Writer and Worker. Rasskazovka, Moscow, 2018

Aidyn Zeinalov’s sculpture of a 20th-century writer and a subway construction worker was opened near Moscow’s Rasskazovka metro station in 2018. The composition features a fragment of a bright red rotor from a tunnel boring machine, which was used to excavate the tunnels between the Ramenki and Rasskazovka stations. The monument celebrates the history of the place where it was installed. A modern-day metro construction worker, with a jackhammer by his side, stands leaning against a stack of rails, which transforms into a bench, with a writer sitting on it. In 1934, writer Maxim Gorky suggested that the so-called “writers’ village” be built in this locality just outside Moscow; dozens of country houses were constructed and writers and poets such as Korney Chukovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Lev Kassil, Boris Pasternak, Ilya Ilf, Yevgeny Petrov, and many more, lived there over the years. Zeinalov’s writer and construction worker also evoke the characters of the 1964 comedy film Walking the Streets of Moscow, where Kolya, a young construction worker, meets a Siberian writer, Volodya, in the subway, and the two set off for “an adventure” in the Soviet capital.