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A Modern RussiaLived Through Fairy TalesModern Russia is modern in name alone. . Its rich tradition of literature and fables is

the sum of a poetic panorama expressed through century-old myths of heroes and demons.

. Long a nation of visionaries and madmen, Russia is perhaps best seen through

photographs that try to capture its essence. .text by Cristina Giuliano photos by Donatella Caristina

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White coats. Muffled sounds. Time and lightseemingly brought to a standstill. Who would-n’t want to be part of a Russian fairy tale? Look-

ing at the rosy sun as it casts its glare on domes, touringmuseums, getting lost. Blankets of snow whispering won-drous words, with the Pushkin’s verses stitched intosleeping nature.

Those have tasted Russia’s lyric sweetness are unlike-ly to forget it. Though the money gods mat tell another s-tory in Moscow, where Vladimir Putin and his croniesrule, and in St. Petersburg, where luxury shops sprawl,Mother Russia is the stuff of dreams. Just as a commer-cial jet pulled us from its bosom, another one takes usback, like a parcel.

Leave Russia behind for a few weeks and you’re soonhit with an irrational yearning to return.

If Africa’s woes are generated by nature, Russia’s e-merge from its people. Russians live primarily throughtheir heart and imagination. Will and reason come later,if they come at all. It’s hard to swear by this reality whenrecent history elicits the wild capitalism of the 1990s andthe energy resource wars of the new millennium. Yet onepiece of history doesn’t exclude another Even Pushkinlabeled his most romantic hero, Eugene Onegin an “e-conomist,” a man who read Adam Smith and “knowshow to enrich a state or a way of life.”

But what does today’s Russia live on? Its collectivemyths are nurtured by untamed fantasies, which in theeyes of a Westerner can seem like a literal retreat into therealm of imagination. The marshy shores of the Balticwilled into cities by Peter the Great yield to the diaboli-cal Moscow of the “Master and Margarita.” The rocky

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brainpower and too little heart in a country still prowledby bears. Cerebral thinkers, both before and during thetime of Wikileaks, seem to have replaced the many loversof winter. Thinkers may have ruined the snowy celebra-tion of nature, but they haven’t warded off its emotions.A few myths remain.

The nostalgic love of a country as big as a continent,for example. Romance may be diluted but not lost entire-ly. Loves, generational clashes, hatred and melancholy –much of what Russian writers and poets conveyedthrough literature – has vanished. But melancholy – Tol-stoy its guru – endures. It is a desire for desires.

Fairy tale justiceho wouldn’t want to be the Lara of Dr. Zhivago?Who wouldn’t want to be a piece of a “fatal mys-tery,” the kind that envelops Vronsky and An-

na Karenina. The charm of Russian literature, swelled

with characters as immortal as their authors, is infinite.It does not stop at the borders of the Russian Federation.It springs from the pages and lingers in the air. In sen-tences spoken by common people. Words are sometimesbastardized by Anglicism, but never scurrilously so.These obscenities belong to another language, the “mat,”something in parallel. Pure Russian continues existingboth in daily life and in the boundless nature of a coun-try that while thirsting for modernity can’t dispense withtradition.

Now, times are tough, which means that fairy tales aremaking a huge comeback. The stylizing of once-real char-acters goes by its own premeditated rules. In fairy tales,the good become heroes and the wicked meet a sad end.It’s a kind of simpler justice that today’s hungry popula-tion longs to embrace. A kind of simple and basic justicethat oppressed peoples tell themselves must exist. In thiscase, the great writers are mere tools. They’re the trans-

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low’s Hill ecstatically contemplates the domes of the sa-cred monastery of Novodevichy.

It’s an upside down world illuminated by obliquelight. “It was a freezing morning, and jawing rustle ofleaves sounded like madness,” wrote Boris Pasternak inhis “Poems of Love.” “Only the roofs and snow and be-side the roofs and snow, no one.”

That blinding light also illuminated Veliky Novgorod,with its rich past, and the suburban Pavlovsk Palace,made luxurious by mad Tsar Paul I, who adored theKnights of Malta, for which he had court jewelers pro-duce not one but two crowns, creating one history’s fun-nier legends. He advocated the Cossack push into Indiaand was victim victimized by a heinous conspiracy with-in his own court. “You thought, you thought so much,but you loved me so little”: snow-covered Russia in thesnow seems like Masha accusing Sergey in Tolstoy’s“Family Happiness.” Too much thinking. Too much

coasts of the Far East, the Amur Valley and Vladivostokdeliver people with almond-shaped eyes. Russia is a se-ries of dialectics: Wisdom and folly; violent nature andboundless souls. It unrolls the magic of a vast fairy talewhose full contents you never really know.

