In Moscow, they want to conduct official tours for cemeteries for foreigners. It seems that such excursions were before, but they were not quite official. And here, perhaps, the whole program will appear. In five languages - English, German, French, Chinese and Korean. It’s hard to say where Spanish has fallen. I saw many Spanish-speaking guests in Moscow in the summer who willingly looked at everything — probably they would have agreed to the cemetery. However, it was the world championship.
Excursions to cemeteries in Moscow, and more widely, in all of Russia are absolutely necessary. Especially for foreigners. Russian mortal culture is a natural continuation of the European culture of the same direction.
In each guidebook on the city, say, in Vienna on the very first pages it says: Be sure to go to the crypts that are under the church, for example, the Capuchins. Crypts are tombs for royalty. In the cathedrals of Vienna they look like stone dungeons with giant copper beds, and on the beds as monuments sit monuments buried in one and a half natural sizes and with surprised faces - spouses who have just woken up on the marriage bed and found themselves repressed.
This impression produces a much more terrible than any mausoleum. I would venture to suggest that even the mausoleum of those times when VI. Lenin did not lie there alone.
Thanks to the mortal culture - the culture of the dying of empires, the birth of a new world - the emergence of art nouveau, or, if you will, modern or art nouveau. This is a style based on the images of death, and it was not for nothing that he caught on in those European capitals where death was so much appreciated: in Paris, Vienna, Moscow.
Famous cemeteries and catacombs of Paris. The catacombs, we suppose, are absolutely terrible - a dungeon with a total area of 11,000 square meters. m., fully lined from the inside by human bones and skulls. But still an attraction, part of the museum complex.
The Peters Lachaise cemetery in Paris with the graves of Edith Piaf, Marcel Marceau, Jim Morrison and Nestor Makhno is also an obligatory tourist stop. And the cemetery of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, north of Paris, is an obligatory stop for every tourist from Russia. Here dazzles the luxurious mosaic carpet on the grave of Rudolf Nureyev, touches the pseudo-Russian tombstone of Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Hippius and soothes the modest cross of Ivan Bunin. And you are still surprised to see completely new burial places of young people - there, in the Russian Orthodox cemetery. They lived in Paris, they were already born, apparently, there were French. And lay down in a piece of Russian land.
Death and healthy attitude unite people. In the end, death is the only thing that everyone has in life. Biographies may vary from the moment of conception, but each ends with a cemetery.
Russia, no doubt, has an endless historical and tourist potential. But cemeteries do not need to be forgotten.
You can make the whole tour of the cemeteries of Russia. Start, of course, with Novodevichy. Here is the grave of the artist Yuri Nikulin. A man sits with a cigarette, and at his feet lies a huge shaggy dog Fedya. How much such a composition speaks of the humanism of the people and the national character!
Immediately close to the monument to Yeltsin, and Gogol’s tombstone a little deep and Bulgakov’s side, on whose grave a stone was laid from Gogol’s grave when the latter was exhumed. Eight years before his death, Bulgakov wrote to the speculative Gogol: "Teacher, cover me with your cast-iron overcoat." Sheltered. Not cast iron, and stone. But where else, except at the cemetery, could such a thing happen? And where else is such a direct and clear metaphor of continuity possible?
Then a foreigner - a Frenchman there or a Korean - should be taken to the Butovo proving ground. And tell who shot whom, oppressed and destroyed. Show our Babi Yar, our Katyn. Explain the very concept of the tragedy of the Russian people in the XX century. Tragedy, if not disaster.
Next - the endless burial of unknown soldiers - the cenotaphs, each of which represents tens of thousands of Russian lives, given for the whole world. To arrange an excursion around Volgograd, to tell about Stalingrad, in the same place everything - one continuous burial. Then bring it under Rzhev, to Myasnoy Bor, to the Kursk Arc. To roll across Petersburg, in the same place each house - a grave.
And then this foreigner, barely standing on his feet, holding his head and not blinking, must be taken to relieve the tension in Yekaterinburg Shirokorechenskoye cemetery for stress relief. There, where all the Ural criminal authorities are buried, where the monuments to them stand in two full height, with “Mercedes”, chains and granite tables covered with granite tablecloths and self-cuts - and how, a respected person must go to another world without changing the situation.
Russian mortal culture is very close, because it was Russia, personified by its people, who died more often and more than others.
There was, you see, dear foreigner, and such a period, and a kind. All died, you look. And so quiet in every cemetery. There are brilliant high monuments, and there are oblique crosses.
But you look more closely: Russia, in spite of everything, is alive and more alive than many.
Do you understand what I'm getting at?
So much for the tour.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.