Elektrichka Land Reloaded (Announcing a Project)

 

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 the books on Russia it is truly rare to find any that have attempted to describe these spaces. Moscow, yes; Saint Petersburg, of course and maybe those aesthetic areas and regions full of history and wooden architecture. The Kolomna's, the Pskov's, the Novgorod's and if we are to go further afield (and into disputed territories) the Koktebel's etc. Yet it is truly difficult to find mentions of all those stops along the elektrichka lines. They have not been imagined into major texts (and certainly not into texts known by the foreign language reader). And yet they are not without their stories, not without their histories, not without their inhabitants... they surely leave some kind of unexplored trace worthy of research.

Walking through them noticing the historical plaques, stopping off on the elektrichka's and visiting the local history museums a certain idea began to emerge. Of a project that could possibly be written. And yet, how to fuse it with other ideas. With a hundred failed (unwritten) projects. This surely cannot  simply be one that talks about the marginal realities of small and marginal places. It must find ever widening links, as though it never intends to be a text. In a way I would like it to recuperate those texts that I have never written or never finished as though every enthusiasm that ever seized me should find some reflection in this project. 

I am mainly intending to use this blog to make notes, record impressions, post citations that I find illuminating and to mention those texts (whether they be filmic, artistic, literary, musical, architectural or pertaining to other forms) that shall form the core of this project.