I was just trapped in a small elevator for 20 min.

This is a short post with a few pictures of the "literary sojourn" my friend Matt (one of the grad students on the program - Andrew, you know him) and I took. It took a lot of walking, and backtracking, and backtracking the backtracking, and running into authors' houses that are closed for repairs - but the 5 hours of walking (short for a day out in Moscow) was worth it, I think.

Here's Mayakovsky, who's place I haven't visited yet, but his statue was around. He looks strapping. And....

Gorky. His place was the coolest I've seen so far. I wouldn't want to LIVE there (too cool for me), but apparently neither did he. He spend his last years here, where I was told he was put by Stalin when he got a little loose with his words (maybe, I might be a little off). But he was a big supporter of simple surroundings in accordance with communism, and he was put here - in lavish surroundings (leather, art nouveau architecture) and it bothered him. The staircase looked like something out of a Tim Burton movie. Unfortunately, I'm too cheap to pay the extra money to take pictures inside - so try to look it up online. Here's a picture of the outside, though.

I think these two were pictures of the outsides of Lermontov and Chekhov's places - which were closed for repairs.


Here are Blok and underneath him is the less important Tostoy, Alexei (which I shouldn't say, that sounds sad).


And we went back to Patriarch's Pond - but I was on the other side of it this time. Instead of Bulgakov, they have a statue of this old moral fairy tale author who I don't know anything about. But here's a picture of him.

And beside him stood a row of smaller statuettes depicting what I can only guess are illustrations of some of his stories.





And finally, here are two pictures of me by the pond....


The end.