Deriving from a seminar series at the University of Basel in 2012, this volume sets itself the task of peeling away the thick semantic layers of the Russian capital. It is produced, dare I say it, to Swiss standards of quality: on excellent paper, with abundant color images. The editors and contributors note that Moscow has generated more than its fair share of myths and narratives; their task is to show how those myths were produced and sustained. Very reasonably, film, literature, the visual arts, and the built environment form the main areas of investigation. The volume combines survey chapters with more specialized treatments. Some basic parameters are provided by Benjamin Schenk's lucid survey of Moscow's rise and self-mythologization from Iurii Dolgorukii onwards. Thomas Grob presents some literary highlights of the “Moscow text” from Mikhail Lermontov to Vladimir Sorokin. Dorothea Redepenning provides a brief survey of musical Moscow, while Tatjana Simeunović contributes a slightly fuller chapter on the treatment of Moscow in Soviet and post-Soviet film. Among the more specialized chapters are Barbara Schellewald's account of Henri Matisse's visit to Moscow in 1911 and its resonance in his work; Alexander Honold's discussion of accounts of interwar Moscow by foreign (primarily German) travelers; Dietmar Neutatz's study of the construction and early imagining of the Moscow Metro; Werner Huber's survey of architecture in the post-Soviet era; and Sabine Hänsgen's chapter on Moscow conceptualism.

Moscow's cultural history has hitherto received a little less attention than its ostensibly more glamorous rival, the “Petersburg text.” As emerges from several chapters in this volume, the reason may well be because it is harder to pin down. St Petersburg is static and monumental (at least in the way it is imagined), and lends itself to analysis by scholars of a structuralist bent, who tended to set the tone in this field of scholarship from the 1970s until quite recently. In contrast, destruction (creative or not), reinvention, and outwards seepage have been inherent to Moscow for many centuries, and especially since 1800. Perpetual change is the city's very nature; conservationists have never achieved much here. Nothing in Moscow is quite as fixed or age-old as it might appear: as Redepenning tells us, the melody of “Podmoskovnye vechera,” the city's (and Russia's) unofficial anthem, was originally written for the Leningrad White Nights. It is symptomatic that the last chapter in this volume, by Tomáš Glanc, focuses on the motif of Moscow's “vanishing” in contemporary literature and art; the “semantic lability” (270) that Glanc identifies is precisely what makes Moscow interesting to several of the book's contributors. One of the most thought-provoking chapters is Jörg Stadelbauer's study of Moscow's periphery and hinterland, which takes the story up to the (later stymied) proposal to move the Russian parliament to Kommunarka, a town in the large slice of southwestern Moscow oblast that the capital swallowed up in 2012. As Stadelbauer's chapter suggests, Moscow's development has mostly been messy and “organic,” maintaining the city's original concentric pattern, but also lurching in new directions due to the interventions of the ever-present state power.

As is almost unavoidable in collectively authored volumes, not all the chapters fit equally well the editors' agenda, and even the survey chapters have their particular emphases and blank spots. Simeunović moves briskly from Grigorii Aleksandrov's Circus to Marlen Khutsiev's I Am Twenty to Vladimir Menshov's Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears—very much the usual suspects for anyone moderately well informed about Soviet culture. Like the material elsewhere in the volume on literature, art, and architecture, this chapter becomes more interesting and original when it reaches the post-Soviet era. It is a bit of a shame that the book does not deliver a fuller description of the period 1850–1970, and that the different themes and art forms are not pulled together into a clearer analytical chronology. However, this volume is well worth a look for any reader interested in the past, present, and even future of the Russian capital.