Recent Reads: Mud and Stars; by Sara Wheeler

In this delightful book, Sara Wheeler follows in the footsteps of the great Russian authors from the “Golden Age” between the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the 19^th century: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and others less well known in the West. She discusses their lives and works and travels through Russia visiting the sites where they lived, including the north Caucasus and remote parts of Siberia; staying in the homes of local people and chatting to them, to build up a picture of life in Putin’s Russia today. This is interspersed with anecdotes about the difficulty of learning the Russian language, and instructions on the correct pronunciations of the writers’ names. I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone with even the slightest interest in the subject.