Elektrichkaland Reloaded

   This evening a series of thoughts race through my mind as I check some more potential links regarding this project. A note to myself that I must read this or that study, this or that article, look up about this or that subject. Art history, an academic piece on contemporary Russian nationalism, Soviet philosophy, studies of symbols of Russian identity (I've recently finished Tom Jeffreys' recent book The White Birch - h ow many ideas it has thrown up in my mind). My elektrichka  project must, I think to myself, connect everything with everything. Should I entitle it A Study of the Russian Periphery ? No, because the suburban train is a universal subject. How I can I neglect to mention Erdosain's suburban train journey in Arlt's two part masterpiece Los Siete Locos/Los Lanzallamas ? And then I read recently of a collection of tales on Mumbai's suburban trains (I think the collection hasn't been translated and yet I'll simply have to unearth something about...

I've been thinking today about how this project originated. If you like what were the ur-texts and the epiphanal moments?  I suppose I could psychoanlayse a certain fascination for trains all the way back to pre-birth (having travelled by train from the UK to Italy once in my mother's womb). A little more seriously, I may look back at a period when I was about 13 or 14 when I had an obsession with trains (which I then replaced with an interest in French literature after starting reading Sartre and Camus at the age of 15). But no the interest in elektrichka 's and peripheral locations surely developed in me much later. My fascination was always urban and even urban capitals (or, at least, highly significant cultural locations). Trieste, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Salamanca, Barcelona, Odessa, and then Moscow and St. Petersburg in my late twenties.  Perhaps, I should start again. I remember certain sensations of a trip from Palermo to Messina (I think) and once catching a train fr...

  Last September I decided to take some trips on my local elektrichka away from Moscow and further into the depths of the Pod Moskovian hinterland. My first trip was the town of Noginsk. On a rather wet afternoon I took the train and set off to walk around the town. My first stop was the local history (kraevedchesky) museum. It seemed to have had quite a makeover and they were keen for me to watch this classy video specially projected onto the walls before I walked around the museum - they'd obviously spent a great deal on making the museum 'contemporary'. I then walked through the rooms of the museum. It had a fair deal to look at but I realised that there was nothing about the revolutionary period of Russia's history. I was curious about the reason why. The custodian told me that nothing much happened - in Noginsk (or what was then called Bogorodsk) there was a peaceful handover of power. I left only half satisfied and then made my way through the town. The writer Bor...

  For almost a decade I contemplated how I could write about what had become my new surroundings: the town of Zheleznodorozhny. After first coming to Russia in 2000 and spending most of my early years in Moscow (with one year in the city of Novkuznetsk in Siberia's Kemerovo Region), I moved to Zheleznodorozhny in 2007. Moving from the capital city to a suburb was something of a trauma. Culture (film screenings and festivals, art exhibitions, book readings and meetings with the authors, concerts) had been ubiquitous in Moscow. In the town of Zheleznodorozhny there were nowhere to be seen. Only a trip by elektrichka and a return around midnight could return something of that lost world. Slowly I realised that I would not be returning to live in Moscow and that these new surroundings would have me in their grip. How many years have taught me that resistance was useless? Many, all too many. And yet to me there came a sense that maybe, just maybe this was a blessing in disguise. Of all ...