October 16, 2017 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s absorbing “House of Shadows,” an exploration of the rich, tragic history of an old Moscow apartment building called the House on the Embankment. Yaffa writes, “No other address in the city offers such a compelling portal into the world of Soviet-era bureaucratic privilege, and the horror and murder to which this privilege often led.” The House on the Embankment is massive, “a self-contained world the size of several city blocks.” Yaffa describes it as “a mishmash of the blocky geometry of Constructivism and the soaring pomposity of neoclassicism.” Yaffa speaks from personal knowledge of the place; he lives there. In his piece, he describes his apartment (“Successive renovations had left the place without much of the original architectural detail, but as a result it was airy and open: less apparatchik, more IKEA. Tall windows in the living room looked out over the imperious spires of the Kremlin”), talks to friends and neighbors (“We spoke about the atmosphere in the building back then, what Tolya’s grandparents must have been thinking as the bright and just world they thought they had built began to cannibalize itself”), and recounts the building’s nightmarish history:

Volin, I learned, kept a suitcase packed with warm clothes behind the couch, ready in case of arrest and sentence to the Gulag. His wife burned an archive of papers dating from his time as a Bolshevik emissary in Paris, fearing that the work would brand him a foreign spy. They gave their daughter, Tolya’s mother, a peculiar set of instructions. Every day after school, she was to take the elevator to the ninth floor—not the eighth, where the family lived—and look down the stairwell. If she saw an N.K.V.D. agent outside the apartment, she was supposed to get back on the elevator, go downstairs, and run to a friend’s house.

Interestingly, even though Yaffa lives in the House on the Embankment and is intensely aware of its traumatic history, he’s not weighed down by it. When a former tenant says to him that the building “stands on mournful ground, and its residents are doomed to carry a very difficult sorrow,” he writes,

I, like many of my acquaintances in the building, don’t necessarily feel the burden of such heavy symbolism. A friend of mine, Nina Zavrieva, a consultant and tech entrepreneur, grew up in an apartment that first belonged to her grandfather, a lawyer who worked in the Politburo secretariat. Nina, who is thirty, told me that from a young age she was familiar with the building’s rich history. “I knew all this in theory, but I never really felt it,” she said. “I never internalized it.” I asked her if anything about the building felt different after all these years. She said that she wasn’t sure, then remembered something: the color of the façade had changed. “At some point, it was pink, then it became bright gray, but really I don’t think I notice anymore.”

I never really felt it. I find this detachment from the traumatic history of the building they live in fascinating. Unlike, say, W. G. Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn, immersed in melancholy contemplation of the past (“Everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life,” etc.), Yaffa and his friend Nina show a tonic pragmatism. The House on the Embankment isn’t a ruin; it’s a functioning apartment building. Life goes on.