In the Moscow library Marsden came across the existence of strange
sects that have somehow survived exile and persecution in remote
corners of the former Soviet Union. Sects such as the Jumpers, the
Milk-Drinkers, and the Spirit-Wrestlers, whose beliefs go back
centuries, have a sort of spiritual purity that sets him on their
trail. In isolated villages, among the Cossacks and on the old
collective farms, he meets people with the courage to persist in
their beliefs, and finds also their confusion at all the century
has done to them. These are the people who were exiled to Siberia
for their politics, who returned later to find their farms
collectivized and no way of making a living. Others, such as the
old man who treasures a letter more than a century old which
recounts the death of one of the holy men of his sect, are among a
host of open, forthright, often comic characters that Marsden meets
on his journeys, providing a fascinating perspective on the hidden
character of Russia. (Kirkus UK)
The new book from the acclaimed author of The Crossing Place and
The Bronski House. In Moscow, a man points on a map to the place
where he was born. He is a Doukhobor, a 'spirit-wrestler', a member
of a group of radical Russian sectarians. He is pointing to a
village beyond the southern steppe, at the far south of the old
Russian empire: 'I was born here,' he says. 'On the edge of the
world.' So begins Philip Marsden's Russian journey - perhaps the
most penetrating account of Russian life since the Soviet Union's
collapse made travel possible again. In villages unseen by
outsiders since before the revolution, he encounters men and women
of fabulous courage, larger than life, dazed by the century's
turbulence. By turns wise, devout, comic, they seem to have stepped
straight from the pages of Turgenev, Gogol and Babel. Marsden meets
such figures as the Yezidi Sheikh of Sheikhs, an exiled Georgian
prince and a cast of passionate scholars, stooping survivors of the
gulags, strutting Cossacks and extreme, isolated sects of
Milk-Drinkers and Spirit-Wrestlers. The Spirit-Wrestlers peels away
the grey facade of post-Soviet Russia and reveals a people as
committed as ever to answering that great Tolstoyan question: how a
man should live. Even more than in The Bronski House and The
Crossing Place, Philip Marsden shows that behind the horrors of the
Soviet years the human spirit remained triumphant. In so doing, he
shows himself to be one of the most exciting and original travel
writers of his generation.
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