Images from left to right: Music and Poetry Theatre of Elena Kamburova (Moscow); Scenography model by Mikhail Gavrilovich Nikolayev for “The Lion in Love (1968)”; Moscow Metro Station. All images owned by the writer.

I am tired of being asked where I am from. What matters is where I am going. My longing for somewhere else defines who I am, and getting lost feels like home. Disorientation is not a stage to be overcome – it is a dance, a dance of confusion, curiosity, exploration, experimentation. And here lies my truth, my immediate response to the state of existence. Existence is not a condition – it’s creation.

Stranger in Moscow

Written by Marina Lan

It is hard to decide which comes first: whether my experience of beauty drove me to a foreign land and made me a foreigner, or if the foreignness inherent in beauty echoes my identity as a foreigner and therefore attracts me. Either way, I am intrigued by the relationship between beauty and being foreign. 

Beauty evokes a longing to be close to something distant and unfamiliar. Such longing carries a feeling of mutuality: there seems to be a voice in beauty that yearns for a response. Calling for my intent listening, this voice is so alive that it overshadows my reality. I want to eliminate the distance between us and travel to another space and time, closer to what I heard, and answer it. As a result, I am always lost in the unknown. 

Why is disorientation essential in my experience of beauty? I can’t find the answer in real life, for the so-called “reality” consists of a series of definite locations and predictable routes. It is in my dreams where my inner adventures manifest in the flow of scenes, where the voices in poetry move me, lead me away. Paradoxically, the feeling of closeness between me and the poetic voice drives me to a faraway land.

In one of these dreams, I became a meeting place for poets from the past. At first, I was waiting for someone in the dark metro station in Moscow, an urban underworld 80 meters away from the ground. As if from deep water, whispers approach me from silence, revolving around my head, clearer and clearer until I can discern textures of voices, words, names of places and people. Suddenly, like an old family photo, the identities of the interlocutors are unveiled: they are Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, two Russian poets who kept correspondence their whole lives but never met each other in person.

My breath is taken away by this discovery, and I surrender to their duet willingly, trying my best to focus on what they are saying. An amateur composer must feel the way I feel when he rushes to transcribe the greatest church music he has ever heard, annoyed even by the disruption of his heartbeat. I hear how Marina interrupts and finishes Boris’s words, outpacing him in swift successions of affirmation and exclamation. How magnificently she projects her voice into the space we are wandering in! And he replies with sighs and smiles, all possible gestures, his monologue flowing like slow, powerful waves, supporting the heroic warship built by her speech. 

I started to wander in the vast station, searching for a corner where their voices sound clearer, like a radio searching for the right channel. The space is boundless, ready for me to take a never-ending walk. I have lost perception of the external and only focus on the inner sound, the chamber music of conversations in my head. Where I am doesn’t matter anymore, nor where I am from. Location, which marks my physical presence in the material world, lost its meaning, as my body became the medium  for something else.

Soon the figure of a transcriber yields to that of a ghost. What my life was like before joining this meeting, I cannot recall, as if I had died a long time ago and forgotten the feeling of being alive, until these voices allowed me to re-imagine living. Our positions are reversed in the underground in this dream: I am dead, and the poets are alive. Here I am, overhearing a secret dialogue between the living with the greed of the dead. 

I have become an object placed near their presence; I have become the room, blushed with the candles lit for their encounters; I have become the darkness that swallows the glitters of their whispers, the distance that separates and connects them, the air that scatters the sounds of their words while delivering them. I am their in-between. I am lost. 

I am lost, for I am so away from myself, from the spot where I am supposed to wait for someone I know… Who is it? 

At this moment it finally came to my mind that I was waiting for my mother. My mother, who speaks neither Russian nor English and came to Moscow for the very first time, is still waiting for me. 

