Back to Moscow by Guillermo Erades Read Free Book Online

ladies’ night at the Duck. Wednesday night we were expected to attend the Moscow-famous Count down at the Boarhouse, where, if you arrived early enough, you could get up to four
drinks for the price of one. Thursday night was Propaganda night. Unmissable. And then, come the weekend, we had new clubs to explore, but also the old ones, which we still had to keep up with:
McCoy, Karma, Dirty Dancing, Beefeater, Papa Johns.
    One day Lyudmila Aleksandrovna handed me a reading list on Lermontov, which we were supposed to discuss at our next meeting. A week later I showed up in her office apologising
for not having read the articles.
    ‘But these articles were mostly in English,’ she said, gazing at me from behind her thick glasses. ‘You shouldn’t have any problem reading them.’
    ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I just didn’t have much time this week.’
    ‘Don’t worry, Martin, go back to the library right now and come back tomorrow.’
    She was pissed off.
    I decided not to go out that night and focus on Lermontov instead. After dinner, I sat in my room trying to read the articles, a selection of texts about the sociological and historical context
of
A Hero of Our Time
. The articles were interesting but I found it hard to concentrate. As I lay on my bed, taking a break from the reading, trying to focus on Mikhail Yuryevich’s
life and times, my head kept flashing up images of Propaganda. The dance floor, the chilled vodka, the pretty dyevs. It was Thursday night and, by now, the brothers were probably getting into the
club. I thought about the night I met Lena, when we left Propaganda and she took me to the rooftop to show me the view. I recalled how, at some point, I put my arm around Lena, and, before we
kissed for the first time, I had to listen to a long exposition on the importance of meditation and yoga in her life.
    Back at my desk, I tried to channel my thoughts from Propaganda back to Lermontov and the articles I had spread in front of me. But my mind rebelled, fought back and drifted to Propaganda.
    What was the point of coming all the way to Moscow if I was going to stay in my room reading articles?
    I began to think about the ultimate purpose of my academic work. When I’d first discussed my research with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, she’d suggested that I also use non-literary
sources. ‘If you are going to study the female characters in Russian literature,’ she’d said in our second meeting, ‘you could start by analysing the situation of women in
Russia.’ She then suggested that I read demographic studies, opinion polls, media analyses, and use all this scientific data to extract a clear picture of the role of women in Russian
society. ‘This could help you understand the real-life context in which literary heroines are born,’ she’d said.
    I could certainly check those sources, I now thought. In fact, if Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s point was that I form a clear picture of Russian women, I might as well adopt a more direct
approach. I could add, for instance, a primary source of qualitative data. It then occurred to me that meeting dyevs could well be considered, to some extent, part of my academic research.
    I stood up and began pacing around the small dusty room, contemplating the possibility of leaving Lermontov aside for the night and joining the brothers in Propaganda. From an academic point of
view, I told myself, it would be interesting to discern to what extent Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov – the whole bunch, really – were describing
Russian women as they
were
in real life, and to what extent they were describing
their own ideas
about Russian women. The more dyevs I met, I told myself, the better I would
understand the defining characteristics of real Russian women.
    Thrilled with my breakthrough, I took a quick shower, put on a black shirt and a thick coat, and headed for the street. In the taxi I continued to think about my research.