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The Spirit-Wrestlers
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.
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.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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111 people want to read
About the author
Philip Marsden
47 books50 followersPhilip Marsden is the author of a number of works of travel writing, fiction and non-fiction, including The Bronski House, The Spirit Wrestlers and The Levelling Sea. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and his work has been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Cornwall.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 5, 2018
Philip Marsden travels through southern Russia and the Caucasus, mixing with the some of the more minor groups (ethnic and religious) - Doukhobors ('spirit-wrestlers'), old believers, Mokolans, Yezidi and the Cossack groups. He also visits Georgia, Ossetia and meets Armenians.
But more accurately, he writes about people. Constantly on the move, but always able to seek out people or a person to talk to, who will share their beliefs, their way of life, their culture with him. He finds a wealth of information from people from all strata of society, and seems equally at home with all.
He also covers the history of the people, especially the Alan and the Scythians, and the cultural features of the area such as the old ages the people from the Caucasus reach.
As an interesting overview, this book was enjoyable. He didn't stay in one place long enough to get too in-depth (which was fine), but as such this book didn't seem to have the same passion as his book The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians, which I enjoyed a little more.
Still a good read, at 3 stars.
But more accurately, he writes about people. Constantly on the move, but always able to seek out people or a person to talk to, who will share their beliefs, their way of life, their culture with him. He finds a wealth of information from people from all strata of society, and seems equally at home with all.
He also covers the history of the people, especially the Alan and the Scythians, and the cultural features of the area such as the old ages the people from the Caucasus reach.
As an interesting overview, this book was enjoyable. He didn't stay in one place long enough to get too in-depth (which was fine), but as such this book didn't seem to have the same passion as his book The Crossing Place: A Journey Among the Armenians, which I enjoyed a little more.
Still a good read, at 3 stars.
October 15, 2017
For me this book is the perfect 3.5 - not quite deserving of a 4 but definitely better than a 3. Let me try and figure out why.
Back in the mid-1990s, Philip Marsden went walkabout one summer in southern Russia and the Caucasus. The Soviet Union had only just broken up, but the many conflicts of the region - Chechnya, Ingushetia, Ossetia, Abkhazia - were already set in motion. Marsden travelled in a sullen landscape of shell scars, distant rifle shots, border posts bound up in the hostile snow. His original intent was to track down the the exotic sects and bizarre religious cults that had spread far and wide in Tsarist times, looking for safe havens far from the tyrant's dead hand. And so we get to meet some of the last surviving communities of Old Believers and Spirit-Wrestlers, Milk Drinkers and Devil Worshippers. This last group has recently gained a sorry sort of renown as they are none other than the Yezidis whom ISIS persecuted with such extreme savagery over the last few years. Towards the end of his journey, Marsden bumps into the Yezidis of Armenia, and gets to explore, among other things, their cult of the peacock.
But before that, there is a whole summer's worth of meandering that starts in the fertile plains of southern Russia, protected for so long on behalf of the motherland by the ferocious Cossacks, themselves immortalised by native son and Nobel winner Mikhail Sholokhov. Literature has always found this region to be very rich soil. Chekhov is synonymous with Taganrog, Lermontov fucked and fought in the Caucasus, although when the author gets to Kislovodsk, he somehow completely fails to mention A Hero of Our Time! Pushkin famously tramped about the region, while Tolstoy was made a man among these lowering mountains and their fearsome fighting tribes. I will, however, give major props to the author for remembering the 1920s journalist Negley Farson (their separate Caucasian journeys intersect in the forgotten village of Hasaut) and for recounting Venedikt Erofeev's recipe for that drink with the deathless name "Tears of a Komsomol Girl." Once you've read enough about Russia, you just keep knocking up against old loves, old names and places.
But back to the Doukhobors and the Molokans. We learn plenty about their myths and stories - the Kuzma legends of the latter, the ruinous leadership of Verigin for the former. Between Tolstoy and Verigin, they managed to ship out tens of thousands of Doukhobors to the fastness of the Canadian wilderness, although only a couple of thousand elderly folks today remain. We shake our head at the fierce tenacity of their faiths, which yields absolutely nothing to the martial power of the Tsar's Cossacks. Who else would suffer exile and martyrdom over the question of whether to raise TWO fingers in prayer or THREE, as the Old Believers did so willingly? Who else could give rise to a family of modern-day hermits as implacable, as incorruptible as the Lykov clan?
Having read this book through, the boiling pot of intense conflicts and ancient hatreds reminds me of nothing so much as the Balkan cauldron where a similar number of faiths and races have been going at each other hammer and tongs for far too long. Is it something about the mountains then that breed such desperate loyalties and enmities? Not too sure about that theory. What I do know - and this is my main beef with the book - is that Marsden's treatment of his subject, the land and its many peoples and their dizzying beliefs, portrayed here mainly through an interminable series of encounters and short-lived friendships - for the longest time, this treatment felt very perfunctory to me. Now this could be my fault - either my slow reading pace, or my thorough immersion in all things Russian this year is to blame - after all, once you've read Teffi and Paustovsky in quick succession, outsider narratives of southern Russia are bound to pale in comparison. I also found that I am having serious issues with the endemic shallowness that characterises many if not most "travel literature", especially as practised by professional travel writers from the late-modern Anglosphere. Everything but everything outside the predictable comforts of their OECD cocoons is grist to the exotica mill, and more often than not these narratives end up reading as a prolonged visit to a vast open ethnic zoo, not real people but rather a series of types, cyphers and quick cliches. Maybe I'm being too harsh, maybe when this book was originally published in the first flush of post-Communist freedom, it still carried that thrill of the unknown. But today in the over-familiar age of social media, even folks as odd as the Doukhobors and the Molokans, even landscapes as gorgeous and conflicts as baroque as those found in the Caucasus have lost some of their wonder and mystery. This loss may be just a sign of the times, but there were times reading this book when yet another casual encounter with a Viktor Stepanovich or a Fyodor Mikhailovich or Pyotr Maximovich no longer held its supposed charm.
