BOOKPATHS

St. Petersburg, Russia

Rachel Polonsky, winner of the 2011 Dolman Travel Book of the Year, "remembers living through the final Soviet winter of 1990 in St. Petersburg -- then Leningrad -- and feeling the world turn upside down."

The bride was English, a former student of mine, but she posed for photographs like an archetypal Petersburg beauty at the foot of the Bronze Horseman, Falconet's statue of Peter the Great. It was the midsummer season of white nights, when the sun never fully sets, and we stayed at the wedding party till morning, wandering along the Moika embankment for breakfast at the Hotel Angleterre.

It was all so different from when my husband Marc and I had lived here 15 years before....

Russia

Author Scarlett Thomas chooses A Life in Letters, by Anton Chekhov as her “book of a lifetime.”

As well as the wonderful letters he writes to his mother and sister about his daily life and his travels, we also read of the complications of renting dachas, buying fishing equipment, boots and suitcases and the care of the mongooses he brings from India. – Scarlett Thomas, The Independent

Russia

Is Andrei Platonov “Russia’s greatest 20th-century prose stylist?"

Stalin called him scum. Sholokhov, Gorky, Pasternak, and Bulgakov all thought he was the bee's knees. But when Andrei Platonov died in poverty, misery and obscurity in 1951, no one would have predicted that within half a century he would be a contender for the title as Russia's greatest 20th-century prose stylist. – from  “Andrei Platonov: Russia’s Greatest 20th-century prose stylist?, by Daniel Kalder, The Guardian

Anton Chekhov's Birthplace -- Taganrog, Rostov Oblast, Russia

Taganrog invites readers to visit the birthplace of Anton Chekhov.

Chekhov's life was filled with Taganrog. Life scenes, details and personages drawn from the home City of the artist can be recognized in his books. – from Taganrog Website

Russia

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (many editions; first published in 1869)

Leo Tolstoy’s (1828-1910) masterpiece transports readers to Russia leading up to, during, and following Napoleon’s invasion.  Through memorable characters and sweeping descriptions of time and place, readers come to identify not only with Russian life in the early 19th century, but more deeply with their own time, with the timeless realities of life in “war and peace.”

Those people in Moscow who couldn’t think for themselves (and that included Count Rostov) were stuck for some time without anyone to lead them and without any clear views on how the war was going.  Moscow society sensed that things were going wrong, but bad news was painful to dwell on, so they kept quiet. – from War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Related Websites

War and Peace Online Edition – Project Gutenberg

Yasnaya Polyana

Russia, Italy, France….

Aravind Adiga explains why we “must read” To the Finland Station, by Edmund Wilson.

'To the Finland Station' is the story of the men who tried to break the code in human history — men like the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico; the French historian Jules Michelet; the Russian nihilist Mikhail Bakunin; and above all, it is the story of Karl Marx, the founder of communism. In some ways, 'To the Finland Station' reminds me of Dostoevski's novel 'The Possessed' — which is also the story of a group of revolutionaries who want to create a better society. – from “All Aboard Historical Thriller Finland Station, NPR Website

Russia

Luke Harding asks why Russia is “lukewarm” about Leo Tolstoy.

Russia's scant regard is connected to its own troubled existential journey, Deryabin suggests, and its failure to discover a national idea. ‘We have been searching for it for long time. In fact, the answer is the one given by Tolstoy: the task before humanity is to be happy now.’ – from “Leo Tolstoy: the Forgotten Genius?” by Luke Harding, The Guardian

Starogladovskaya, Chechnya, Russia

On the other hand –

Sophia Kishkovsky writes about the recently reopened Tolstoy Museum in Starogladovskaya, Russia.

A museum devoted to Leo Tolstoy reopened recently in the village in Chechnya where he spent his formative years as a writer in the 1850s, and where he warned of the pitfalls of Russia’s quest to tame this restive region in the northern Caucasus. – from “Tolstoy Recalled Fondly in Chechen Museum,” by Sophia Kishkovsky, The New York Times

Yasnaya Polyana, The Museum-Estate of Leo Tolstoy, Russia

The former estate of Leo Tolstoy is open to the public year round.  Visitor information can be found on their website.

The house that witnessed the greater part of Tolstoy’s life and where most of his literary masterpieces were created became a museum in 1928. The authenticity of the furnishings, and of the works of art, and the library, which belonged to the writer’s family, makes it one of the most unique museums in the world. The interior of the house is kept as it was in 1910. – from Museum Website

(Photograph of Tolstoy's bedroom from museum website.)

Russia, especially Moscow and The Ural Mountains

Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak (New York:  Pantheon, 1997, and various editions; first published in 1957)

Set in the first part of the 20th century, Boris Pasternak’s courageous and memorable Doctor Zhivago follows physician and poet Yurii Andreievich Zhivago as war and social unrest tear him from the life he once knew and the people he loves, including his wife, Tonia; his children; and Lara, the great love and passion of his life.  Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, Pasternak refused the honor because of pressure from the Soviet government.  Movies and television have adapted Doctor Zhivago for the screen, but the depth of the novel is only found by entering its pages.

Ever since childhood Yurii Andreievich had been fond of woods seen at evening against the setting sun.  At such moments he felt as if he too were being pierced by shafts of light.  It was as though the gift of the living spirit were streaming into his breast, piercing his being and coming out at his shoulders like a pair of wings.  The archetype that is formed in every child for life and seems for ever after to be his inward face, his personality, awoke in him in its full primordial strength, and compelled nature, the forest, the afterglow, and everything visible to be transfigured into a similarly primordial and all-embracing likeness of a girl.  Closing his eyes, ‘Lara,’ he whispered and thought, addressing the whole of his life, all God’s earth, all the sunlit space spread out before him.

But everyday, current reality was still there, Russia was going through the October revolution, and he was a prisoner of the partisans….  – from Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak

Publisher’s Website