Old city fairy tales

On my first Saturday in Samara I armed myself with a camera and spent the day traipsing through the old town. The roads were flooded with traffic while pedestrians on the street met my camera eye with blasé indifference. I leisurely took my time spotting out contrasts of old and new: metallic pipes near decaying awnings, electric wires haphazardly strung through elegantly carved ceiling beams, satellite dishes nesting in façades of exposed concrete. The old city enticed me further and further in, morphing into a kaleidoscope of shifting fairy tales frozen in time by a magical spell.

Known as “kupecheskie doma” (merchant houses) the old city’s cottages were once built by wealthy merchants. They were usually two stories high, the first laid out in brick and the second an intricate lacework of wood, and some had elaborate awnings. One of these houses had lured me onto Samarskaya street with the eye-cutting contrast of its white number plaque beside a crumbling awning of leaf and petal carvings. Paint occasionally peeked through layers of soot, and peeled off in chips on the wooden door. A corrugated pipe ran down the wall whose bricks had parted into a fissure, while electric wires snaked through the elegant fern relief under the roof. Therein was my introduction to Samara’s old town, a sumptuous sight of abandoned beauty in perpetual disrepair. Keeping in pace with Russia’s rapid industrialization, which created a thriving working class in desperate need of adequate housing, Soviet architecture shifted away from the decorative toward the functional, focusing on practical materials like concrete and steel. Traditional woodwork that required much effort and skill, became too decadent and out-fashioned, and its craftsmen were reaching extinction as evidenced by the old city’s forlorn façades. Still, the malleable wood around me bloomed into a thousand lives as it transpired into elaborate flights of fancy into Russian folk.

Further down Samarskaya a small one-story house popped up amidst decaying mansions. It was surprisingly well-preserved, as if its wooden façade was frozen in an icy time capsule. Wooden icicles with prickly needle tips hung off its earth-brown windows, creating a cool winter feel. The sun’s rays broke through green foliage nearby and playfully jumped on the needles, trying to thaw them in vain, while the warm summer breeze blew cooler gusts around this frosty idyll. I crept up to the window, expecting to find Snegurochka on the other side.
“Ded Moroz” (Grandfather Frost) and his “vnuchka” (grand-daughter) “Snegurochka” were central figures in our kindergarten New Year celebrations with their gigantic sack of presents and photo sessions under the huge Christmas tree that we had decorated ourselves with much care and effort. Girls were snow-flakes in tutus, boys wore white bunny ears, and we all recited poetry, sang songs and performed carefully rehearsed dances to our parents’ applause. New Year’s Eve was the rare occasion when we went to bed without a peep and shut our eyes tight, hearts anxiously beating for presents that would magically appear under the Christmas tree in the morning, presumably dropped down the flaming pechka chimney by Ded Moroz and Snegurochka. Before this house, elaborate illustrations of Snegurochka’s North Pole abode were becoming more and more real. All our children’s books were, no doubt, illustrated by Russians, but we in Bishkek did not have the rich visual history of Russia’s old wooden towns. What had been purely exotic was now becoming familiar, and finally feeling up-close what I had so long admired from a distance, I was beginning to fall in love with the city’s wooden decay.

My next fairy tale cottage resembled the setting of “Alenkii Tsvetochek” (The Crimson Flower), a Russian version of Beauty and the Beast. While the two tales share some imagery – the enchanted flower, beast, and compassionate daughter, their plot and underlying morals are quite different. “Alenkii Tsvetochek’s” father was a widowed merchant with three daughters who asked him for impossible presents like a crimson flower only seen in a dream. The father found the flower on an enchanted island inhabited by a beast who allowed him to take it in exchange for his daughter, or die. Upon learning of her father’s bargain, the youngest daughter, Nastenka, secretly left to the enchanted island where she lived under the gentle protection of an invisible host. When she accidentally saw the beast, she was terrified of his appearance, breaking his heart. The disconsolate beast sent Nastenka home, bidding her that if she didn’t return by a certain hour he would die of his broken heart. Nastenka brought many exotic gifts for her sisters, who, as typical in Russian folklore, became jealous of her and turned back all clocks to keep her past the bidden hour. Thus, the beast fell prey to conniving female jealousy. When Nastenka discovered the ruse and returned to the island, it was her sorrow for loosing a friend, not romantic love declarations, that broke the spell.

With its lavish floral carvings the house before me could have easily belonged to Nastenka’s father. Framed by massive posts with tortuous plants that curled into off-shoots and snaked around exotic shells, the second floor had three long windows facing the street, made just for the three sisters. Carved plants ran wild underneath each window and slithered up the sides, taming into clovers at the feet of burgeoning “petushki” (iris) and “kolokolchiki” (bell-flower) bouquets. These beautiful and distinctly Russian floral motifs whisked me back to the magical scenes “na staroi Russi” (in the old Russia), when crimson-lipped “baryshnias” (wealthy maidens) in flowing sarafans and gilded headdresses wistfully waited at these windows, waiving their embroidered hand-kerchiefs like “Alenkii Tsvetochek’s” sisters and dreaming of a handsome “molodets” (young man).

