police would regularly sweep them up for loitering. In the late eighties, Arbat Street got a makeover as a pedestrian mall—just as the USSR was starting to lift the Iron Curtain. In the nineties, street vendors of everything from fur hats to handmade jewelry shared the street with street musicians, street artists, and fans of the once wildly popular singer Viktor Tsoi, who had died in a motorcycle crash in 1990 at the age of twenty-eight. The fans had constructed a tiled wall in the Arbat as a memorial to him and milled around it, mourning their idol 24/7, year after year. Tsoi’s most famous song was “Change!” “Our hearts demand change! / Our eyes demand change!” went the refrain.
By the naughts, the Arbat had turned into the tackiest street in Moscow, lined with overpriced cafés with bad food and stores selling counterfeit antiques. Of the street vendors, only the fur hatters remained. Tsoi’s wall drew a crowd only in August, on the anniversary of his death. The street musicians had gone on to get real educations and actual jobs as advertising executives, and the only trace of their existence were three or four men who continued to strum their guitars in “the Pipe,” the pedestrian underpass at one end of the Arbat. Their audience was a semipermanent group of inebriated adolescents who had been drawn to the Arbat by its old reputation, in search of the counterculture or perhaps even a cause (Tsoi had represented one) or meaning (Okudzhava had promised it). This was where Maria met Nikita in 2006.
Nikita was older—twenty-two to Maria’s seventeen—and had been drinking harder and longer. He had a backpack with his essential belongings, which included a slim volume of Immanuel Kant, and he had been wandering central Moscow for a few years, with only an occasional stopover at home, in the northern Moscow bedroom suburb of Otradnoye (“Delightful”), one of the most dreadfully gray and desolate areas in a city almost unremittingly gray and desolate around its edges. Maria and Nikita started wandering together. They were both slim, not very tall, and both had long, slightly frizzy chestnut hair. Perhaps together they felt like the ghosts of those long-ago Arbat hippies. “It was a marginal way of life,” Nikita told me over tea in Moscow’s first vegetarian café. “A megamarginal way of life.”
Whatever it was that Nikita had been seeking when he drifted to the Arbat, he had long since stopped looking. Maria barely managed to graduate from high school; getting into college was out of the question. “When she did something, she threw herself into it fully,” N told me. “And drinking was no exception.” Most people I asked about Maria tried to skirt around the drinking issue—it seemed inappropriate, and disloyal, to discuss her teenage binges while she was struggling in jail—but found it difficult to tell the story without this part of it. “Should I be talking to you about this?” N asked me. I admitted I was not sure how I was going to handle the drinking in the writing, but told her this: I had been a teenage alcoholic myself; I nearly flunked out of high school because I was always either drunk or hungover; and I had no real explanation for what it was that enabled me to stop drinking. Nor did anyone really understand what gave Maria the strength and vision to quit: Nikita thought it was the Art of Living, a prepackaged yoga outfit that provided her with daily exercises that anchored her better than daily drinking; N thought it was getting pregnant—which Maria did in the fall after she did not go to college. She was eighteen.
“We got very inspired when she got pregnant,” Nikita told me. “We started researching birth, going to classes. She made plans. She has this ecological bent, she tries to lead an ethical life without the killing of animals, so she wanted to give birth at home and we made plans.” A home birth would indeed have required planning, as well as money, and
By the naughts, the Arbat had turned into the tackiest street in Moscow, lined with overpriced cafés with bad food and stores selling counterfeit antiques. Of the street vendors, only the fur hatters remained. Tsoi’s wall drew a crowd only in August, on the anniversary of his death. The street musicians had gone on to get real educations and actual jobs as advertising executives, and the only trace of their existence were three or four men who continued to strum their guitars in “the Pipe,” the pedestrian underpass at one end of the Arbat. Their audience was a semipermanent group of inebriated adolescents who had been drawn to the Arbat by its old reputation, in search of the counterculture or perhaps even a cause (Tsoi had represented one) or meaning (Okudzhava had promised it). This was where Maria met Nikita in 2006.
Nikita was older—twenty-two to Maria’s seventeen—and had been drinking harder and longer. He had a backpack with his essential belongings, which included a slim volume of Immanuel Kant, and he had been wandering central Moscow for a few years, with only an occasional stopover at home, in the northern Moscow bedroom suburb of Otradnoye (“Delightful”), one of the most dreadfully gray and desolate areas in a city almost unremittingly gray and desolate around its edges. Maria and Nikita started wandering together. They were both slim, not very tall, and both had long, slightly frizzy chestnut hair. Perhaps together they felt like the ghosts of those long-ago Arbat hippies. “It was a marginal way of life,” Nikita told me over tea in Moscow’s first vegetarian café. “A megamarginal way of life.”
Whatever it was that Nikita had been seeking when he drifted to the Arbat, he had long since stopped looking. Maria barely managed to graduate from high school; getting into college was out of the question. “When she did something, she threw herself into it fully,” N told me. “And drinking was no exception.” Most people I asked about Maria tried to skirt around the drinking issue—it seemed inappropriate, and disloyal, to discuss her teenage binges while she was struggling in jail—but found it difficult to tell the story without this part of it. “Should I be talking to you about this?” N asked me. I admitted I was not sure how I was going to handle the drinking in the writing, but told her this: I had been a teenage alcoholic myself; I nearly flunked out of high school because I was always either drunk or hungover; and I had no real explanation for what it was that enabled me to stop drinking. Nor did anyone really understand what gave Maria the strength and vision to quit: Nikita thought it was the Art of Living, a prepackaged yoga outfit that provided her with daily exercises that anchored her better than daily drinking; N thought it was getting pregnant—which Maria did in the fall after she did not go to college. She was eighteen.
“We got very inspired when she got pregnant,” Nikita told me. “We started researching birth, going to classes. She made plans. She has this ecological bent, she tries to lead an ethical life without the killing of animals, so she wanted to give birth at home and we made plans.” A home birth would indeed have required planning, as well as money, and
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