Black Earth City

"Yes. Charlotte’s book is like a sort of mirror image of my experience of Voronezh. I spent a year there in 1973-4 when the Brezhnev regime was very stolid. Charlotte spent a year there in 1991, just after the failed coup against Gorbachev, so I recognise everything in her book but it’s presented as though in a distorting mirror. So, whereas students in the hostel when I was there were conservative and leading a very dull life, Charlotte describes this wild Dostoevskian picture of sex, drugs, alcohol and wild inflation – girls turning to prostitution because of inflation. The passage I remember most in the book is that she’s wandering about in the morning with her Russian boyfriend just before New Year and they go into a café and there’s nothing in the café except bottles of champagne and, for some reason, masses of Mars bars. These are the only two items. Yes. I wasn’t there then, but she has this champagne breakfast. I’m not sure if they had the Mars bar or not, but it’s a wonderful paragraph about the difference between getting drunk because you want to get drunk and getting drunk because there’s nothing around but champagne. She describes it as a more solemn kind of drunk."