A Homeland One Kilometer Long

Autumn of some year in the fifteen-sixties — the chronicles never bothered to record the exact day. A convoy grinds along a muddy road toward the Smolensk highway: soldiers, carts, the smell of tar and horse sweat. This isn't a street in any modern sense — it's Moscow's western edge, the road armies took to war and merchants took to market. People already call it Arbat. What the word actually means, though, nobody knows. And somehow, that suits the street perfectly.

There are three competing theories. An Arabic word, "arbad," meaning suburb. A Turkic one, "arba," meaning cart — which tracks, since cart-makers' workshops stood here for centuries. And a nearly forgotten Russian theory, from "gorbaty," meaning hunchbacked: the street runs over a gentle rise, and old-time Muscovites always noticed the road climbing here. Chronicles from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often spelled it differently still. It seems even the people who lived here weren't sure whose word it was.

The street's social history reads like layers in rock. First came the soldiers and craftsmen, a garrison quarter on the road to Smolensk. Then, once that military system was dissolved, the aristocracy bought up the district fast — grand old families building estates with gardens. After a fire in eighteen-twelve, apartment buildings went up instead: rented flats, hotels, literary salons. By the late nineteenth century, Arbat was dense, loud, and lived-in — poets, clerks and a seamstress sewing gowns for the aristocratic mansion across the courtyard, all sharing the same building.

Look down there, into the depths of Krivoarbatsky Lane. That's the Melnikov House. Two intersecting cylinders, their surface a honeycomb of hexagonal windows, like the walls of some giant hive. Konstantin Melnikov built it between nineteen twenty-seven and twenty-nine as his own personal laboratory, already famous after the Paris World's Fair. Around it — ordinary apartment blocks, a narrow lane, everyday Moscow. And then, suddenly, this. His son Viktor remembered thinking, as a child, that the house was alive, and taking offense when visitors called it "the barrels." For the family it wasn't an architectural experiment. It was simply home.

Bulat Okudzhava, a beloved singer-songwriter, wrote the line "Ah, Arbat, my Arbat, you are my homeland..." in the early sixties. Back then the street was just an ordinary thoroughfare — cars, trolleybuses, exhaust fumes, people rushing past. Nothing that looked like a "homeland" on the surface. That very contrast is what gave rise to the myth: a lyrical homeland hidden inside a noisy city. In one interview, Okudzhava admitted that the mirrored high-rises of New Arbat, built nearby, felt like they'd psychologically cut him off from the street he sang about. Many listeners knew this Arbat first through his lyrics — and only later came here to check it against the real thing.

Now walk over to building number thirty-seven. That blank wall is the Tsoi Wall, dedicated to Viktor Tsoi, a rock musician who died in a car crash in nineteen ninety. Within weeks of his death, someone wrote "Tsoi lives" and added a few lines from his songs. Soon the wall had become a layered scrapbook — signatures, drawings, dates, confessions. For the first few months, city crews left it untouched; there was no protocol for handling this kind of memorial. It was the first grassroots monument of its kind in the Soviet Union — created from below, with no permission and no plan.

The street became pedestrian-only in the eighties — though not because anyone dreamed up the idea first. People were already strolling it like a promenade; street musicians and artists had already claimed the sidewalks; cars could barely crawl through. The authorities simply made official what was already happening. For a while, police tried to regulate where street musicians could set up. Then they gave up — it became clear the crowds came precisely for that unpredictable, unregulated energy, not for order.

Arbat has always stayed one step ahead of whoever tried to control it. True of the aristocrats, true of Soviet architects, true of the police at the Tsoi Wall. The street simply moved forward, and people followed.

Ask me about the mansion on Denezhny Lane, just around the corner. I know who lived there in nineteen seventeen — and why that story still isn't officially told out loud.

Anything at all — a building, a word, a habit you never questioned. moygid dot online.