Margate or Petushki?

   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 - how 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 this too). And then there was that Russian poem that mentioned its subject or narrator traveling in an elektrichka between Brighton and London. So my Russian periphery on the elektrichka lines is a kind of antonym for T S Eliot's Margate Sands (how I loved those lines as an adolsecent). Or connecting everything with the elektrichka is, perhaps, a way of accomplishing this Eliotesque project (and Margate after all merits a further mention: ever since I've known that Lev Vygotsky visited Margate I've always wanted to write a play or a film script entitled Vygotsky in Margate).  

   And yet yes, it was Yerofeev who linked an elektrichka journey to everything; and then Aleksei Fedorchenko who resolved to picture a world genius who cracked the engima of time travel as being kicked off an elektrichka by a ticket collector. Kira Muratova will depict its hawkers peddling postcards of the Slaughters of the Innocents, while the extraordinary art director and production designer of films by Khamraev, Tarkovsky and Klimov, Shavkat Abdusalamov, will portray the death of Christ in contemporary Russia in his Sukrovitsa, opening the film with a character alighting from an elektrichka. Peripheral Russia and peripheral Rome come together in Aleksandra Petrova's novel Appendix. Gorod N. becomes Gorod R. in that universal locus Yailati (ai lati). The periphery becomes transnational in what is the most extraordinary novel on migration of recent times.

    Having little more to add this evening I check up London to Margate. A wikipedia post tells me that: "Margate railway station serves the town of Margate in Thanet, Kent, England. It is 73 miles 69 chains (118.9 km) down the line from London Victoria."

Then I check the distance between Moscow and Petushki. A site helpfully informs me that: "Distance from Moscow to Petushki is 117 kilometers. This air travel distance is equal to 73 miles." (well, the train line is just a little more).

Interesting. Though the destination of Russian utopian hope (where the jasmine is always in bloom and the birds never stop singing) feels more comforting than the depressed Eliot nowhere where nothing can be connected to nothing. 


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