Hamid Ismailov’s latest work, The Underground, is the story of the Soviet underground in the final years of the USSR – both above and below the surface. The tunnels of the metro are Moscow’s very arteries, throat, skeleton, and womb: ‘I would venture that the best museum of Communism and the Soviets is the Moscow Metro,’ he writes.
The Underground is the story of the precocious and perceptive Mbobo, his life from 1984 to 1992. The narrator is the ’26- or 28-year-old’ man he would be, if he were still alive. Mbobo is an ‘Olympian’ – the child of an African athlete who competed in the 1980 Olympics, and a half-Khakass, half-Russian limitchik (a temporary resident of Moscow’s suburbs from a far-flung corner of the Soviet Union). His mother’s waters broke in Paveletskaya Station, she collapsed in Novokuznetskaya, and Mbobo – officially Kirill – was born near the Oktyabrskaya Station, on the Moscow Metro’s famous Circle Line. Mbobo is ‘Moscow’s underground son.’
Like Mbobo, Moscow is a city estranged from its own existence. The promises and certainties of the subterranean Soviet palaces of the Moscow Metro are a refuge from a hostile and decaying society above. ‘The construction of such magnificent stations as Sokol amid the maggoty darkness was a subconscious hint,’ the author muses, ‘at fashioning the heavenly homeliness of life, albeit underground, in the very place where Hell is generally supposed to be.’
For Mbobo, Hell is very much above ground. It is this society, which the fatherless, mixed-race Mbobo must navigate, in a series of reflections signposted with the city’s metro stations. Like Mbobo, Moscow is a city estranged from its own existence. In the late Soviet era, everybody is out of his depth.
