Overheard in Moscow

This LiveJournal community (in Russian) allows users to contribute transcripts of conversations overheard on the streets and in public transit in Moscow. The first place I read about this was in Russian Life magazine, but Digenis had the story first.

One of my favorite publications, Bol'shoi Gorod, has a piece in a recent issue titled "Tasty Conversations," which may or may not have been inspired by the "overheard in Moscow" LJ site, and which - if you believe the commenters on the web version of the article - may or may not be fictional. I was reading this a couple of nights ago in a fit of procrastination and found myself laughing out loud.

The conversations were supposedly overheard in Cafe Pushkin. The upscale restaurant, which has stayed popular for too long to call it trendy, is right around the corner from BG's editorial offices, so maybe they really did have their writers sitting in there for hours at a time waiting for the people at neighboring tables to say something interesting. But some of the conversations seem too good to be true, not to mention the fact that many of them reveal details about the people speaking which you'd like to think a journalist wouldn't want to publish without getting consent. I wanted to write that they've succeeded in capturing the zeitgeist, but that sounds a bit pompous...

If I were a betting man, I'd say the conversations are probably fictional, but as I enjoyed them I found that to be almost beside the point. Maybe one of the commenters who suggested that some of the conversations are real and some are fake had it figured out. Anyway, they took me right back to Moscow and made me feel very nostalgic. They are full people who are gossipy, silly, self-absorbed and self-important, sometimes drunk and often unhappy. I guess when you grow to love a city, and it's forever, you love that city and the characteristics of its inhabitants warts and all. Anyway, if this is fiction, I hope some of the writers involved (it was a team effort) are working on first novels. I was going to try translating one of the funnier ones, but they are so full of colloquialisms that I don't think the humor would really come through.