Russia used to be renowned as one of the most well-read nations in the world. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, love for reading has been on the decline. This year an initiative called "Moscow Reading" was launched to get Muscovites back into books. The Moscow metro showed its support by launching a train at the end of May with literary texts and storybook illustrations adorning every carriage. Each has different themes. One carriage (right) is dedicated to animal fairytales, while the next has more serious reading, with extracts from Tolstoy's "War and Peace," Pushkin's "Yevgeny Onegin" and Lermontov's "Masquerade." Another carriage is dedicated purely to stories for children, while the last carriage focuses on foreign literature, with stories by Mark Twain and Jules Verne. Photographs by Vladimir Filonov.
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