The Archivist of Nizhny Novgorod

Anatoly Moskvin spoke thirteen languages. He had visited over 750 cemeteries across Russia in the course of what one assumes he described to himself as research. He was 45, a journalist and historian, and people who knew him called him a genius. When his parents showed up unannounced at his apartment in Nizhny Novgorod, they found 26 corpses.

He’d selected them carefully—all female, all between 15 and 26 when they died, all dug up across years of nocturnal fieldwork and transported home in plastic bags. He dried them out. Some he dressed as dolls or teddy bears and arranged around the apartment: on the couch, in the bed, in the wardrobe. A private museum with a very specific curatorial vision. Men didn’t interest him at all.

What gets me, in the way that train wrecks get me, isn’t the horror—that’s obvious and accounted for. It’s the methodology. The 750 cemeteries visited and assessed like a field researcher mapping a subject. The patient selection criteria. The years of sleeping in coffins or on benches in graveyards before getting to work with the shovel. This is a man who applied the same rigorous intelligence to corpse decoration that he applied to his thirteenth language. Whatever came loose in him came loose slowly, and whatever stayed intact kept functioning at a high level. That might be the most unsettling part.

Police arrested him and then, shortly afterward, let him go. Nobody’s been fully clear on why. He probably wasn’t thrilled about it—the authorities took all his ladies back, which means starting the whole collection from scratch. The state: confiscating a man’s life’s work.