The Pod-Moscovian Text.

  

 In 2020 an issue of Russia's prestigious literary journal 'New Literary Observer' (Новое Литературное Обозрение) came out with a short essay on the poet (and occasional prose writer) Dmitry Garichev. The philologist Elena Zeifert analysed Garichev's work in terms of a hypothetical Moscow/Moscow Region text. For Zeifert, the poet living in Norilsk in the Moscow Region but having studied in Moscow, is a perfect example of this literary phenomenon. Garichev's inside and outside perspective on the capital (he still regularly travels between his native Norilsk and the capital) gives Zeifert an opportunity to assume a kind of continuum between the Moscow Text and the 'Moscow Region Text' and she counterposes this hypothetical text to the St Petersburg Text that Vladimir Toporov (among others) has written about. 

    She sees the Moscow/Moscow Region Text (at least in terms of the work of Garichev) as distinguished by a number of common characteristics. To quote the abstract of her essay these are:

    the markings of the lower-class outskirts of the city, including the striving toward the “outskirts of the outskirts”; harshness; the extreme honesty of the characteristics of the trauma of the society; the mix of sacral and historically significant places from downtown to the periphery; the thoroughfare quality of antiutopian loci; the depiction of the external as internal, including the timely development of mortal motifs of war and widespread death; the depersonalization of space as an opportunity to compensate for trauma, paradoxically gaining strength through “unconsciousness,” a small number of toponyms; the erasure of the boundary between living and lifeless landscapes; and the perception of Moscow and the Moscow region as an uncomfortable, yet alluring, domineering native locus-home and a potential anti-home for migrants.

    This article got me thinking of a potential mass of authors and texts (not merely literary - we can also think of artistic and cinematic texts, even musical ones) to test this hypothesis. I am keen though on a distinction between the Moscow and Pod-Moscovian text even if the boundaries are rarely clear. Moscow will steadily encroach on the Pod-Moscovian. In addition to this there are surely other considerations. The Pod-Moscovian is an unwieldy territory to think of, sprouting out in many directions and intersected by many boundaries. Elektrichkaland may be one of many auxiliary concepts that we need to work with (and what can one say about Moscow-Petushki as being a Pod-Moscovian text? surely a fascinating topic for discussion). We have the boundary of the MKAD (the Moscow Ring Road) to work on but then other historical markers complicate issues- what of the Vladimirka or Vladimirsky Tract and the other historical tracts running out of Moscow such as the Stromynka and then what about the notion of the Meshchera Lowlands that Konstantin Paustovksy once wrote about. Reading Soviet-era texts then brings up a whole new area of contention. What are we to make of the historical accretions that go up to make our texts or Text? Tolstoy's imagined Obiralovka, Bely's Kuchino, Sleptsov's and Levitan's Vladimirka, and even Lenin's observations on Orekhovo Zuyevo or Balashikha may be of relevance. How to tie up all these considerations? And then there were the Pod Moscovian underground texts, not always linked to location as such but inextricably linked to the peripherical: Erofeyev's Moscow-Petushki and the Lianozovo Group of artists and poets.