Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age Audiobook (Free)

With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides-Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, among others-Sara Wheeler looks for a Russia not really in the news headlines, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet areas and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nation­alities, religions, and languages in the Caucasus. Bypassing major cities as much as possible, she goes rather to the locations from the country’s literary experts. With her, we start to see the fabled Trigorskoye (“three hillsides”) estate about Dirt and Stars: Moves in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Various other Geniuses of the Golden Age that Pushkin frequented during his exile, right now conserved in his honor. We search for Dostoevsky along the waters of Lake Ilmen, site from the only house the restless writer ever possessed. We spend tribute to the solitary stone that remains of Tol­stoy’s birthplace. Wheeler weaves these writers’ lives and works around their traditional homes, providing us wealthy portraits of the numerous diverse Russias from which these writers spoke.

As she travels, Wheeler follows regional guides, boards with family members in moderate homestays, eats roe and pelmeni and cabbage soup, invokes formulas from Learning the Artwork of Soviet Cooking food, learns the vocabulary, and observes the pattern of outcry and silence that characterizes lifestyle under Vladimir Putin. Mud and Stars provides us timely, witty, and deeply personal insights into Russia, then and now.