Why a blog about the bleak Moscow suburb Zheleznodorozhny?

Writing about the town of Zheleznodorozhny, once known as Obiralovka (the spot where in Lev Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina the eponymous heroine threw herself under a train) is, in many ways, no mean task. The idea has been present in my mind for some time and yet the question of how to do so has been a moot one. This can, of course, be no travelogue. Tourists simply do not come here to this grey, uninviting Moscow suburb that has grown from a small settlement of less than a hundred in Tolstoy's time to a town of almost 140,000 people today. In spite of having lived here on and off for about four or five years my attitude hasn't really differed from that of the school administrator where I used to work. Although born here she really had very little to tell me about either the history of the town or anything of great interest about the present day life of Zheleznodorozhny. For her (as for myself) Moscow was the city she wished to be associated with and the unfortunate fact of being located in a town 20 kilometres away meant little apart from a journey to and back in one of those overcrowded, smelly, local trains known as the elektrichka so immortalised in Venedikt Yerofeev's Moskva-Petushki. Zheleznodorozhny, by the way, is one of those stops on this line and so the town has been immortalised at least twice in great Russian literature.

For me  is that I write about Russiathere is a certain irony in writing about cinema from a town considered for entry into the Guiness Book of Records for being the settlement with the largest population in the world not having its own cinema. While a location in the town has been marked for an entertainment centre it has been standing more or less idle for something like a decade. Of course, this is not a town likely to be showing Godard in the near future even if the cinema eventually gets built. An attempt of my own to show Lindsay Anderson's If ... at the school where I worked for a new cinema club turned into farce as the turnout consisted of three people two of whom insisted that I show a Tom Hanks film instead that was lying on the desk of the receptionists. I could do little but look on with jaundiced prejudice during this years Moscow International Film Festival to see that the cinema clubs of Moscow Region gave the weirdest of ratings to the competition films. From their votes it suggests that Moscow Region was the least cinephilic of all regions from the whole of Russia. Being close to a cultural capital seems to mean little. Cinephiles from Yakutia or Sakhalin seem far more informed than their Moscow Region colleagues.

Yet surely writing from the 'void' is a necessary task. Bleakness can surely be both a subject matter and the source of deep reflections. After all without Brezhnev's Soviet Union where would all the Conceptualists and Sots Art be and that extraordinary profusion of talent that emerged in the 1970s Soviet art world? How can the void that Zheleznodorozhny appears to be serve as a  kind of source of reflection and creation? How can the banal become interesting without surrendering oneself to a cheap journalistic prose which simply turns travelogue writing into its opposite becoming a denunciation of the unprepossessing and the unsightly? I'm not sure whether one could try to write a psychogeography of the place (and psychogeography in Anglo-Saxon translation has become rather synonymous with psycho-babble) but it is surely worth trying to prise apart life here from its different accretions.

In many ways I can't help thinking that this blog was born many years ago in the summer of 1999 while on a Czech language course in the town of Ceske Budejovice. Each and every weekend (on both Saturday and Sunday) we would be taken to yet another Czech castle and expected to admire the  beauty of this historic location. A fellow student on the course (a geographer with an interest in the high rise building) convinced me that these absurd trips were of no interest (and I needed little convincing already by the second weekend) and that the townscape of Ceske Budejovice could give more scope for aesthetic reflection. Describing Zheleznodorozhny may also give some scope for reflections on a different plane. Who knows? In the process of writing the blog I hope to make certain discoveries of my own of how to portray the unportrayed.