Songs And Dances Of Death
“Lighthouse was me all over. The Bell is less so because I decided to take a more detached approach, and not take it too close to my heart.”
When Marjana Semkina was a child, her father worked at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a vast facility located on the Kazakhstan steppe, about 2000km southeast of Moscow. For over half a century it’s been central to the Soviet then Russian space programmes: it’s where the first Sputnik satellite was launched, and where the Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was based before being catapulted into the heavens. It’s also a grim, poisonous place, where the locals report high levels of cancer, and toxic chunks of scrap metal dot the landscape.
“I spent my first years there in terrible poverty,” says Semkina, safely ensconced in her apartment in St Petersburg. “A terrible climate. No rain. So much desert. No food. No money. No clothes.”
For a while, it didn’t get much better. Next stop was Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, a city currently most famous for being a distant, unwanted destination for football
