Everyday Moscow. Essays on Urban Life in the Early 20th Century

What was life like in Moscow in the early 20th century? How much did a crispy French roll and a summer dacha cost, a meal at a restaurant, and a fashionable hat? How did Muscovites relax, meet each other, look for life partners — and what replaced social networks for city dwellers? Urban gossip and legends, dubious places and transportation, police work, high society life, and the everyday life of ordinary Muscovites… — you will rise above time, as if on the first tall “skyscrapers” of the capital, and closely examine that distant, forever lost Moscow. The authors of the book, recognized experts on Moscow life Vladimir Ruga and Andrey Kokorev, created their version of “Moscow and Muscovites” — with a much more detailed description of the life in the Capital in the details, often slipping out of the sight of Gilyarovsky, but extraordinarily interesting to us. “Everyday Moscow” will speak to you with the voices of Muscovites who lived over a century ago: they will resonate from diaries and memoirs, newspaper and magazine essays, novellas and novels. This journey into old Moscow will also be made extraordinary by rare illustrations, caricatures, photographs, and advertisements from the periodicals of those years.