Mud and stars Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and other geniuses of the Golden Age

Wheeler (O My America!, 2013), one of the finest travel writers and biographers around, merges her twin disciplines in this sterling exploration of contemporary Russia. Using golden-age Russian writers Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Gogol, Chekhov, Leskov, Herzen, and Tolstoy as her guides, Wheeler traverses every facet of this vast nation, from its western rim near Estonia to the remote eastern expanses of Siberia. Each chapter begins with a brisk and wonderfully informative biography of a writer, noting the impact of specific places on their fiction. Wheeler also weaves in her personal attempts to learn Russian as she enrolls in numerous courses and immerses herself in the lives of her colorful hosts. She repeatedly documents the parallels between contemporary Russian nationalism and the nineteenth-century Tsarist world; indeed, she fascinatingly conveys how the influence of indigenous, Tsarist, Soviet, and contemporary cultures overlap, intertwine, and clash in this enormous country. While Paul Theroux's writing are a clear inspiration, Wheeler carves a unique portrait of Russia, one informed by a genuine affection for the food, culture, and landscape. A journey through time, space, and personal, culinary, and literary history, Wheeler's latest is a joyous demonstration of how brilliantly immersive travel writing can be at its very best.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2019 Booklist

Wheeler (Chile: Travels in a Thin Country) mixes travelogue and literary history in an entertaining work centered on her fascination with the great Russian writers of the 19th century. Zigzagging across a vast landscape, Wheeler visits sites associated with Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Turgenev, as well as lesser lights, such as Tolstoy's writer friend Afanasy Fet. Amid accounts of these men's lives, Wheeler relates her own experiences in homestays, sleeper cars, and hotels, showing how the run-down, seedy, and kitschy live in tension against the beauties of landscape and architecture. To Wheeler, if a single characteristic unites Russia, it is misery, "before, during and after communism." At times, her tone toward the country and its people borders on mocking, as when noting the provincialism of her Russian language tutor, who "had once been to a conference in Greece, and spoke of the country like the Promised Land." Vivid details nevertheless propel the narrative, from Gogol's anorexia to "a tin-can shaded" lightbulb in far eastern Anadyr, where wages hover at just above $200 a month. Fans of Russian literature will find this survey simultaneously provoking and informative. Agent: Lisa Baker, Aitken Alexander Associates (U.K.). (Nov.)

The veteran British travel writer roams around Russia, inspired by some of its most storied writers.In the introduction to this adventurous but not always cohesive book, Wheeler (Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2010, 2011, etc.) notes that she aspires to show how Russian literary titans like Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoy spoke both to their time and to present-day Russia. However, in most of the pages that follow, she's not engaging in socio-literary criticism so much as using those authors to lend gravitas to her efforts to grasp the country's current melancholic mood. Near Pushkin's ancestral home, she met a man boozily complaining about Putin; a chapter ostensibly about Dostoyevsky detours into her struggles learning Russian, nearly getting mugged at a St. Petersburg train station, and meeting some couch-surfing youths. Wheeler notes that her Russian teacher adores Turgenev but never explains why; a trip to the Caucasus to walk in Lermontov's footsteps leads to some digressive grousing about the country's poor preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and sour conclusion that "being Russian has always been miserable." This rhetorical disconnect is especially unfortunate because the text sings when Wheeler thoughtfully weaves her chosen writers with her travels. In Ivan Goncharov's 1859 novel, Oblomov, she finds a Bartleby-esque symbol of the national character, particularly in his hometown in Russia's far eastern region, where there are now "dozens of sets of traffic lights, many of which work." Wheeler's admiring visit to Tolstoy's estate thoughtfully captures the author's mordant mood and his hypocrisiese.g., his churchy pronouncements about austerity belied more than a dozen illegitimate children). More often, though, the book is best appreciated as light travelogue bolstered with some literary history.Wheeler is impressively well read in Russia's literary golden age, but her pocket biographies could better blend with her excursions. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

I. The People Stay Silent   "The people stay silent." "(Narod bezmolvstvuyet.)" -- Pushkin, Boris Godunov   Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a lubricious, bawdy, impet­uous, whoring gambler who seldom missed an opportunity to pick a fight. He never had a proper job, even though he was for a while nominally at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a department of the Chancery. He lived mostly off his father. He had a tortured rela­tionship with both the civil service and the authorities. The govern­ment of Alexander I, the tsar who had defeated Napoleon and was by European standards a medieval figure, was becoming increasingly reactionary, and an incontinent loudmouth like Pushkin had no chance. One prince, a high-level civil servant, recorded in his diary after a dinner in January 1822, "Listened to Pushkin at table . . . he tries to convince everyone he meets . . . that only a scoundrel would not wish a change of government in Russia. His favorite conversa­tion is based on abuse and sarcasm and even when he tries to be polite there is a sardonic smile on his lips." Pushkin was opposed to landowners, supported the abolition of serfdom, and indeed when he got going--according to the princely dinner companion--"began to pour abuse on all classes of the population." He announced "that all noblemen should be hanged, and that he would tighten the noose round their necks with pleasure." It is a testament to the respect in which literature was held that the government didn't kill him. Of course, three generations later Pushkin's dream of an egalitarian world came true in Russia. But they shot writers then.   Pushkin chose to write poems in Russian. Literary Russian had only evolved in the eighteenth century, stimulating a new school of poets from which Pushkin emerged. He turned to prose later. In his short story "The Queen of Spades" ( "Pikovaya dama" ), when the countess asks her grandson if he will bring her a novel, he replies with a ques­tion: Would she like a Russian one? "Are there any Russian novels?" the countess queries. (As a young woman in the middle of the eigh­teenth century, she read only in French.) Pushkin produced the first major Russian work in almost every literary genre. Just as Peter the Great, standing on the banks of the Neva, founded St. Petersburg "to open a window onto Europe," so Pushkin both Russified literary Russian and made his nation's books into something of Europe. And he is contemporary for all time.   The young Pushkin, "Sasha," grew up with household serfs and then attended the prestigious Imperial Lycée, where pupils were not permit­ted to leave during their six-year term. They studied the humanities, following the English public school system, and cultivated the worship of male friendship. ("My friends, this brotherhood of ours will live. | United, like the soul, it cannot perish.") Parents could visit on Sundays and feast days, but for two years, as a young teenager, Pushkin never saw his mother. While he was a pupil, Napoleon entered Moscow and for four days the city burned. This was the defining trauma of Pushkin's generation. His uncle was one of many who lost everything. The man fled the city with only the clothes he stood up in.   In the summer of 1824 the tsar dismissed the poet from the civil service (besides his political leanings, Pushkin was having an affair with his boss's wife, which can't have helped). Alexander exiled him first to the south, and then to his ancestral estate in the northwest, where he remained under civil and church surveillance in the company of the serf Nikita Timofeyevich Kozlov, who had brought him up. Whenever a friend visited from Petersburg, the pair would hear the sleighbells of the abbot from the local monastery. The old man would shuffle in for a glass of rum, the three would drink and mumble in the candlelit room, and the abbot would ride off again to compose his report. Excerpted from Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age by Sara Wheeler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.