The Metaphysics of Moscow

Rustam Rakhmatullin is an essayist, local historian, and a writer who has studied the history of Moscow for many years – he reinterprets the knowledge of Moscow studies in a new way. The author resorts to unexpected comparisons and conclusions,... leading the reader simultaneously through the visible and invisible capital. Comparing it to Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople, as well as to St. Petersburg and other Russian cities, he sees Moscow as a miracle of the manifestation of the Higher Design, embodied over many centuries in historical events, artistic monuments, urban topography, and the symbolic space of city monasteries and former country estates. In the times of the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Russian Tsardom, during the St. Petersburg era and in the 20th century. In the deeds of Ivan Kalita and Saint Metropolitan Peter, Ivan III and Ivan the Terrible, the first printer Ivan Fedorov and Prince Pozharsky, Peter I and Catherine II, architects Bazhenov and Kazakov, and many other heroes of the first book. The second book discusses the Moscow love myth – its topography and sociology, not just its metaphysics. The heroes of the book, from great to small, from kings and queens to literary characters, inhabit and 'fall in love' with the city not arbitrarily, but according to the laws of the city itself, its spaces. A map of these spaces concludes the book. The book 'Two Moscow' is a laureate of the National Literary Prize 'Big Book' in two nominations (2008). 'Falling in Love with Moscow' is a laureate of the Russian Government Prize in Culture (2009).