Back to Moscow by Guillermo Erades Read Free Book Online Page A

I was aware, of
course, that my new methodology brought with it some technical difficulties. To begin with, I could anticipate a high degree of cross-contamination between the two populations of my study: heroines
from Russian books and women from Moscow’s nightlife. While it was surely real women who had inspired the heroines of the Russian literary canon, the opposite was also true: Tatyana Larina,
Anna Karenina, Natalya Rostova, they had all influenced the way Russian women saw themselves.
    I paid the taxi fare and strode towards the queue outside Propaganda. I needed to start meeting dyevs in a more structured way. I needed to learn about their lives, their ambitions, their fears.
In a later stage of my research I could merge the qualitative data obtained from these encounters with the quantitative data I could gather from scientific sources, such as sociological studies.
That would give me a complete picture of Russian women that I could compare with the behaviour of heroines in Russian literature.
    Of course, at this stage, I didn’t need to share these details of my research with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, I told myself as I walked past the bouncer and entered Propaganda – it
would be my own methodology, my unique approach, my very personal path into the core of the Mysterious Russian Soul.

10
    A N INITIAL MISTAKE I made was not taking notes on my encounters. This caused me a great deal of confusion. Dyevs had diverse and interesting stories and
I could at first identify some Tatyanas and Kareninas, but soon their backgrounds began to merge into one single narrative in my head and my many meetings turned into a continuous conversation with
a changing interlocutor.
    I often found myself in the awkward position of asking a dyev about a friend or a job she’d never had. When I noticed their confusion, I blamed my faux pas on my poor Russian. They seemed
happy to correct me but, to avoid further embarrassment, I began to carry notebooks so that I could keep track of my meetings. Now, on long metro journeys, or sitting alone in cafés, I would
take one of the red notebooks I’d purchased at the university, and I would scribble thoughts and bits from my conversations. With time, these notes – my field observations, so to speak
– became particularly useful, as they allowed me not only to quickly recall the background of each girl I met, but also to identify common features of the Russian woman, the kind of
information that could become handy at a later stage of my research.
    I also wrote down the new words and phrases I encountered. Thanks to my regular meetings, my vocabulary was being expanded by intriguing concepts, such as sudba, a word that was used often,
meaning fate or destiny, but in a distinctively Russian way. Events in life, I learned, were either ne sudba, when they didn’t happen and therefore were not meant to be, or sudba, which
implied a supernatural predestination against which simple human will was powerless. Once I understood the importance of this concept, I tried to use it as much as I could. And so I often found
myself walking along the Old Arbat or sitting in a café, holding a girl’s hand and telling her how I thought our meeting had been such a huge sudba. They liked that.

11
    M IND THE CLOSING DOORS . Next stop: Chistye Prudy.
    I was heading north on the red line, rocked from side to side, observing the other passengers, not thinking of anything in particular.
    As the metro clanked through endless tunnels, I began to reflect upon the sheer size of the city, how nobody could tell me how many people lived in it. More than in Paris or London or New York,
I was often told.
    Every day, millions of unsmiling Muscovites navigated their way through the underground arteries of the city. Silent strangers in dark clothes, crammed into wagons yet trying to avoid human
contact, staring at their newspapers, at their books, into the air. Not a smile. Every passenger in Moscow’s metro