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Dushechka is a new woman because she is with a new man.

She lives happily for six years until one day in winter, after drinking hot tea, Pustovalov goes out without a hat, catches a nasty cold and, after four months of illness, dies.

Poor Dushechka. She retreats into isolation, with only the company of her cat. There is also the local veterinarian, who’s separating from his wife and comes to visit Dushechka often.
Although Chekhov doesn’t really go into the details, he seems to hint that Dushechka and the vet are more than friends. We know this partly because Dushechka now bores people talking about
animal diseases.

One day, to her despair, the veterinarian is posted far away and once more she is left on her own. With nobody to love, Dushechka falls into a depression. She grows old and grumpy. She no longer
has any opinions. She doesn’t know what to talk about or what to think. Her heart, Chekhov tells us, is ‘as empty as her courtyard’.

The years go by and Dushechka’s house grows shabby. She is now an old woman, who spends her summers sitting on the porch and her winters looking through the window at the snow.

Then, one day, the vet, now an older man, shows up in town with his wife, with whom he had reconciled. Dushechka lets them stay at her place, and somehow ends up taking care of their
nine-year-old boy. In the child, Dushechka finds someone to love, a new purpose in life. Now she cares about the school curriculum and other child-related issues. With something to whine about and
occupy her days, Dushechka is happy again.

As interesting as Chekhov’s story is Tolstoy’s interpretation, which gives us an original take on the mystery of Olga’s soul. In a review of
Dushechka
, Lev Nikolaevich
says that Chekhov, intending to mock the unsophisticated woman, had accidentally created an endearing character. Tolstoy goes on to accuse Chekhov of being harsh on Dushechka, by judging her
intellect and not her soul. Olga’s soul, according to Tolstoy, embodies the capacity of Russian women to love unconditionally, a virtue unknown to men. It is through this unconditional love,
he suggests, that women achieve happiness.

Y
EARS LATER
, I
CAN SEE
that the moment at the Revolution Museum, as I stood absorbed by the silent call of a woman in a poster,
had the makings of a spiritual awakening – like the instant Raskolnikov finally realises he needs to confess his crime and move on with his life and his punishment.

If my life in Moscow had been a Dostoyevsky novel, Polina’s tears at my apartment would have carried the seeds of my epiphany, and the dark feeling that accompanied me during the days that
followed would have – perhaps at that very moment in the Revolution Museum – emerged at the surface of my conscience as clear regret.

But back then I didn’t know. I couldn’t know, really, distracted as I was by the city. Despite the odd doubt about the purpose of my life – despite the fatigue, the sleepless
hours in bed, the morning headaches – come the weekend, I would put on a well-ironed shirt, drink shots of vodka and go out with the brothers to nightclubs. And in this way we spent our
weeks, our months, and never did I stop to think that all of this could, one day, come to an end.

By late spring, Yulya Karma had stopped visiting me on a regular basis. We still saw each other for tea, but only every two or three weeks. It was nicer this way, because our bodies had time to
get unaccustomed to each other, and we clashed with more zeal. One day, Yulya Karma told me she had decided to leave her boyfriend and proposed, in the same businesslike manner as when she’d
first offered to be my lover, that she be my girlfriend. ‘I think we are very compatible,’ she said, ‘we would be very good together, as a real couple.’ I told her it
wouldn’t really work because, even though I was quite fond of her, I would never be able to fully trust her. I think she understood. And it was a pity, I thought, because I liked her and she
had a touch of pragmatism that made her different from the other girls; so practical and focused, Yulya Karma, and she could have made a good girlfriend, were it not for her natural talent for
deceit.

Colin said, in the end, we were all searching for the perfect girl, the Export Quality Dyev, as he put it – the perfect woman to take home with us the day we had to leave Moscow.

Maybe he was right. Perhaps all the going out was, after all, just a protracted search for someone we could keep. A futile search, I now understand, because, ever since Katya had left me in
Amsterdam, I couldn’t bring myself to define what I was looking for and, had I encountered it, I would not have known. What I craved was a particular thrill, a wave of euphoria, a resonance
in my soul, which was becoming harder to feel with each new girl I met.

