For someone like me, who has spent most of his peripatetic life away from the country of his birth, there exist two distinct types of nostalgia: positive and negative. The former is a bitter-sweet longing for the happy moments of your past; the latter a somewhat darker attraction to (or even a near-obsession with) an environment similar to the one you grew up in – no matter how restrictive, or even sinister, it could have been.
My undying interest in enclosed spaces goes back to my childhood. I spent the first three years of my life in a so-called ‘closed town’ near Moscow, to which my parents, newly married graduates of Kharkiv University (Mum a chemical engineer, Dad a nuclear physicist), were dispatched to work at a top secret Soviet government facility, developing nuclear and hydrogen bombs in the early 1950s. The town of 40,000 people was both unmapped and unnamed (it was referred to as ‘Military Unit BA/48764’, or something similar). A tall concrete...