Moscow

Moscow is a city of rings around a fortress, like the age-lines of a tree that grew too powerful: the Kremlin at the center, then boulevards, then avenues, and beneath it all the palatial metro spinning — chandeliers, mosaics and marble bought at the price of an empire's ambition. St Basil's swirls its candy domes; Bulgakov's cat still seems to hold the lease on Patriarshie Ponds.

This postal, too, is written with honesty and love: the present has narrowed the sky's doors — flights are few, many chancelleries counsel against the journey, and the Guide does not argue with chancelleries. We counsel patience instead: read Tolstoy the long way, see the Bolshoi when it tours, learn the difference between pelmeni and vareniki, and let Moscow remain, for now, a city of the imagination — where she has always done her best work.

The Guide's honesty, which here is also a vow: this page waits with its lamps lit. When the bridges between the world and the rings are rebuilt, the doors below will open onto neighborhoods, tables, day trips and the winter that makes the city make sense. Until then the postal stands — the chart of a harbor the Guide intends, one day, to enter.