Sara Wheeler's Mud and Stars

Sara Wheeler has written a wonderful little book about her relationship with Russia.  The book focuses on author's visits to the homes of Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Leskov, Lermontov, and Dostoevsky.  But it also touches on her delightful attempt to master the Russian language as she approached the age of fifty.  The book isn't especially original, or tightly organized.  It's also a slightly awkward mixture of travel writing, literary criticism, and collective biography.  On the other hand, the author provides readers with a nice introduction to varied Russian literary giants, and provides readers with a number of amusing anecdotes about her travel and language adventures.  At any rate, Russophiles will definitely envy her trips to so many literary shrines in Russia.  I know that I treasure my own visits to apartments or homes once owned or occupied by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Block, Nabokov, Akhmatova, and Gogol, and regret not being able to find or enter apartments or homes once owned by Bulgakov, Mayakovsky, and Chekhov. When all is said and done, I guess we're all religious, one way or the other. 

Some favorite quotes from the book are below

Dostoevsky

He pawned his watch so many times that his saintly second wife said she never knew what time it was.

From Brothers Karamazov.  "For real Russians, the question of the existence of God and immortality are of course first and foremost."

A Dostoevsky biography reads like a Greek tragedy.

Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a lubricious, bawdy, imperious, whoring gambler who seldom missed an opportunity to pick a fight.

From Queen of Spades.  Would she like a Russian [novel]?  "Are there any Russian novels? the countess queries.

Pushkin produced the first major Russian work in almost every literary genre.

Pushkin was a heroic shagger who had time to write only when he had a sexually transmitted disease.

Two years later, he married her, writing to a friend to say that she was his 113th love.

Turgenev

Turgenev's father:   My son, fear the love of woman;  fear that bliss, that poison.

Lermontov

I have a congenital desire to contradict;  my whole life is merely a chain of sad and unsuccessful contradictions to heart and mind.

Gogol

Gogol's mother was proud of her son and in old age told neighbors that Nikloai Vasilyevich had invented the railway engine.

According to one academic there are eighty-six kinds of food in Dead Souls.

Chekhov

His stories and plays deal with the essential problem of being:  How to find meaning before the return to dust.

Chekhov felt that he had "wasted his life on fornication"--who hasn't--and wished to write a report on the condition of the prisons and prisoners, hoping that it might do some good.

"It seems to me," he said, "that Pushkin and Gogol are not understood here."

On Russia

Their lives were and are consumed with the generally dreadful business of being Russia.

Russia emerged as an increasingly shocking country. 

Catherine the Great said [Russia] was too big to govern, or so they say she said.

Russians claim the banya as their first doctor, vodka being the second and raw garlic the third.

Russia has two eternal problems, roads and idiots.

Quoting Alexandra Kropotkin:  "Russians are nice people, though in certain parts of Russia the admixture of Oriental blood may lend a definite touch of deviousness to their thought and behavior."

Quoting Alexandra Kropotkin:  "The whole of Russia is a prison camp."

Dostoevsky:  "The most basic spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything."

I remember my friend Colin Thubron, an accomplished Russia watcher and fluent speaker, saying that in decades of visiting, he had never met a smiling Russia.

The author's prose [Grossman's]  reinforced my opinion, forged both through direct experience and through reading, that for most people, being Russian has always been miserable--before, during, and after communism.

...the Soviets like shifting graves around, controlling death as they did life.

One of my Russian grammar books says that da and nyet "loosely correspond to yes and no."

We covered kto, "who," and chto, "what," or "that."  Cats and dogs, it turns out, had to be referred to as "who."  I asked Irina why.
"Well," she said, "they are not insects."

Words I had to look up

Lubricious





Other

Raisa Gorbacheva, we heard, was the first Russian First Lady who weighed less than her husband.