"Back to Moscow" Guillermo Erades

"Back to Moscow" by Guillermo Erades was published in 2016 by Scribner UK.

It is a story about a Martin who, around the turn of the Millennium, is in his twenties and moves to Moscow to do his doctoral theses.
The topic he writes about is the female heroine in Russian literature.

His interpretations of the Russian classics are spot on and make you want to read and re-read all of them at once.
His heroines of choice are:
Pushkin's Tatyana in "Evgenin Onegin"
Tolstoi's Anna Karenina and Natasha in "War and Peace"
Dostojevski's Sonya in "Crime and Punishment"
Chekhov's Olya, Masha and Irina in "Three Sisters"
Turgenev's Liza in "Nest of the Gentry"
and more.

While he's meeting a lot of girls and reading at cafés, he's always in search of the secret of 'The Russian Soul':

I'd learned by now that Russians loved to hear the expression Mysterious Russian Soul. It made them feel special, unique. The Russians I met often referred to the Mysterious Russian Soul to describe deep feelings that, I was told', a foreigner like me was never able to comprehend.

So we learn that it is something that sets the Russians apart from the Westeners, gives them a uniqueness and depth.

With the example of Turgenev's Liza in "Nest of the Gentry", Martin explains that The Russian Soul is not about being happy, but about making sacrifices and

toska, a deep spiritual sorrow, [that] is worth pursuing in itself. Beautiful, self-inflicted pain.

Martin realizes that the Russian Soul makes them

avoid superficial joy and choose to pursue deeper, sadder feelings - something that makes them chase the resonance and aesthetic value of melancholy.

The moral of the story and what it means to be Russian is that life is not about happiness but about meaning.
And that you should always choose Russia, even if it means not being happy, over the non-moral Westernized/Europeanized.


One of Martin's acquaintances, Stepanov, has his own explanation about what sets the Russians apart from the Westeners:

You Westeners are always angry because you want to change everything in life. We Russians are always sad because we know that most things cannot be changed in life.

His advisor at university, Lyudmila Alexandrovna, lectures Martin on the origin of the mystery as follows:

The expression Russian Soul, as known today, had been coined in the 1840s by Belinsky, the influential literary critic. It was Russia's reaction to German romanticism, an ideal to agglutinate a divided nation, to put Russian idiosyncrasies above those of other European states. Lyudmila Alexandrovna told me how the expression had been part of the romanticising of Russian peasant life and how, in her view, it had been Fyodor Mikhailovich - good old Dostoyevsky - who had popularised the term later on, making the soul, she said, the depository of human contradictions, of the eternal struggle between God and evil.

Lyudmila Alexandrovna, along with Nadezhda Nikolaevna (who is Martin's language teacher), represent the 'Old Russia'. It seems especially the older people in the book, who grew up in the Soviet Era, represent a certain melancholy for those days, when they were taken care for and people could still depend on each other.
One of Martin's girlfriends, Lena, functions as the 'bridge' between Old and New Russia.
She has a very particular view on religion, as she states that you don't need to believe in God to be a good Christian and try to be good. She also represents the advancing corruption of Russia's values by the Western influence and the urgent need for guidance.
What Westeners don't understand, because for them it was nothing but a tool of oppression, is what the downfall of Communism meant for the Russians.
Lena explains it as follows:

Moscow is changing [...]. In soviet times, communism gave us values to live by, a sense of community. People helped each other. That's gone now. [...] Russia is lost. [...] First we had God. Then we had Lenin. Now we have nothing.

This void of values is a common theme throughout the novel and also what seems to set the modern day Russian women apart from the Russian heroines Martin tries to understand.
And he, as the male hero of his own story, is the counterpart that represents a common and well-known type of protagonist of the Russian novel.
Lyudmila Alexandrovna correctly labels him as a Lishniy Chelovek, a 'Superfluous Man'.
Someone who is:

typically born into wealth and privilege. They are sensitive men [and] also very cynical. [...] [T]hey disregard social values. [...] They don't contribute anything positive to society. They suffer existential boredom. Often, they end up challenging other men to useless duels.

Martin really indulges in his expat experience. He goes to clubs and cafés, meets girls and friends, reads and re-reads the Russian classics (but no scholarly literature).
In short, he does everything but concentrate on his studies.
He proves everyone right in thinking him to be a Superfluous Man.



What I didn't like about the novel was that you could 'feel' the author too much.
He is too obviously depicting a time in his own life, only fictionalized.
At one point he even lets Martin claim that he is going to write a novel about his experiences in Moscow, which is practically as if the author tries to speak directly to the reader (and ever since Mr Barthes we know that the author is dead).
But, you can also clearly feel that he is a Russophile with his understanding of the culture and people.

He really makes you understand the difference between being happy and having meaning in life, and what it means to be Russian.