A Great Migration of Verse

Abstract

On the old streets of Novosibirsk, a city where I lived for a good many years, you still find sturdy houses built of logs marked with painted numbers. It is said that many of these houses were at one time brought here from Kolyvan'. Kolyvan' is a trading town at the juncture of the famous Moscow road and the Ob River which began to lose its significance when the railroad was put through and its residents moved to the rapidly growing town of Novonikolaevsk. The houses there were taken down log by log, each log was numbered so as to keep a record of where it belonged, and the houses were delivered by river—apparently on barges drawn by tugboats (after all, they were travelling upstream!)—to their new sites. And there they were put back together. Each house was reconstructed exactly as it had been before the move. Only now it stood in another place, on different soil. Here there was sand; there there had been clay. Or vice versa.