We're going, we're going, we're going: metropolitan transport through the eyes of writers

The collection of short stories "16 Trips" is published under the auspices of the Moscow Museum of Transport and is slightly colored in solemn jubilee shades on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Moscow metro celebrated this year. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week specifically for Izvestia.

Various authors, Dmitry Danilov (compiler)

"16 trips: Moscow routes in the stories of modern writers"

Moscow: AST Publishing House: Edited by Elena Shubina, 2025. — 269 p.

One of the first escalators at Lubyanka station was captured by Alexander Labas in his 1935 painting Metro, which adorns the cover of the collection. In the same cheerful and life-affirming way as Labas' painting, the afterword to the book is written, where Oksana Bondarenko, director of the Moscow Museum of Transport, talks about the writers' long-standing undying interest in transport, recalling Okudzhava's "midnight trolleybus" and, as a curious contamination, discovering Bulgakov's "Annushka" tram (actually the popular nickname for the tram route "A" has nothing to do with Bulgakov's ill-fated Annushka, who spilled the butter).

Director of the Moscow Transport Museum

Photo: RIA Novosti/Stanislav Krasilnikov

The director of the museum also explains the creative and technical task that the participants of the collection received: "To present their image of Moscow, a city that never sleeps and is always on the move." A cheerful idea — in the context of the lyrical hero's not always pleasant and joyful experiences, still being able to casually convey how the Moscow metro has been growing uncontrollably and prettier in recent years - can be seen in some stories, although there are some that are made in the opposite genre of horror or psychological thriller.

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Sergei Shargunov, in the story "The Letter "M", shares the metrophobia that inexplicably arose in the lyrical hero in connection with the mention of the death of the poet Boris Poplavsky and prevents him from descending into the subway, which he was once fascinated by: "Since childhood, I have liked these halls, benches, slow ceremonial ascents, running up the steps, the glow lamps, noise, wind, thunder, a special, inexplicable smell, pitching, the flight of darkness outside the windows, thick threads of the tunnel, the faces of strangers, each of whom is fascinating to guess who he is and where he is going, and the reflections of these faces, and the opportunity to touch the forbidden glass with the white letters "DO NOT LEAN". These same romantic interiors receive a sinister, infernal illumination in Darya Bobyleva's hard-hitting self-destructive horror film "Please Get Out of the Wagons." Then the train suddenly stops in the tunnel, the lights go out, the carriages are filled with a corrosive "white gelatinous substance", the black driver, like a spider, drags the passengers wrapped in jelly, and the coat of arms of the USSR on the wall turns into a golden bird, crushing people's heads with a sickle-shaped beak.

Photo: TASS/Sergey Fadeichev

But the metropolitan subway looks comforting and soul-saving in Anna Luzhbina's Murmurationia, where a young but already tired of life MFC employee leaves work early to release the nurse who looks after her sick mother, however, succumbing to a sudden impulse, uses the free hours that accidentally appeared to ride the Moscow subway as a kind of psychotherapy. Along the way, the girl not only visits ancient stations like Revolution Square (where she ritually rubs the nose of a sculptural dog, making a wish), but also creates a flattering portrait of the new Nizhny Novgorod station, which reminds the heroine of an alien temple: "I looked at it with envy: I wish I could take a man like that and renovate. To erase his untidy thoughts, to shift his ruined hopes, to wash away his fear, to rebuild new meanings."

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The heroine of the funniest story in the collection, "Naked Scooter" by Anna Matveeva, is in a completely frank and "inescapable" admiration for Moscow public transport. Tamara Fyodorovna Myasnikova, an honored worker of public transport, moves from Yekaterinburg to Moscow, where her daughter lives with her husband and granddaughters, and discovers how much better the transport logistics in the capital are compared to Yekaterinburg, where "the metro was built, built, and then abandoned." Riding with her granddaughters in the Moscow metro, the heroine does not forget to remind about the beauty of its best stations: "...Tamara Fyodorovna's favorites were Novoslobodskaya, like a kaleidoscope— and Novokuznetsk, with its mysterious benches—they say they come from the old Cathedral of Christ the Savior."

Photo: TASS/Alexander Shcherbak

The only thing that overshadows this sparkling transport landscape are the odious scooters, to which the heroine is not alone in her "burning dislike": "She couldn't even walk calmly past the stall of these flashing demons." However, with the help of an unexpected humorous twist, Matveeva finds a way to at least briefly reconcile the reader even with the damned scooters. One of them is used here in a completely desperate situation by a very likeable character who, under other circumstances, would probably not have come close to this Shaitan machine. In addition, the scooter, which makes an unexpected, breathtaking turn in the fate of the heroine, generally fits seamlessly into her life trajectory associated with a variety of modes of transport: Tamara Fyodorovna explains to her granddaughters how difficult it is to build tunnels for the subway, and why planes fly, and "how important it is to walk in a city with a big river." water transport..."

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It should be noted that Dmitry Danilov, the compiler of the collection, easily ignites interest in water transport in the preface, where he notes that the authors of the stories mentioned almost all the means of transportation existing in Moscow — except for bicycles and river trams, officially called "electric vessels". In the preface, Danilov slightly compensates for the absence of the latter, telling how one late February evening he sailed on an electric boat from the ZIL marina to Pechatnikov: "It was an amazing journey. The cozy salon is almost empty (it's filled to capacity on weekends, Muscovites have fallen in love with boats), dim lights, and most importantly, a completely unusual Moscow, which we almost never see."

A special passenger optics adds to the strangeness: the fact that Danilov is able to see the otherworldly in the most ordinary and breathe existential meaning into any route is evidenced by his recent book "Empty Trains of 2022". For the collection "16 trips," Danilov took out his 2017 story "Our Man" from the bins — how a prudent passenger takes out a pre-purchased return train ticket from his bosom, a little crumpled, but still absolutely suitable. Like the rest of the stories in the collection, "Our Man" was written "as part of a project" (a special Russian-Chinese issue of the October magazine called Moscow – Beijing) and once again confirms that a good writer is not hindered by the framework, but, on the contrary, promoted and disciplined.

Basically, "Our Man" is a kind of master class on how to write a story if necessary: "A story should have a plot. Let's not worry too much about him. Let the plot be the simplest. For example, a person (the hero of the story) needs to pass the night in Moscow. We will create artificial difficulties for our man." Overcoming the uncomplicated difficulties created by the author, "our man" manages to travel a little in the cozy Lastochka train along the MCC, and by the frosty midnight he transfers to night buses (from Kitay-Gorod to Golyanovo and back, and then to the end of Kashirskoye highway), resourcefully solves the problem of urination, loses his hat, enters into Absurdist dialogues with other passengers, observes their strange habits.

From time to time, he falls into euphoria about "getting to know Moscow in a way unknown to him until now," and sometimes even feels a transcendent possibility of escape, of going beyond his existence: "Our man thinks that if he now gets off a warm, bright bus and walks along one of the Park Streets along a string of lanterns melting in a frosty fog, then you can melt into the frosty fog yourself, turn into glass and crumble, disappear, disappear." This Danilov's ability to suddenly discover a portal to another dimension at every bus stop, to feel an alien from unknown worlds in anyone, even an absolutely sober passenger, makes a much more fascinating impression with its fantasticism than the most sophisticated and sophisticated horror about mutants living in a Moscow dungeon.