In Which Tolstoy Meets Fellini

18 June – Afternoon

It’s time to recount my afternoon with Erin traveling to the Khamovniky neighborhood to see the house and garden where Count Leo Tolstoy frequently spent his winters in the 1880s and 1890s. We had no difficulty navigating through the Metro to the ПАРК КУЉТУРЫ (Park Kultury) stop and with Erin’s internal Magellan operating like a finely tuned GPS she quickly oriented us (even though we were no longer in Asia) in the right direction. After a short walk, a sign directed us onto Leo Tolstoy Street. I snapped this picture because

I can never pass up the chance to photograph a statue of a blue horse on a side street in a major metropolitan area. We walked a few hundred meters and I began hesitating, wondering, particularly in light of our adventure yesterday, whether we’d misread the sign. E assured me that we simply needed to continue walking because I had, indeed, misread it. We needed to walk 700 meters not 400 as I thought. Walk on we did and reached the museum straight away.

I had some difficulty understanding the admission fee structure so the woman at the desk asked if I spoke French. I answered, “Oui, un peu.” She then tried to tell me about the admission fees in French. Unfortunately for me, she spoke French with such a heavy Russian accent that to my ears she might as well have still been speaking Russian. She must have thought that when I said I spoke a little French, I meant very little. She called over another woman who told us in English that the basic fee was 200 rubles plus an additional fee to take photos. Failing to learn from my mistakes earlier in the trip, I purchased only a basic entrance ticket – a decision I would subsequently regret. On the short walk from the box office to the museum, the woman’s French clicked for me and I realized that what I’d heard as “doo-zen” and not understood – she was saying “deux cents” (200).

We entered the house itself, showed our tickets and were directed by the woman at the desk to cover our shoes with blue booties. I assumed this was to protect the carefully preserved wooden floors from scuffs and tracked in dirt. In keeping with Tolstoy’s moralistic and ascetic views, the house still eschews the use of electricity and running water. It was surprisingly compact despite needing to accommodate Tolstoy, his wife Sofya, as many as ten children, and the servants.

However, it’s packed with interesting facts and artifacts both of us found particularly intriguing. And, after the crowds and rapid-fire pace of the morning, I think we both found this experience to be very much what we needed physically and intellectually. Excluding the group at a meeting of some sort being held on the grounds there were only a handful of people there.

We could walk through at a leisurely pace without ever feeling we might be disturbing someone if we chose to linger over say, the desk where Sofya hand copied his manuscripts, or the grand piano where Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov played, or spend extra time in the study where he wrote his final novel Resurrection, or the room where his seven year old son Ivan died of scarlet fever and that would so deeply impact the great writer’s life. And we could do all this because we knew we could comfortably see the entire museum without feeling overwhelmed. Including our stroll around the garden and a brief sojourn sitting on top of a hill looking back at the house and garden we were there for nearly three hours – probably

an hour longer than we’d expected. The photos are only of the exterior and are few in number but you can look at them if you want.

The Tolstoy house is a short walk from Gorky Park and we’d heard so much about it that we knew when we’d finished at the one we’d investigate the other. We walked along the Moscva River and crossed the Krymskiy Bridge and this provided a grand view of what is certainly the ugliest statue in Moscow and perhaps in all of Russia. Rose, who went to the park yesterday, had warned us and we’d seen a photo or two but I’m still not certain we were fully prepared for the reality of it. I think Erin’s naturally wavy hair went straight at the sight and my bald spot grew measurably larger. My two photos were taken from some distance. I’m not sure they do it proper injustice but we couldn’t bring ourselves to walk any closer.

The statue is 98 meters tall and was erected in 1997. It seemed a bit odd to me that Peter the Great would have a statue honoring him in Moscow since he was responsible for relocating the capital to Saint Petersburg. In fact, in 2010, Moscow offered to give the statue to Saint Petersburg. They politely(?) refused it. We averted our eyes and eventually our respective hair and hairlines returned to normal. We hurried across the bridge and into the park.

Let me try to enumerate the many unexpected sights and oddities we encountered in just the small section of the park we visited. We entered through a side gate. Though the main entrance to the park is more famous, this one was closer to the bridge. The first thing we saw was the sand pit serving as a beach because when you live in Moscow, and you can’t get to the beach, the obvious solution is to bring the beach to you. But that wasn’t the first photo I took. I happened to glance to my left and saw this:

She was whipping her hair around and gyrating in ways I can’t quite describe. She most certainly was not playing that piano.

As we continued walking toward the “space shuttle” (have I not mentioned the space shuttle?), we passed some green space with some chairs whose main purpose seemed to be to accommodate canoodling couples. I managed to take a discreet photo of these but couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of the beach volleyball courts. There were simply too many men inappropriately wearing Speedos. We dodged random cyclists and roller bladers, found the source of the echoing gnip-gnop of ping pong games, and saw a place where you can turn your head into a cabbage. Or maybe none of it was real and Erin and I had simply wandered onto the set of a Fellini movie.

We strolled along the river for a while. We stopped at a kiosk. Erin bought coffee. I bought tea. We walked away from the river. We saw the ping pong players. We found an unoccupied bench. We sat to rest, drink our respective beverages, observe the passers-by, and enjoy the lovely weather. The varied services in the park stimulated my curiosity so I pulled my phone from my vest and turned on the wi-fi. Of course, Gorky Park has a free unsecured network. I looked at the time, 18:30 and did a quick calculation. Realizing it was 10:30 in Baltimore, I called Dad. I know he understood I was calling from Moscow but I’m not sure he grasped that I was sitting on a bench in Gorky Park.

The evening grew late and, after finishing our drinks, we decided to make our way back to the hotel. After lunch, Groud mentioned she might try to meet us in the park. Although I think she genuinely likes our group and enjoys spending time with us in various assemblages when we are not together as a group, she’s also something of a mother hen tending to her charges and feels a certain responsibility to assure herself we’re okay. Given that we hadn’t set a time or place to meet and the park’s size, it’s not at all surprising that we didn’t connect. That presented Erin and me with a perfect opportunity to concoct increasingly outrageous scenarios of the horrors that had befallen us as a result. Each became more outrageous than the last. Hilarity ensued though only five other people on the planet were in a position to get the joke. (Okay, six if I count G.)

We laughingly made our way back to the Park Kultury Station and, having gotten the hang of Moscow’s Metro, successfully navigated the escalators and connecting tunnels, and took a problem-free ride back to the hotel. After a small and eminently forgettable dinner, I met Groud who walked with me to one of the many nearby markets where I was going to buy a bottle of vodka. Tomorrow, June nineteenth, is Erin’s nineteenth birthaversary (birthday in the common vernacular) and the group had been planning to celebrate with shots. I was determined to be certain we did just that. With my mission accomplished and beginning to show the early symptoms of having contracted “the cold”, I went straight back to the hotel for a relatively early to bed night.