As I marched down the street with my digital apparatus the carvings multiplied to wiggly worms, toothy triangles, Celtic plants and crosses, all in the gloomy reality of the present. One house with clover window carvings had a black gaping hole near the roof. Its corner window slanted in a crooked diagonal while the entrance awning was replaced by a rough cement roof. Another house resembled the hanging gardens of Babylon as its floral motifs cascaded over the windows in supple branches. Its white paint had completely peeled off, brown construction paper was pasted over the windows, and a sullied gray rag hung in one of the gardens’ corners. The neighboring house was swallowed by ads, the first story submerged under hand-written sale notes while garish promotions of European clothes were plastered over the second floor. Still, its old charm prevailed in triangular wall borders, arched windows and serpentine posts. A part of the wall slanted to the side, forming a wooden quilt of the vertical post, diagonal side and perpendicular frame, un-spoilt by commercialization thus far. Another beautiful cottage was completely boarded up, in the process of being demolished. Perhaps this mansion belonged to old Russian gentry, as it mixed European architecture into its traditional style. Folk carvings were diluted by Classical columns and minimalist geometrical shapes. A European dome gracefully rose into a spire above the second story, adorned by an old Russian attic window. Plants curled up the spire’s base, while bundles of icicles dropped from the windows onto minimalist rectangular shutters. What used to be a petal-carved window sill hung sideways on one nail. Wooden planks peeled off the walls, jutting out against the smooth granite of a nearby nomenclature building. The house had lost its foundation, and its entire structure careened to the right, the roof spire an oblique diagonal to the vertical granite building behind. Slowly but surely, the elegant dome gave way to present day modernization, and it was just a matter of months before a glitzy high-rise construction would be erected in its place. Change announced itself in these wobbly structures keeling over from time and neglect, and, sadly, their fairy tales would not much last longer.

As I approached Samara’s center, the old city’s European-influenced wooden mansions morphed into late 19th century edifices of stone. One surreal construction of moths, snakes and grimacing bearded men sprawled over an entire block. Fat, scaly snakes arched into Ss on the balconies, while on the walls, miniature bearded men opened their mouths in different contortions: one to speak, another in laughter, this in surprise, that in mockery, in fear here, pure rage there. Massive pillars rose up to the roof, culminating in stone damsels. Wires haphazardly tumbled over the maidens’ oval faces, which cast severe reproaching glances for this obstruction of sight. Slender bull skulls lined the window posts, curling their horns. The window frames, filled with amorphous Venetian glass, intertwined like tree branches. Giant furry moths spread out their wings over some of them. The entrance to this leering edifice was cached away in a secret corner, its rusted awning of slender iron ferns guarded by a smiling elephant head a chopped off hobbit. The elephant looked at me sideways, eyes askance in mysterious mirth: welcome to Pan’s Labyrinth.

My old city wonderings continued amidst a mischievous play between subversive and surreptitious as I stumbled on old treasures in secret courtyards. A decrepit ark between two slanting houses led to an enormous Dutch mansion whose round tower, side apses and wooden beams were completely out of place in Samara. Lines of laundry dried outside, while shrunken grannies bemoaned the calamities of daily life on a bench in the front, oblivious to their surrounding riches. Another treasure of red sandstone was tucked away between old steel garages. Long white curtains swayed in the wind against earthy red walls, a pair of muddy boots was drying on one sill, while a cat lazily observed me from another, gently swinging its paw. The cat scrunched its eyes, arched, and, bored with my photographic activities, disappeared inside, taking the earthy red beauty for granted just like the gossiping grannies.

The state of disrepair in the city center was just as rampant as on Samarskaya Street, but on a much grander scale, offering grandiose decay of the Baroque. Two antique glories held torches in place of decorative columns on a façade, one of them beheaded – a steel rod in place of her ripped out face. These ramshackle Victories were ensnared in a net of satellite dishes, while the ornate iron balconies below were missing floors. Satellite wires crawled over the walls and snaked through the windows, a perfect Borat scene – iis ok-ei have hole in floor, iis a sexitiime with remote control satellite dish! Another building remained in a perpetual state of undress with its exposed cement structure, metal netting and protruding nail spires, eternally in renovation. Its windows jutted out of the walls like skeleton bones, and had the lavish frames of Baroque paintings, but with a thick coating of soot in place of gilded paint. Promises of renovation glimmered in the new light brown frame of one, where a fat white cat also reposed on the sill, bearing silent witnesses.

In the city center I stumbled upon Tolstoy’s country estate, a clump of wooden cottages with peeling paint and an excavated hole in the yard. After tying some rags around my shoes so as not to dirty the floors, I stepped into the exhibit to discover that it was Alexei Tolstoy, Leo’s offspring and the first Head of USSR’s Writers’ Union, who grew up in this house. The exhibit began in a dimly-lit room filled with musty wood scents and old clothes. Traditional embroideries, a samovar, “lapti” (village sandals made from birch bark) and pottery pieces mingled with Tolstoy’s photographs of Samara. A photo of ragged villagers was labeled “Bednost” (Poverty) in Old Russian letters. Tolstoy’s childhood living quarters on the second floor were a tiny apartment with long windows and high ceilings, restored circa 1901. Filled with original and replica furniture, it abounded in western remnants shunned in the USSR until glasnost. Antique French dolls, a Zimmerman piano, Tolstoy’s first camera – Kodak, and a Remington type-writer were just some of the preserved western brands, a remnant of Russia’s pre-Revolution proximity to Europe. As I was her only visitor, the curator narrated detailed accounts of his belongings, pointing out minute details on clocks and dishes, spinning a tale about a silk parasol in one room, a teacup with Turgenev’s court insignia in another. I learned that the museum had only been established in 1983, prior to which it was – as unimaginable as it may seem – a communal flat. The only surviving member of Aleksei’s childhood able to help the restoration was their adopted daughter who was flown into Samara all the way from Georgia. Tolstoy’s Samara was full of neat houses with freshly painted walls, their beautiful elaborate windows set in white frames. His most widely known work is the translation of Pinocchio, making one wonder why a writer with such legacy and the highest Soviet literary honor, immersed himself in translation, craft of the dissidents. Was Pinocchio perhaps Tolstoy’s escape from socialist realism?