Things I've thought and talked about since getting back:1. How useful the
BBC Active language course had been (book and 2 CDs). Though I didn't get far with it, it made an excellent, easy start.
2, How lucky we are, with our ease of travel. Many Russians don't seem to grasp tourists' needs because they have never been tourists themselves.
2. The cathedrals and churches of the
Kremlin made the most enduring impression. They were so ancient and shockingly rich in frescoes and iconography. There is no good book about them available in Britain, and I kick myself for not buying one of the souvenir books on sale – I wish I had bought a catalogue for St Petersburg's Russian Museum, too. Usually I am a sucker for souvenir picture books, telling myself that I may never pass this way again.
3. St Petersburg was enjoyable but it is Moscow that I continue to wonder about. I would happily go there again.
4. I have not read Pushkin since I got back, but I am reading
Natasha's Dance, and I have read Martin Cruz Smith's new Arkady Renko thriller.
Stalin's Ghost is a galloping crime novel with spades of interesting background and a central plot about a fledgling political movement of Chechnya war veterans whose American PR advisers tell them to call their movement the Patriotic Party – a name that won't fail, especially if they hijack the memory of an increasingly venerated Stalin. Without visiting Russia I would have thought the idea implausible.
5. In St Petersburg we learned of the extraordinary life of the poet
Anna Akhmatova, who has a house-museum in the Sheremetev Palace, and how, for fear of persecution, she did not write most of her poetry down, but committed it to memory among her friends. This is not borne out in D.M. Thomas's introduction to the Penguin Classic of her work. She is anyway a local heroine, for having refused to desert Leningrad during the 29-month siege in World War II. Not surprisingly most of her work is dark. This poem, from 1914, is different:
I've a lot of feeling for you. You're kind.
We'll kiss, grow old, walk around.
Light months will fly over us
Like snowy stars.
