Novodevichy Cemetery is among the places Eduard wanders through during his return to Moscow, a city he once lived in for seven years. Its significance in this episode lies in how the present-day search for a place to begin becomes a passage through locations bound to his past with Tanya—and to the recognition that their relationship is over.

Setting and recollection

Eduard walks through Novodevichy Cemetery as part of a wider circuit of places that had served as backdrops to his affair with Tanya. The cemetery is not presented as an isolated destination: it belongs to a landscape of remembered encounters and former intimacy that he moves through while trying to orient himself in Moscow. The city feels newly gray and inhospitable to him, making the contrast between present surroundings and remembered life especially stark.

Connection to Tanya

As Eduard passes through these places, thoughts of Tanya return alongside more particular memories, including her poodle, whose white curls became black with dirt when the thaw began. He considers calling her in Madrid, where she is living with a Spanish marquis, and has her number in his address book. But the imagined appeal—arriving downstairs and asking her to open the door—belongs to a reunion that can no longer happen. Anything less, he thinks, would be sentimental claptrap. The cemetery thus forms part of a remembered geography of their love, while his hesitation makes that geography a measure of their separation.

Narrative significance

The scene makes the city function as an archive of personal history: familiar places remain physically available, but returning to them cannot restore the relationship they once framed. Eduard’s walk connects the cold, difficult present of his return with the intimate past he encounters in memory. Novodevichy Cemetery’s importance here is this conjunction of place and recollection, not a separate event within the narrative.