In her utterly unsentimental memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam: Two volumes of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs have been translated into English by Max Hayward as Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. (Nadezhda is ‘hope’ in Russian, hence the brilliant titles.) Hayward has done an admirable job, yet I have felt the need to personally translate the passages from Mandelstam’s memoirs used in this book, maybe because by doing so I felt I could communicate more directly and more intimately with my readers.
Wherever you live, clothes are never just about clothes: I have come across the thrilling hybrid that is Nicholay Uskov while watching Gordonquixote (Гордонкихот) – an ‘ideas’ talk-show presented by journalist Alexander Gordon on Russia’s Channel One. The program dedicated to Uskov and glamur was aired on 20 February 2009.
A contemporary Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya: This is from a much-quoted article written by Tolstaya in the late 1990s for a short-lived quality newspaper, Russian Telegraph, closed down by the Russian financial crisis (default) of 1998.
Yes, the queues: Vladimir Sorokin’s ‘Farewell to the Queue’ is available in English translation on the Words Without Borders site.
My family left before the 1990s: I have drawn here on philosopher Natalya Zarubina’s essay ‘About mythology of money in Russian culture: from the modern to the post-modern’ (‘О мифологии денег в российской культуре: от модерна к постмодерну’), published by the Russianlanguage Sociological Research in my discussion of all the things I no longer know about money. Victor Pelevin’s quote comes from his mega-seller Generation ‘P’.
This refashioning and unleashing of Money as a force of nature: Susan Richards’s first book on the region, Epics of Everyday Life: Encounters in a Changing Russia, was published in 1991 by Viking. Her second book, Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in a Deep Heartland (I.B. Tauris) took sixteen years to live and write. It is, in other words, not a quick journalistic job, but a deep and long-burning exploration of what has happened to the people and the country since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One of the benefits of straddling two worlds: Ariel Dorfman, ‘The Nomads of Language’, The American Scholar, January 2002. This essay can be found under the title ‘The Wandering Bigamists of Language’ in Ariel Dorfman’s collection of essays Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980-2004, Seven Stories Press, 2004.
It suddenly dawns on me that I am practising my favourite game: This image is borrowed from Dina Rubina’s essay with an untranslatable title ‘And Not Here You Couldn’t Not Walk, or How Klara and I Went to Russia’ (‘“А не здесь вы не можете не ходить?” или Как мы с Кларой ездили в Россию’). It is available on Rubina’s official website. Rubina immigrated to Israel in 1990, but she is one of the most widely read and brilliant Russianlanguage writers working today. Several of her books, including the novel Here Comes the Messiah, have been translated into English.
Chapter 3: The space inside
I have never previously visited Petya and Natasha’s apartment: Brodsky’s words are taken from the essay ‘A Room and a Half ‘, dedicated to the memory of his parents. It can be found in Less Than One: Selected Essays, Joseph Brodsky, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.
The Hungarian historian István Rév: These quotes are taken from Rév’s brilliant book Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism, Stanford University Press, 2005. A very interesting English-language reflection on the making of Zhirinovsky and on the meaning of everyday life and everyday spaces can be found in Svetlana Boym’s ‘From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia’, Representations 49, Winter 1995. Boym is definitely worth looking up, particularly her books Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, Harvard University Press, 1994, and The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, 2001. For their part, Lev Rubinstein’s ideas come from the essay ‘Communal Pulp Fiction’, taken from his book Music Played at Home, Moscow, 2000. The essay is reproduced and translated in English on the very remarkable bilingual website Communal Living in Russia: A virtual museum of Soviet everyday life. The website, designed as a virtual ethnographic museum, has a wealth of literary, pictorial and documentary materials on communal living and spaces: www.kommunalka.spb.ru/.
‘Long before collective farms and Gulag camps’: I am indebted here to Russian anthropologist Ilya Utehin’s argument that the defining feature of communal apartments was ‘the transparency of space’. Utehin is one of the people behind the virtual museum Communal Living in Russia.
To ‘imagine what [Boris] Grebenshikov means: Music journalist Artemy Troitsky had a book on the history of Soviet rock music translated in English in the late 1980s: Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia, Faber and Faber, 1988.
As I was growing up, we called him by his initials: Kirill Kobrin is a cultural historian, essayist and journalist. (Last time I looked he was working for Radio Liberty, among other things.) The observation about his peers communicating in quotes from Aquarium is taken from a chapter entitled ‘ “Words” and “things” of the late Soviet childhood’ (‘“Слова” и “вещи” позднесоветского детства’) in Kobrin’s third book of essays Descriptions and Discussions (Описания и рассуждения), Moscow 2000.
Chapter 4: Enemies of the People
Marina Gustavovna sits at the kitchen table: Satirist Mikhail Zadornov’s observations about the triumph of Soviet ingenuity come from his book I Have Never Thought (Я никогда не думал), Moscow, 2006. ‘What can the aforementioned French woman do with a pair of stockings? Just wear them – and that’s it! That doesn’t take much brainpower. And our woman?…’
His name may have been largely forgotten for most of the twentieth century: I have drawn here on the work of Tatyana Shedrina, the most prominent and dedicated scholar of Shpet’s legacy in Russia and Marina Gustavovna’s best friend (’My best friend is thirty,’ Marina Gustavovna tells me). See G.G. Shpet, reconstructed, compiled and annotated by T.G. Shedrina, Essay on the Development of Russian Philosophy. Volume 2, (“Очерк развития русской философии”. Том. 2. Материалы) and T.G. Shedrina, ‘I Write as an Echo of Another’: Essays on the intellectual biography of Gustav Shpet, (“Я пишу как эхо другого…” Очерки интеллектуальной биографии Густава Шпета), Moscow, 2004. I have also used M.K. Polivanov, N.V. Serebrennikov, M.G. Shtorkh (eds), Shpet in Siberia: Exile and Death, (Шпет в Сибири: ссылка и гибель), Tomsk, 1995. M.G. Shtorkh is, in fact, Marina Gustavovna herself. Shpet can now be read in English. See his Appearance and Sense: Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and Its Problems, translated by Thomas Nemeth, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.