The Bolshoi Theater’s sagging roof is under repair; its makeshift tin drainpipes are as crooked as ever. Behind the theater, an establishment called Cafe Friendship has greedily absorbed a coat of spring paint. It is an outdoor eatery ' featuring frankfurters, inedible green peas and chipped 250
glasses of muddy coffee. Across the street, Wanda, the Polish shop, has put a lustrous lipstick on sale, and a thousand women materialize instantly to besiege the counters.
Bookstore No 44 carries on as before, several doors above Wanda; the Ministers request for appointment as the new manager has been denied. In the struggling crowd, a middle-aged woman with rimless glasses and a tight bun, nothing more or less than a Chekhov character, is looking for a volume of Chekhov stories. When she leaves, it is to fight her way into a fish store for supper’s salted cod, but she loses no dignity in doing it.
The fish store, a pathetic butcher’s, a pharmacy from a silent movie set. ... A cluster of red kerchiefs on school-children stands out in the ceaseless stream of bodies pushing along the street and in and out of these establishments. Then three bantam Asian soldiers strolling arm in arm, followed by a hulking muzhik with a full beard holding tight to his grandson, who in turn is clutching a white toy horse.
A grizzled taxi driver slows down to allow a neatly-dressed man to beg for a ride. A handsome girl is giving an impatient stranger her telephone number, knowing they’ll be in bed together in several hours, A schoolboy in uniform checks to see whether he still has his wrist watch. A hundred peasant grandmothers trudge onward with their sacks. . . . What makes these scenes seem so memorable? Perhaps no more than a perception that we have little say in who we are and what we do. Something in this old street makes truism about fate and mortality especially real.
Petrovka is what Petrovka was; even the changes seem to speak of the continuity of Russian life - and of the human condition. I can’t say I love it any longer, but it’s her street and I want to stay. What would I do in Chicago?
‘You can’t leave me now ’ she called in the courthouse. Surely this was meant to imply that I’m with her, ‘inside* forever. But we both know enough about her use of ambiguity to recognize its other meaning. The problem is to keep
my stories neutral enough to deter expulsion. This is progressively harder; now even Esenin is under attack in vengeful tirades. The retreat towards Stalinism wasn’t temporary, as optimists hoped; we’ve settled into another age of hard times, seemingly more natural to Russia than its occasional liberalizing spurts.
To ease this pressure, I walk down Petrovka in the early afternoon. The familiar ache of being alone is also a comfort, and a bond with the missing person. I indulge myself in the old game of seeing her reflection in a shop window and postponing the moment of discovering that the girl is a pale imitation. I can’t imagine that I’ll never see her again.
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
IfllllllllllllllllHiniiii ......
girlfrompetrovkaOOfeif
girlfrompetrovkaOOfeif
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(Continued from front flap)
acerb commentator on the bureaucratic and Establishment scene, a dabbler in the black market, a pursuer of girls, girls, girls, and the past master of deadpan wit. He—along with Oktyabrina's other colorful lovers, friends, and acquaintances—bodies forth the mystery, vitality, and endurance of the Russian people, but it is Oktyabrina herself who unforgettably stands out against one of the most sharply realized and evocative portraits of real Russian life yet written by a Westerner in thU century.
has been
Moscow correspondent for a number of English and American newspapers and is the author of Justice in Moscow, which described the workings of Soviet courts. His first trip to Russia was as a college-student-guide during the 1959 Fair, at which he was a witness to the famous Nixon-Khrushchev "kitchen debate" that took place. Born in New Jersey, he graduated from Harvard Phi Beta Kappa and received his M.A. from Columbia University. Mr. Feifer was also the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship, and holds a Certificate from Columbia's Russian Institute. He is now a resident of London, where he lives with his Soviet-born wife, Tanya, whom he met during that same 1959 Fair in Moscow, when she was sixteen, and whom he married in 1970.
Jacket design by Dudley Gray & Mel Williamson
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