. The fake grave of our
greatest iconographer, St Andrey Rublev, was then built,
together with a restaurant for tourists. It was that
very monastery which the teachers of my Art College were
enthusiastically helping to restore years back.
Indeed I knew almost nothing when I came to Moscow three
years ago last time. All I knew was the sense of the
thickening doom and inability to breath. I left my
birthplace being shocked with myself – during those ten
days I did not even attend a single Liturgy.
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