In order to really do justice to the writing of Trinity, I knew I had to return to Russia to deepen some of the things I’d experienced that first time, and enrich the sensory texture of the novel, and the series in general, especially as I would be writing some very important scenes in Moscow, which I wanted to know a good deal better than over the two and a half days we’d spent there in 2010. We didn’t want to stay in hotels or go on any organized tours either, this time, but instead wanted to experience daily life in the city, on our own. In order to do that I knew I needed to learn at least basic Russian. Used to slipping from English to French with fluent ease, I had found it frustrating  to be stuck in the role of helpless tin-ear tourist the first time. So before we went the second time in August 2012, I enrolled in an excellent online course called Russian Accelerator, which, with an imaginatively devised combination of video and audio focussed on natural learning plus individual tutor attention, promises to make you fluent in basic conversation in just a few months, as well as to read Cyrillic script—a promise that was kept!
And thus it was that a month after I finished my last Russian Accelerator lesson, we were crawling in heavy Moscow traffic, heading for one of the city’s most central thoroughfares, Tverskaya Ulitsa, or Tverskaya Street, and the apartment we’d rented for two weeks, only a few blocks’ walk away from Red Square and the Kremlin.

Moscow is a great world city but it is also its own world. European but not Western; beautiful and ugly; built for giants yet surprising you with glimpses of cozy neighborhoods on a very human scale. Once the feared seat of the ‘Evil Empire’, it is now the brash symbol of Russian capitalism, buzzing with pushy energy yet also at times surprisingly relaxed. And of course Moscow is most certainly not the be-all and end-all of Russia. But like all great capital cities, it is also a kind of physical microcosm of the nation, of its history, its culture, its people. The shaggy parks mimic the forest; the river winds its way through the city’s heart, like waterways do throughout the land; Red Square, in its exhilerating yet overwhelming spaciousness is a kind of miniature of the sweeping vastness of the Russian landscape; the faces in the street are molded from features that have come from every corner of this enormous country. Continue reading →