To Their Adopted Faith

“The Kremlin Ball" was on my mind all day.  Something about summer.  Something about being away from home on the family porch and its easy to justify an uninterrupted read through a two-hundred-page novel, or fictive memoir, whatever we choose to call Curizo Malaparte’s fascinating account of elite life in Moscow during the thirties. 

Mayakovsky is alive, for a while.  Trotsky’s sister is still in town.  Stalin and his moustache show up at the Bolshoi and we are forced to consider the contradictory passions of the newly liberated Moscow at the time of the Red Terror when people of note were steadily disappearing.

Malaparte is particularly concerned with what has become of Christ. This must have been more troubling in the 1930s than it is today.  Everyone seems newly divorced from their relationship with Christianity, newly accustomed to their adopted faith that topic gets considerable engagement and forceful rebuttal.  Today the Churches are there, some are faithful, most don’t care.

This book, jammed so quickly into my mind, that the visions of former aristocrats selling underwear in the street, and Mayakovsky’s room where he killed himself, with its pictures of the New York City skyline, that heady, scary 1930s Moscow was swimming about my head as I showered and drove with my wife over to meet the rest of the family at Burgerfi, where the Juliette Theatre used to be, out near Vassar.

Burgerfi is nothing like 1930s Moscow.  They have double, marbled Wagyu beef patty, super burgers and fatter-than-thou onion rings from farm-to-table that are delicious if gratuitous.  I didn’t really ‘need’ a double Wagyu burger but I ordered it nonetheless.  It was really, good, going down.  So was the IPA they had on tap.  But, sure as a Bolshevik free-thinker was going to find himself shot in 1930’s Moscow, I was now tired.  Pushed that urge back though, I did and got myself on a bike and went for a ride, once I was back home.

Sunday 7/22/18