I lost contact with Ira. A couple of times we’d agreed to meet for coffee at the university but, for different reasons, I’d had to cancel at the last minute. We’d talked on the
phone, and she told me she was considering leaving her American lover and getting back with Sergey. We agreed to go out for dinner to catch up, but I kept postponing, never finding the right time,
until the plan faded away. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Ira, and at times I missed her company, but I found it hard to fit her into my life. We were out of sync, Ira and I. She
lived at a slower pace, with her modest salary, going to Project OGI with her old friends, torn between Sergey and her one lover.

Stepanov’s car dealership, which he had set up in just a couple of months, was booming. He imported luxury vehicles from Finland, where he bought them for almost half their Moscow market
price. He managed to avoid customs duties by profiting from a mix of bizarre legislative loopholes and good old Russian bribery. The cars were exhibited in a spacious salon in Prospekt Mira, which
Stepanov had named Miller & Stevenson Luxury Vehicles, suggesting foreign ownership. To emphasise the non-Russian nature of the business – which, according to Stepanov, allowed for the
cars to be marked up at least ten per cent above their price in Russian-owned dealerships – I was asked to show up often, particularly when serious buyers were expected. Oligarchs, flooded
with enormous amounts of cash at the time, couldn’t get enough of the cars, and, by June, Stepanov was selling about a dozen luxury vehicles a month.

He kept a black BMW for himself – a bumer, he called it – which gave him much to talk about but rarely left its parking place in Stepanov’s courtyard. To the chagrin of those
Muscovites who could now afford decent cars, it remained much easier to navigate the city by public transport or the large and very efficient fleet of unofficial taxis permanently cruising the
streets.

We had a great summer that year. Truth be told, I don’t remember much of the legendary nights of the summer of 2001. It’s not that I forgot them – it’s more that they
never registered in my vodka-soaked mind. I only know what happened because I recall Colin, Diego, Stepanov telling and retelling our stories in Starlite, or at Stepanov’s place, and the
stories that weren’t told back then were for ever lost, and, in the end, my memories of those great nights are not my own memories, but those I borrowed from the brothers.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
R
USSIA
changed again.

A week after the attacks in New York and Washington, in the midst of worldwide soul-searching and hysteria – as the Western media talked about the war against civilisation, or ‘the
day that changed the world’ –
The Exile
came out with an article that caused a stir among expats. Under the heading ‘Be Cool, America’, the article said, more or
less, that America had it coming.

Russians also seemed to have mixed feelings about these historical events, brought up as they were to hate their Cold War foe. Russian leaders, including the president, rushed to publicly offer
condolences and assistance but, if you looked carefully at the TV while they spoke, you could detect a trace of a smirk on their faces.

These are the kind of people we have to deal with in today’s world, Russian politicians said, referring in the same breath to the war in Chechnya. But Russia went ahead and allowed America
to use its air space to attack terrorist bases in Central Asia. Russia also shared intelligence from the soviet experience in Afghanistan. All of this was unprecedented, historical in fact, and, in
the few weeks after 9/11, Moscow expats had the feeling that Russia was warming to the West. Russian leaders sounded more obliging, helpful and understanding than ever before, perhaps thinking
that, if the world was to be split along a new Iron Curtain, they wished to be, this time, on the right side of history.

This geopolitical rapprochement cascaded down to our everyday Moscow lives, where we all perceived a small post 9/11 shift. Expats were in vogue again, and for a few weeks, we – the
ambassadors of Western civilisation – were the recipients of kind words of support.

It didn’t last long though. By the end of the year, as the images of the planes crashing into the towers lost part of their power to shock, things went back to normal. Russia redirected
its course away from the West, disappointed perhaps that its friendly gestures had not been taken seriously. And, in Moscow, expats no longer deserved any particular sympathy.

Stepanov said the Americans had done this to themselves; not by provoking others, as
The Exile
had suggested, but by actually planning and carrying out the attack on their own soil. He
maintained it was all a CIA conspiracy. This theory was widely held in Moscow at that time. It was a bizarre hypothesis which I couldn’t understand until, at some point, after long drunken
discussions on the topic, it dawned on me why Russians didn’t know how to deal with 9/11. Russians were envious of Americans and regretted that 9/11 hadn’t happened to them instead.
They couldn’t bear the fact that an event so full of suffering and historical meaning, an event that was to mark the fate of the new century, had happened to undeserving Americans instead of
Russians – hungry and ready as they were for national tragedies.

