Ur Texts and Epiphanal Experiences (1)

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 from Palermo to Florence and being stuck in Sicily for seventeen hours. Or going from Venice to Trieste via the long Udine route (ah, that's where my Pasolini came in... and to digress, there are a couple of Pasolini texts telling of his love for stations and railways and about his memories of travelling on the local train to go to school... I don't have the texts to hand but they stayed in my mind). 

But no, I can almost date the time I first heard of Venedikt Erofeev and his Moskva-Petushki. It was in the summer. I was in Prague, and was meeting with a Russian there. I still hoping that one day I would learn Czech used to buy a copy of Lidove' Noviny and would try to get the hang of some articles. My Russian friend was a student of Czech at Moscow State University. I tried to decipher one article but to no avail. My friend told me that it was about a famous Russian writer and that there was a conference in Prague about him. His name was Venedikt Erofeev. My friend then proceeded to tell me about this writer and I think I read him later that summer. Yet I still had little idea of the phenomenon of the elektrichka. 

For that I would have to wait at least another couple of years. As far as I remember I took no elektrichka in my first year in Russia (or if I did so the journey was not memorable). But then moving to the Kuzbass I would take a local elektrichka from Novokuznetsk to Mezhdurechensk once every two weeks. After that some time in 2003 a friend who was writing about the figure of Yakov Bruce asked me to visit the museum and speak to its director Alexander Nikolaevich Filimon. I took an elektrichka to what must have been Monino stop from Yaroslavsky station. It seems that that was my first trip into Pod Moskovia by train. There would follow thousands more. Though commuting on an elektrichka is without doubt a much more stressful and banal affair.

Perhaps, it wasn't until I found the elektrichka being reflected on the screen that I began to abstract the magical from the banal. Suffice it to say that of all the films watched I do have one film text that speaks to me more than any other about the mystical side of the elektrichka and of what I would call elektrichkaland. This film text Chronoeye by Alexei Fedorchenko is part of an omnibus film called The Fourth Dimension. The trip in the elektrichka initiates the film and the story of its main character whose experiments with time travelling in a flat in Yekaterinburg are introduced by a rather dour character who regularly visits a deserted location somewhere in the Sverdlovsk region (whose only 'attraction' is a cemetery). And yet the scene is full of that mystical realism that Fedorchenko so excels in. One could argue (very convincingly I would say) that this was one of the perfect film texts illustrating, capturing the spirit of Russian cosmism. That Fedorchenko manages to use the elektrichka journey as the initial setting for this discourse on time, the cosmos and eternity is rather wonderful as is so much of his filmography. (In the youtube video below Fedorchenko's film starts at around 29 minutes).