For the poet Andrey Bely, “the streets of St. Petersburgpossess one sure quality: they turn passers-by into shad-ows.” Before Bely, Nikolai Gogol, the slightly madUkrainian, infected by the fascination of St. Petersburg,charged the devil with lighting the lights on the city’sNevsky Prospect.

Besotted witches and Tolstoyatan is also on display Moscow: Margarita turnsinto a witch for love, giving up the privileges ofan enviable bourgeois existence. Madness is the

epitome of initiation. Evil is turned on end. Mikhail Bul-gakov’s Woland, the devil incarnate, who from the Swal-

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tic pleasure in imagining a different and better ways oflooking at things than those used by the writer you hate.”

Young Sicilian photographer Donatella Caristina usesthis technique in her photos, though her point of originseems far closer to love than hatred.

s a result, even the painted horses of Zurab T-sereteli, a linchpin of the Moscow artistic coterieof former Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, take on their own

poetic dimension.Her photos evidence lightness, freedom, insight. Those

who walk down Okhotnt riad, down the road from RedSquare, soon become aware that Russian fairy tales – par-ticular during the violent 1990s – morphed into center-pieces for the building boom in what has since becomethe city’s monumental center. There are horses as well as“Golden Fish” and the “Rusalka” mall, which is decorat-ed by bronze and concrete castings. It’s an undergroundmall. Underground like the Mafia. Its building was con-troversial, and the controversy only grew more intensewhen President Dmitri Medvedev fired Luzhkov.

According to the latest urban legend, Medvedevsacked the mayor, who had ruled supreme for 18 years,because he interfered in the relationship between the y-oung president and his mentor, the former president and

now prime minister, Putin. But those in the know pre-saged the event for years, as improbable as it sounded.All of it as in fairy tale.

One turned real.Thanks to Medvedev, from St. Petersburg, who found

the brick wall represented by Luzhkov and his billion-aire wife Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia,intolerable. She was far closer to the queen in Lewis Car-roll’s “Alice in Wonderland” than the traditional “BabaYaga,” or Russian witch.

Until the young president made his move he was con-sidered too weak. Since then, he’s become a favorite, ahero-style figure in the tradition of Russian folklore. “I-van the fool, thought by his brothers to be a stupid bun-gler, is really as smart as a fox”: Nabokov again. “He’s acurious prototype of Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of‘The Idiot’ (Dostoevsky), the pure and innocent fool”whose “nephew is a character created by Soviet writerMikhail Zoshchenko, who tries to get the best out of a to-talitarian police state, since in that kind of world there’sno other way out.”

White coats. Muffled sounds. Time and light seeming-ly brought to a standstill. Who wouldn’t want to be partof a Russian fairy tale? But to taste that sweetness againdemands a considerable amount of imagination. .

lators and collectors of folklore. Aleksandr Pushkin wassuch a tool for the Russian people, as Giambattista Basilewas to the Neapolitans and the Brothers Grimm to thepeoples of Germany. Other writers pushed their imagi-nation beyond all known limits. Enter the grotesque andtransnational tales. In Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” a carriagetakes the form of a melon, from which landowner Ko-robochka descends. He “looked as much like Cinderellaas Pavel Chichikov looked like Pickwick,” wroteVladimir Nabokov in his “Lectures in Russian Litera-ture.” “It’s wrong to think of a relationship between themelon he emerges from and the squash that illustratesthe fairy tale.”

The father of “Lolita” lies consciously. And whowouldn’t want to be a little undone by his provocations,intended at undermining literary preconceptions. “Anovel such as ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ always seemedto me like a very, very long play with just enough furni-ture and equipment that an actor might need,” he writeselsewhere. “A round table with the wet ring of a glass, awindow painted yellow to give the impression that thesun outside is shining, or that that sunset has been servedby a servant.” An iconoclastic view in the presence of aliterary overlord. Only a Russian can afford to play it out.Nabokov again: “If you hate a book, you can also get artis-

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