The Streets are Paved in Gold

One of the dramatic readings at a recent festival, Кино без плёнки [Films without any film], was a "whodunnit" melodrama staged at the 1957 World Festival of Youth in Moscow. The scenario was pretty horrible, but the discussion on how to "improve" it afterwards was fascinating.

I'm still struck by one of the phrases that came out of the anti-hero, Zina's, mouth:

What's there to love about the Urals? It's all dirt, drinking, degeneration... But here - in one word - is the capital!

This is interesting on a couple of levels, not least of which that it is an Armenian man in St. Petersburg writing about the glory of the capital, at such a time when Piter has been relegated almost to the provinces.

To Russian provinces, that is, as opposed to American: I recently gave a presentation on American suburbia, which I loosely translated, for the fulfillment of my purposes (but with full disclosure that my definition wasn't definitive) as an ideologico-geographical space somewhere on the periphery of a metropolitan area, where families live in nuclear houses. You notice - this includes small towns and bedroom communities, but does not include apartment slums.

After the presentation a few people made a point of verbally and, to an extent, vehemently disagreeing with those two specific points (no slums, small towns included). "I grew up in the suburbs," one said, "and the defining feature of the ideology, for me, was that we spent all of our free time out of the suburbs and in the city."

It highlights an American centrism we don't prefer to accept. We don't have the same relationship to our capital, the hotbed of Senatorial prostitution, muggings, and heightened crime rates that it is; but for all of our multiplicity of metropolitan areas, there still is the sense of being IN or being OUT.

-An urbanite: "I might not be from New York, but at least I'm from Philadelphia."

-A suburbanite: "I might not be from the city, but at least I'm not from a small town."

-A small towner: "I might not be from the suburbs, but at least I'm not from a farm in the countryside."

And admitting any happiness at being from a more provincial region, or by identifying ideologies that might clump an individual with a "lower" podunk village - that is vulgar and conservative and repulsive.

"To Moscow, I beg you!"

Image: Mikhail Trakhman, "String Orchestra in a Car," 1957 Moscow Youth Festival