Ebook: Mud and stars: travels in Russia with Pushkin and other geniuses of the Golden Age
Author: Gogolʹ Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich, Pushkin Aleksandr Sergeevich, Tolstoy Leo, Turgenev Ivan Sergeevich, Wheeler Sara
- Tags: Authors Russian, Authors Russian--19th century, Homes, Literary landmarks, Literary landmarks--Russia (Federation), Russian literature, Russian literature--19th century--History and criticism, Travel, Criticism interpretation etc., Biographies, Biography, Literary landmarks -- Russia (Federation), Pushkin Aleksandr Sergeevich -- 1799-1837 -- Homes and haunts, Gogolʹ Nikolaĭ Vasilʹevich -- 1809-1852 -- Homes and haunts, Tolstoy Leo -- graf -- 1828-1910 -- Homes and haunts, Turgenev Ivan Sergeevich
- Year: 2019
- Publisher: Random House
- City: Russia (Federation
- Language: English
- epub
There is a literal Russian landscape, and there is its emotional, literary counterpart. In Mud and Stars, award-winning writer Sara Wheeler sets out to explore both.
With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides – Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev, among others – Wheeler travels across eight time zones, from rinsed north-western beetroot fields and far-eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of ethnic soup that is the Caucasus. She follows nineteenth-century footsteps to make connections between then and now: between the places where flashing-epauletted Lermontov died in the aromatic air of Pyatigorsk, and sheaves of corn still stand like soldiers on a blazing afternoon, just like in Gogol's stories. On the Trans-Siberian railway in winter she crunches across snowy platforms to buy dried fish from babushki, and in summer she sails the Black Sea where dolphins leapt in front of violet Abkhazian peaks. She also spends months in fourth-floor...