BOOKPATHS

Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, Russia

The Guardian pulls a 1905 visit with Tolstoy from their archives.

Yasnaya Polyana seems a very haven of peace. And about Tolstoy's own personality the atmosphere of peace seemed to be resting continually. He was very calm, with the calmness of one whose time of struggle is past, and though he talked freely about current events and was kind and courteous after the gracious manner of Russian noblemen of the old school, one knew that his real life was hidden in some remote world of quiet contemplation. – from The Guardian

Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Russia; Washington State, U.S.

The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006)

Suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, elderly Russian émigré Marina Buriakov’s present life in the Seattle area is gradually giving way to vivid memories of World War II Leningrad, particularly the celebrated Hermitage Museum where she first served as a guide; then worked with others to save the art collection before the city's fall; and finally lived, hoping to survive the siege in its “cavernous vaults” with 2000 other citizens.  One doesn’t forget the images author Debra Dean presents of the ravages of war; the frigid, killing winter; the hope of spring; the magnificence of the Hermitage Museum; and the beauty of art and nature, present or remembered, that helped some, like Marina, survive.

Because one leaves the book’s pages wanting to know more, the "Reader’s Guide" at novel’s end is particularly welcome, including the suggestions for further reading and a lovely essay by Debra Dean describing her first journey to St. Petersburg.

“It is harder for Marina to preserve her old life.  She was a museum guide, and now there is no one to guide and nothing to see.  Every day, she walks through the abandoned picture gallery with its broken and boarded windows.  Hills of sand are piled near the entrance to each room in case of fire.  And on the walls are rows of empty frames, left hanging as a pledge the paintings will return someday.” – from The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Barbara Dean

Related Websites

Publisher’s Website

Debra Dean’s Website

Hermitage Museum
“…the next best thing to visiting the museum in person.” – Debra Dean

Moscow, Russia

Novelist Martin Cruz Smith discovers “the sinister magic of a city that reveals its true colors at night.”

At midnight the city is a brilliant grid of light that includes the gilded dome of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the Stalinist horror of the Ukraine Hotel, and a dark loop of the Moscow River. Downstream the lights of round-the-clock construction hang in the air while steel and concrete disappear. The clutter of the day is gone. The night brings clarity, and lights trace the future. – from “Moscow Never Sleeps,” by Martin Cruz Smith, National Geographic

Russia

Guy Dammann talks to Orlando Figes, whose newest book is The Whisperers: Private Life Under Stalin’s Russia.

With his latest, fifth book, The Whisperers, a favourite for this week's Samuel Johnson prize, Figes takes this lens and adds a zoom, maintaining the close focus on invisible lives but taking in the whole sweep of Soviet history. The book concentrates on the fragile survival of private and family life under Stalin, and in it the historiography of empathy has in many ways reached its definitive form. – from “Russian Revelations,” by Guy Dammann, The Guardian

Russia

Jonathan Dimbleby explains why Yasnaya Polyana, “the estate where Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 and where he wrote his two most famous novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace,” was the highlight of his trip to Russia.

And by the time had wandered around the estate on a balmy September afternoon, I really didn't want to leave. I walked through apple orchards, along leafy rides and into the meadows where Tolstoy used to work alongside his serfs mowing the hay. I sat on a bench made of birch where he used to sit in a favourite part of his beloved wood. And I stood in silence in a glade facing the simple grass mound where he was buried in 1910. The solitude of the moment was broken only by the rustle of the wind; it was truly hallowed ground. – from “Dimbleby in Tolstoy’s Russia,” by Jonathan Dimbleby, The Times

Nabokov Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Housed in the grand home where Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was born, the Nabokov Museum, established in 1997, “is dedicated to fostering Nabokov’s memory and his artistic legacy and cultural values, both within Russia and internationally.” Visitors will find “exhibits related to Nabokov’s life and milieu;” a research library; special events, including readings and lectures; an annual international Nabokov summer school; tours of Nabokov’s St. Petersburg; guided tours to other family homes; and temporary exhibitions and installations related to the author. The museum is open year-round, Tuesdays-Fridays, 11:00-18:00, Saturday-Sunday, 12:00-17:00. The Nabokov Museum website offers visitor information, along with biographical information on the author and his family.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is a perfect companion, whether planning a trip to St. Petersburg or armchair traveling. Evocative and moving, the author’s autobiography returns readers to a distant time and place, a time of “splendid country estates” and revolution.

My mother did everything to encourage the general sensitiveness I had to visual stimulation. How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red. Sometimes, in our St. Petersburg house, from a secret compartment in the wall of her dressing room (and my birth room), she would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to be hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fêtes, when, in the padded stillness of a frosty night, giant monograms, crowns, and other armorial designs, made of colored electric bulbs – sapphire, emerald, ruby – glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above snow-lined cornices on housefronts along residential streets.. – from Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov

Related Website

Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov – Publisher’s Website

Chechen Republic

Asne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul, explains why she was drawn to Chechnya’s street children, the subject of her latest book, The Angel of Grozny.

“She says she didn’t write about the big picture in Chechnya 'because other people do that better than me. I wanted to write about what I saw.' And what she saw was nearly always heartbreaking. She tries to 'put armour' around her emotions now she is back home, but clearly needs to guard herself carefully.” – from “Author Asne Seierstad Enters Hell with the Angel of Grozny,” by Marie Colvin, The Times

Taganrog, Russia

Taganrog, Russia, celebrates Anton Chekhov, its native son, with numerous “memorial sites” open to visitors, including the house where he was born on January 29, 1860. For an online tour and information on Chekhov’s life and work, visit Taganrog’s website.

Chechnya

Meg Clothier talks with Arkady Babchenko whose “writing about his time as a Russian soldier in Chechnya helped him cope with harrowing memories.”

“These notes became One Soldier's War in Chechnya, his memoir of the Chechen conflict which was published in the UK earlier this month by Portobello Books (translated by Nick Allen). As a book, it not only tallies with growing western dismay about life in Russia, but has also earned Babchenko critical comparisons with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Tolstoy's early stories about Russia's 19th century Caucasus wars.” – from “No Quiet on the Chechen Front,” by Meg Clothier, The Guardian

Russia

Jonathan Myerson revisits Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

“This is a novel about how individuals are broken and degraded by politics, by history, by inevitability. At the heart of this is Lara and Yuri's daughter. In Lean's film, Tanya is the smiling, balalaika-playing worker at the dam (played by a toothy and burnished Rita Tushingham). In the novel, she is a foul-mouthed street orphan, a thief who could not be more different from her long-dead parents. She is what Russia has sunk to, Pasternak is telling us, she is all that is left of these two great souls.” – from “Doctor Zhivago Comes in from the Cold,” by Jonathan Myerson, The Times