The pain of guilt, even in a dream, struck me hard. How can I leave my mother alone in a foreign country because of my ridiculous fantasy about poetry? Where is she now? Is she still waiting? Is she panicking? Will passers-by give her a helping hand? She is the one who truly needs me, not some dead poets in the previous century. My obsession with them feels like a betrayal of my reality, of everything fundamental to my identity. Now that I have realized how I stray, can this realization stop my wandering and guide me home? The idea of home weighs heavily. A home is a promise to leave the uncertain behind, a leash of belonging. The question is: do I want to go home, or, am I really “me” at home?

More doubts emerged as I remembered my mother and my origin. I am a foreigner to the two poets. Although I have learned Russian for seven years, I never felt confident enough when faced with their work. There are always ambiguities in their poetry that tempt me to take liberties with the interpretation, to make loose associations, and to imagine what they could mean. I wonder whether the mystery created by these ambiguities is what really caught me, whether the distance is the very reason for my feeling of closeness and fascination. Apart from that, as a student of a foreign language, I doubt my role as the “transcriber”, for I can never be a reliable transcriber of their work as a native speaker, and it seems immodest for me to claim this role. Not to mention, that listening leaves little space for my own expression, in other words, my originality as an individual and a potential writer. 

I chose to be a foreigner with neither a firm grasp of place nor that of language, longing to approach the poetry I heard from afar. The state of foreignness is more complicated than relocation in a geographical sense: it shakes my understanding of myself. The fear of not knowing where I am grows into that of not knowing who I am. I am foreign to myself. 

A stream—cool and dark as fear, cool and dark as freedom—carries me away, passing the landscape of undecipherable visions. With sparkles of discoveries and intimidating depth, it fills the emptiness in my identity, rustling, ringing, with its fluid melody moving forward. Does this melody come from the poets I heard? Is this their composition? They touched something in me without a doubt, but the shape of the ripples says more about the water than about the breeze, and how music touches me informs me of my quality. Music contains certain knowledge about the listener, a knowledge I will never acquire within the boundaries set by agreed-upon definitions of me. The foreignness in the music of poetry revealed part of me, unnoticed even by myself in the past. It is miraculous but also natural that, when I recognize  the foreignness of beauty, beauty recognizes  the foreignness in me, too.

Unexpectedly, my longing for beauty is reciprocated. The voices of the poets,  breathing, wanting to be felt, urge readers to reply by creating their equivalent but original voices. And I do. The musical flow comes not only from the poets but also from my retelling of their conversation. (This explains why the music rings as if inside me.) It is more than the comprehension of the preexisting work: it is also the premonition of something yet to be created. To reply to the foreignness of beauty, I resorted to a foreign voice of mine, which became my work. Beauty empowers its appreciator; it makes a receiver the author. 

Hence, there is no outsider of beauty. Blessed with the recognition of beauty, foreigners like me are creating our land where we are insiders. We lost the place we knew, only to create a place no one has ever known. Disorientation is the beginning of creation. 

Now I know that I will never leave this dream, this metro station where I heard two poets talk. It has become my handmade homeland. I live in its depth, filled with invisible possibilities, in the soft voices of conversations, in the dramatic intensity of missing a definite meeting and indulging in a ghostly one. Am I not in the scenes of impossible encounters staged by myself? Isn’t my description of imaginary music becoming the music? Once I was so eager to gain access to the poetic world foreign to me. But now, instead of being invited, I reside in a poetic world created out of my foreignness. 

Like a crystal chandelier, shining, yearning, undiscovered, out of place, I am waiting for the grand arrival of my new voice. Writing is the metro station, a place of anticipation. As I finish this drama of poetic presence and absence of identity, I will come to life as a poet, rising from the underground, the underworld. I will become the poet I have heard.

MARINA LAN is a researcher in Russian poetry, music and theatre. She is also writing theatre reviews and learning to be a bard with her new guitar. She is exploring her language, her music and drama. If you would like to start a discussion with Marina about her writing, you can contact her at marinainblue@outlook.com.