Mr. Mayakovsky I Presume?

On the way back to Sheremetyevo yesterday morning, Brooke asked me which image, of all that I had seen while in Russia (okay, Moscow mainly), would be the most enduring.

Now it's one thing to visit a city as a tourist, check all the obvious boxes and leave with mental souvenirs of its most spectacular and emblematic sights. For example, I already posted a picture of St. Basil's Cathedral, but that was before Dylan captured it, more artfully, framed through the Iberian Gate:


I agree, it's beautiful.

But it's another thing entirely to walk into the offices and homes of well-meaning people and ask them politicized questions about the fate of their country. It's a different kind of sightseeing, one that gives YOU the tourist - both arrogant and naive - a rooted, proprietary stake in the fate of that fate. And so the most enduring image, for me, looks a lot like this:


That's Vladimir Mayakovsky, early 20th-century poet, standing proud in the lower left corner, and the Peking Hotel standing tall to the right. Down the Garden Ring, a few blocks straight into the photo, is a bakery that sells small quiches and chocolate croissants and cheese bread. Across the street is a grocery store with a surly checkout lady. Around the corner, teenagers drink beer and get affectionate (VERY affectionate) in the park. In the invisible foreground is the entrance to the Metro stop, Mayakovskaya, that is the neighborhood's mass transit connection to the rest of the city.