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For the last ten years, journalist Jens Mühling has been traveling through Russia in search of stories that appear unbelievable: a hermit from the Taiga who only recently discovered there was a world beyond the woods; a mathematician who believes a thousand years of Russian history to be a fairy tale; a priest who ventures into the exclusion zone around Chernobyl to preach to those that stubbornly remain there. Mühling shows us a country whose customs, contradictions, absurdities, and attractions are still largely unknown beyond its borders.
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About the author
Jens Mühling is the author of
A Journey into Russia,
Troubled Water, and award-winning features and essays on Eastern Europe. He has won numerous awards for his features and essays on Eastern Europe.
Summary
In A Journey into Russia Jens Muhling shows us a country whose customs, contradictions, absurdities and attractions are still largely unknown beyond its borders.
Additional text
“A brilliant account of the Russian frame of mind.”
— Süddeutsche Zeitung
“To understand the ambiguities, contradictions, absurdities and complexities of the Russian soul, the advice was always to read Gogol. The advice now would be to read Jens Mühling. There is a shock of discovery and a shot of pleasure on every page.”
— Times (UK)
“Jens Mühling is a brave man. . . . The spine of his narrative remains the quest for Agafya, for a woman whose ancestors, at each of ‘the crucial crossroads of Russian history’, had refused to follow the herd. . . . It won’t spoil the story to say that he and she (then 69) do finally meet, an encounter that Mühling describes movingly and elegantly. It’s a tribute to the translator, Eugene H Hayworth, that this never reads like a book that was first written in German.”
— Telegraph
“[Mühling] meets a bewildering variety of ‘old believers’ in a broader sense, from members of the sectarian Orthodox Church . . ., through stubbornly Leninist former Soviet citizens, to newly minted Slavonic pagans. They all want to tell Mühling their life stories which, in his empathetic retelling, provide glimpses into other lives that are vivid and frequently moving.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“[A] rich, eclectic travelogue.”
— Russia Beyond the Headlines
