16/7/07

Today went better, though not in the sense of getting anything done, but of at least making contacts and setting up meetings; I had expected that everything would get done in the last few days of my stay here and that expectation is turning out to be correct. Tomorrow I have a meeting with R. and then M., and the day after that probably with Mi. and Sh. (for whatever that's worth). What will come of the latter two is hard to say, and it probably isn't worth worrying about. Other than that, though, the day was pretty much wasted (as so many have been up until now); it being a Monday, all museums were closed (except, of course, Zurab), and there was little to do but wander about the city, getting hungry and tired and overspending you budget on food. The metro gives an interesting, and alternative, experience of the city, offering a sort of underground variant of it, all the more memorable as the stations here are consciously designed to convey a sense of place, of a sort. Thus Arbatskaya, for example, has a quite different atmosphere to what lies above it, yet both possess their own reality and both are in a peculiar sense connected - though the underground world changes at a much slower rate to the one above, if it changes at all. Perhaps this is why you find it comforting: below the streets, the built environment bequeathed by the Soviet system remains largely intact. The metro, on its endlessly long, almost dreamlike escalator rides (reminding you of angels ascending the dark tunnel towards the shining light of heaven in that Bosch triptych) allows one to study the faces of the passengers coming the other way fairly carefully. Here, unlike Georgia, it is not so much a case of establishing a new taxonomy as of measuring differences between here and the west. For it appears as if people's features are more pronounced here in comparison with there: high cheekbones are higher, oval faces are more oval, long noses are longer, with the result that they are capable of being both strikingly beautiful and strikingly unbeautiful (and sometimes in some strange, indefinable way, both at once). The fashions - I mean the women's fashions - seem to echo this: more overt, upfront, 'extrovert' than in the west. This is one big change upon eleven years ago, when most people's clothes remained largely Soviet.
This afternoon you visited Novospassky Monastery, saw the cathedral with its much-damaged and somewhat repainted sixteenth century (?) frescoes, and attended part of a service. An atmosphere of tranquility still pervaded, but within the walls of the complex the space felt confined and claustrophobic: one needed fields and woods around it to breathe, which, no doubt, it once had. As usual, you found the atmosphere of obscurantist mysticism repellent, and you left after a short while, though not without noting of the whitewashed walls, with their trees and hollyhocks planted outside, that the monks probably had a very pleasant life there. Note how different the spatial arrangements are to any western church: all is laid out concentrically around the central point of the dome, both the cathedral itself and the monastery walls that enclose it, whereas in a western church the focus of attention is always at an altar at the far end opposite the entrance, and the building presents you with a visual narrative, of sorts, as you approach it: hence the soaring columns and vaults of Gothic. In a Russian cathedral you encircle the point of focus, rather than approach it. In this sense western churches are more theatrical in that they introduce something of the effect of a proscenium arch (columns flanking the altar), while eastern churches, if theatrical at all, are so as theatres in the round and their wall paintings emphasise this, being 'free flowing', covering every available space almost indiscriminately, so that they are evident everywhere you look. The monastery reminded you ultimately of something else as well: the Russian practice, present into Soviet times and even, or especially, today, of building self-enclosed complexes that operate as virtually independent units: a symptom, perhaps, of the tendency for the (political and economic) 'systems' connecting them here to fall apart at short notice. Thus Novospassky and Mosfilm are linked - have, indeed, a surprising amount in common. And consider also what kind of films Tarkovsky made at Mosfilm, with scenes including the island house floating in a shapeless sea (Solaris), the half-ruined complex housing the printing press (Mirror), the Zone (Stalker), and later, of course, after he'd left Russia, the 'crude but effective' shot of the Russian house within the Italian cathedral (Nostalgia). None of this seems coincidental: it comes from an experience of space, and an understanding of the semiotics and symbolism of that space. And note too how the space between these complexes - these 'homesteads' or 'settlements' - with its uneven, arbitrary and shapeless quality, is equally revealing. It expresses something of the social arrangements involved in establishing societies in vast, empty and limitless spaces.