An innocent abroad: a Dutch tour operator in 1980s Russia

‘One morning in late October 1988,’ begins The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street, ‘this dapper-looking guy from Leiden asked me if I might be able to deliver 7,000-odd Bibles to the Soviet Union.’ It’s the kind of line you might hear in a bar when you accidentally catch the eye of the resident storyteller — a tale so implausible it could just be true. Where on the scale between fact and fiction Pieter Waterdrinker’s memoir lies is impossible to tell, and beside the point: his engrossing 400-page account of post-Soviet disorder grips you and doesn’t let go.

We meet the author — who may be the successful Dutch novelist himself, a projection of him, or most likely a composite version of the two — living in Saint Petersburg with his wife Julia and three cats on Tchaikovsky Street, named not after the composer but ‘some communist or other’. This is characteristic of Waterdrinker’s informal, unpolished style, nimbly translated by Paul Evans.