Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age,
FRANCES WELCH
Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age Jonathan Cape £20 The title of Sara Wheeler’s new book is taken from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons: ‘We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.’
In her introduction, Wheeler announces that it is she who is in the mud, following an – unspecified – personal crisis, and the stars she reaches for are the Russian writers of the
Golden Age (1800-1910). A substantial part of Mud and Stars is taken up with vivid portraits of these giants of Russian literature. Wheeler writes that her aim is to touch Russian culture ‘with butterfly wings’; sometimes it feels more as though she is wielding a cudgel.
She outs Pushkin as a ‘whoring gambler’ and ‘heroic shagger’, who proclaimed that ‘lawful c*nt castrates the mind’. Dostoyevsky, another compulsive gambler, pawned his wife’s clothes and displayed other ugly characteristics, including boundless vanity and antiSemitism. Goncharov, the creator of Oblomov, was mad, while Gogol was an ‘anorexic and barking genius’ with a nose so long he could touch it with his lower lip.
Wheeler is more forgiving of Turgenev, tall, handsome and in possession of 5,000 serfs who literally sang his praises. A self-proclaimed ‘incorrigible Westerner’, Turgenev did not go in for what Wheeler calls guff about the Russian soul. Chekhov, sainted doctor and supporter of derelict brothers, emerges generally well, fishing peacefully in a pond from his window. On the other hand, he did take Nikolai Leskov, the author of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, whoring and complained of the frigidity of Siberian women, calling them ‘frozen fish’.
Tolstoy is denounced as one of the most egotistical men ever to have lived. Wheeler adds that he ‘cultivated high ideas about humanity in general but didn’t like individuals much’. He certainly came to loathe his adoring wife, the mother of 13 of his innumerable children. On a lighter note, he wrote the plan for War and Peace on the receipt for a Panama hat and had a surprising weakness for mod cons. Thomas Edison himself sent him the first recording device.
Wheeler gives elaborate accounts of visits to the writers’ widespread haunts and Mud and Stars has a strong travelbook element. Following chequered experiences in second-class train carriages, hostels, down-at-heel hotels and random ‘homestays’, she conjures up a galaxy of humbler stars. There’s Oleg, an overnight train companion, with just one front tooth; a homestay hostess, Tamara, with no teeth at all; and an uninvited visitor to her hotel room, who sports a toupée that goes ‘up and down like the lid of a pedal bin’.
The various stars of the book shine brightly, but they never quite outshine their chronicler. Wheeler is a stranger to oblomovshchina, the sleeping disorder named after Goncharov’s indolent hero. Indeed her appetite for every aspect of Russian culture – history, politics, music, language and cuisine – seems insatiable.
Though she never fully describes the crisis she underwent, or her travails in what she calls ‘the suffering department’, she advises us not to read Dostoyevsky on wife-beating. If she was beaten, she remains decidedly unbowed: when not kneeing a would-be mugger in the balls or thrashing women in the banya with birch twigs, she is leaping naked into the Volga. After quoting Chekhov’s lament about wasting his life on fornication, Wheeler suddenly chimes in, ‘Who hasn’t?’
She is quite an exclaimer. At odd points in the narrative come a Crikey, a Yikes and a Bozhe moi (my God). Occasionally she goes in for repetitions as well as exclamations. Of Gogol on his deathbed she writes, ‘They had put leeches on his nose (his nose!).’ And later, ‘Alexander Herzen was born … in 1812 (1812!)’. She also offers shouty instructions on pronunciation: Boris must be pronounced BAREECE and Turgenev Toorgaynyeff.
This might not be to everybody’s taste, but I found Wheeler’s brash humour and courage exhilarating. Mud and Stars is packed with fascinating details. Where else would you learn that Sergei Bondarchuk had two heart attacks while directing 13,000 extras in the Russian film of War and Peace? Or that khalatnost is the ability to spend all day in an oriental dressing-gown?