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By Root 964 0

a building in the center of the Princeton campus. The language classes were crowded, but only four of us in the Class of 1982 declared Russian as our major. I took courses in politics and history to examine the centuries-old ties between the rulers—Czars, Bolsheviks, the Politburo, or whoever held the reins at the time—and the country’s writers, who belonged to the Russian people. I remained obsessed with the literature—with Chekhov’s stifling parlors and Gogol’s lunatics, yes, but also with a couple of contemporary writers and poets, some of whom were in exile, and some of whom—through compromise or cleverness or both—survived the system as Soviet writers.

After graduation, I turned down the chance to translate interoffice memos at some Washington agency or another. Instead, I worked for tips as a tour guide for doctors on professional exchange programs. I crisscrossed the Soviet Union, starting each trip in Moscow, finishing up in Leningrad. Two years later, I began a career in network television, and as I climbed the ladder, traveled frequently to the USSR. Three times I fell in love on assignment during Moscow winters, always finding some magic of chemistry or coincidence in that barren place. In 1992, I spent two months researching weapons facilities for the American network I worked for, but it was my last trip to Moscow. I had recently married, soon would have a son, and then a daughter, and duty and domesticity curtailed my exotic travels almost to extinction. But my devotion to Russian literature remained, and I loved to revisit my college volumes—Turgenev, Lermontov, Gorky, Aksyonov, Akhmatova, and especially Chekhov—and skim my margin notes, scribbled at a time when there was nothing on earth more important than the book in my hand.

In my forties, my old obsession began to scratch at me. I had begun to travel, write, and work again, but there was urgency in the sensation that Russia was calling me back. I started to miss, then crave, and then positively require my connection to the passion that had defined me. A classic midlife epiphany, to be sure, where I felt a desire to stitch the known past together with the unknown future, and to soothe myself with the knowledge that I might yet be the same person after nearly three decades. My whole life was before me back then, and in a way, with two nearly-grown kids, it was now as well. So, on Memorial Day, I left my husband, my teenagers, and a couple of houseguests in the middle of a summer barbecue to catch my plane to Moscow. I was duplicating that first journey, taken right after I graduated from college. I wanted to know if, when I landed on Russian soil, it would feel like home again.

It hadn’t begun well. Two weeks earlier, I had spent two full days—one of them in hurricane-force rains—standing outside the Russian consulate in New York, applying for a visa, with a restless throng of other document-waving hopefuls. I made the mistake of not hiring an outside procurement service, and spent hours on the sidewalk making anagrams in my head out of the words, Mr. Medvedev, tear down this wall. One advantage of traveling with a television network? I never had to get my own visa. The document came through, but I already felt done-in by the great Russian obstacle machine.

Round two greeted me upon landing in Moscow at 5:00 P.M. Passport control was interminable; it gave me severe Brezhnev-era flashbacks. I couldn’t find an open bank to get rubles, so I charged a train ride to Belorussky Station, where I discovered that I left my fluent Russian somewhere in 1992. It was pretty much gone, especially the part that might have helped me negotiate with a swarm of drivers, all clad in leather jackets, who lurked curbside ready to shake down the next sucker—in this case, me. There were no official taxis. What had I ever liked about this place? I fumed as I doled out fifty U.S. bucks to a man who ferried me to the National.

It was now a seven-star hotel. My parents had sprung for it in 1982; this time, I prepaid my stay in credit card points. In my room, the antique reproductions