R
EADING
W
AR AND
P
EACE
IN
Russian was an ambitious project I had tackled
several times but never managed to carry through. I knew I was no real expert in Russian literature – and, clearly, I lacked the intellectual focus to become one. But if I could at least
claim to have read
War and Peace
in its original language, word by word as Lev Nikolaevich had written it, I thought I would somehow feel less of a fraud.

For the last few days, I had been going every morning to Coffee Beans. I would sit by the large front window and carefully arrange the two volumes of my 1944 edition on the table, next to a
dictionary and one of my notebooks. I would ritually spend a few minutes holding my hot mug of coffee, observing how Muscovites fought winter in the street. For some reason, I took pleasure in the
contrast between the two sides of the glass wall – the world of high ceilings, gilded mirrors and fresh coffee, and the world of crawling traffic, red noses, teary eyes and thick scarves.
From the warm interior of Coffee Beans, listening to cool jazz, people in the street appeared to me as fictional characters.

I would take my time with every page, sipping coffee, flipping through the dictionary, struggling with bizarre Russian words I had never encountered before and, I suspected, I would never
encounter again. I would take notes, my work occasionally slowed by my having to exchange looks with a dyev at a nearby table.

Every now and then, the thick double doors of Coffee Beans would open to let a new customer in, coat peppered with snowflakes, shoes caked with ice and mud. The floor of the café was
constantly being mopped by diligent waitresses in a Sisyphean effort to keep winter outside, so, after passing through the door, newcomers would hesitate for a few seconds before defiling the shiny
floors. To me it felt as if each newcomer were an intruder who had, for some reason, less right to be in the café than me.

A few days into my latest
War and Peace
attempt I realised that I wasn’t making significant progress, that at this pace it would take me months, if not years, to finish Lev
Nikolaevich’s book. I decided to recalibrate my objectives. After all, I told myself, it’s not that I had to read the
entire
book in Russian. A taste of the original language
was all I needed, as long as I knew the story well enough to form some original opinions of my own. So, one morning, before entering Coffee Beans, I walked into the Moskva Bookshop and, overcoming
a vague sense of guilt, I bought an English translation.

Now I would flip through the pages of the cheap Penguin Classics translation – which I kept half-hidden under the table – identifying interesting passages that I could later read in
Russian in my beautiful soviet edition. I couldn’t be bothered with the war bits. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had told me that Tolstoy’s battle scenes were masterpieces in their own right,
the best depictions of violence in world literature, she said, so realistic and vivid. But when I tried to read them I would soon lose interest. I always ended up skipping those sections and
looking for the passages about the lives of the characters in times of peace, analysing Lev Nikolaevich’s take on his female characters.

One morning I sat by the window of Coffee Beans observing how snowflakes floated among the cables and banners of Tverskaya. They didn’t seem to reach the ground, the snowflakes –
they glided peacefully towards the street’s surface, then hovered above it for a moment, weightless, as if having second thoughts, and were briskly swept away by the breeze, sideways and
upwards, back into the sky. Of course the snowflakes had to reach the ground at some point, I thought – Tverskaya was covered in white.

I was reading the scenes in which Natalya Rostova made an appearance. At the beginning of the book Natalya is only twelve, but she already shows the features of a full dyevushka in the making.
She’s lovely, Natalya, and gracious – the pure embodiment of youth. I had read somewhere that Tolstoy had fallen in love with Natalya’s character and I could see where that theory
came from. Although she was not described as being particularly attractive, she was depicted in a special light. Was she Tolstoy’s ideal woman? Unlike Pushkin’s Tatyana, who was too
good to be true, Tolstoy’s Natalya felt real, alive. Natalya Rostova was capricious, coquettish and, in her own early nineteenth-century way, a bit of a tease. She would certainly fit in
modern-day Moscow.