Yet there are compensations. Memorable characters, like Father Gyorgy who builds a giant church in a tiny village along the marshes of the Azov Sea. And plenty are the flotsam and jetsam of the post-Soviet age. Pushkin the doctor who tends to his village flock on less than a shoestring, mountain flowers and healing grass taking the place of a full medicine cabinet. Mara the Armenian widow, her son dead, she reduced to begging in the Tbilisi metro. And the trio of Russian border guards, as forlorn as Vladimir and Estragon, abandoned in their rusty copper mine not just by the government or the military, but as if by humanity itself.
There are people here with long memories and longer histories. Ancient peasants who at the time of writing still remembered starving in the Siege of Leningrad, marching with the Red Army into Berlin, even the black shadow of Stalin's purges in the thirties (the 118 Cossacks decapitated by the Cheka perhaps the cruellest story of the lot). One of the most interesting diversions in the book is Caucasian longevity, which is just as impressive or even more so (given their relative poverty) as that of the Japanese. The discussion on the vanished race of Scythians and their extraordinary burial practices was something that first gripped me in Ascherson's "Black Sea" - one of the great attractions of this London season is the British Museum exhibition on these same mysterious Scythians. Coming on the heels of countless dazzling exhibitions on Russia in this centenary year, this show should fill what is a serious personal gap, and I appreciated the timely primer ahead of a visit to the museum.
So all in all a decent book, not a great one. The promise of those names - Rostov and Stavropol, Kislovodsk and Pyatigorsk, Maikop and Gori, Yerevan and Tbilisi - remains still unfulfilled. It is what next year is going to be all about.
Back in the mid-1990s, Philip Marsden went walkabout one summer in southern Russia and the Caucasus. The Soviet Union had only just broken up, but the many conflicts of the region - Chechnya, Ingushetia, Ossetia, Abkhazia - were already set in motion. Marsden travelled in a sullen landscape of shell scars, distant rifle shots, border posts bound up in the hostile snow. His original intent was to track down the the exotic sects and bizarre religious cults that had spread far and wide in Tsarist times, looking for safe havens far from the tyrant's dead hand. And so we get to meet some of the last surviving communities of Old Believers and Spirit-Wrestlers, Milk Drinkers and Devil Worshippers. This last group has recently gained a sorry sort of renown as they are none other than the Yezidis whom ISIS persecuted with such extreme savagery over the last few years. Towards the end of his journey, Marsden bumps into the Yezidis of Armenia, and gets to explore, among other things, their cult of the peacock.
But before that, there is a whole summer's worth of meandering that starts in the fertile plains of southern Russia, protected for so long on behalf of the motherland by the ferocious Cossacks, themselves immortalised by native son and Nobel winner Mikhail Sholokhov. Literature has always found this region to be very rich soil. Chekhov is synonymous with Taganrog, Lermontov fucked and fought in the Caucasus, although when the author gets to Kislovodsk, he somehow completely fails to mention A Hero of Our Time! Pushkin famously tramped about the region, while Tolstoy was made a man among these lowering mountains and their fearsome fighting tribes. I will, however, give major props to the author for remembering the 1920s journalist Negley Farson (their separate Caucasian journeys intersect in the forgotten village of Hasaut) and for recounting Venedikt Erofeev's recipe for that drink with the deathless name "Tears of a Komsomol Girl." Once you've read enough about Russia, you just keep knocking up against old loves, old names and places.
But back to the Doukhobors and the Molokans. We learn plenty about their myths and stories - the Kuzma legends of the latter, the ruinous leadership of Verigin for the former. Between Tolstoy and Verigin, they managed to ship out tens of thousands of Doukhobors to the fastness of the Canadian wilderness, although only a couple of thousand elderly folks today remain. We shake our head at the fierce tenacity of their faiths, which yields absolutely nothing to the martial power of the Tsar's Cossacks. Who else would suffer exile and martyrdom over the question of whether to raise TWO fingers in prayer or THREE, as the Old Believers did so willingly? Who else could give rise to a family of modern-day hermits as implacable, as incorruptible as the Lykov clan?
Having read this book through, the boiling pot of intense conflicts and ancient hatreds reminds me of nothing so much as the Balkan cauldron where a similar number of faiths and races have been going at each other hammer and tongs for far too long. Is it something about the mountains then that breed such desperate loyalties and enmities? Not too sure about that theory. What I do know - and this is my main beef with the book - is that Marsden's treatment of his subject, the land and its many peoples and their dizzying beliefs, portrayed here mainly through an interminable series of encounters and short-lived friendships - for the longest time, this treatment felt very perfunctory to me. Now this could be my fault - either my slow reading pace, or my thorough immersion in all things Russian this year is to blame - after all, once you've read Teffi and Paustovsky in quick succession, outsider narratives of southern Russia are bound to pale in comparison. I also found that I am having serious issues with the endemic shallowness that characterises many if not most "travel literature", especially as practised by professional travel writers from the late-modern Anglosphere. Everything but everything outside the predictable comforts of their OECD cocoons is grist to the exotica mill, and more often than not these narratives end up reading as a prolonged visit to a vast open ethnic zoo, not real people but rather a series of types, cyphers and quick cliches. Maybe I'm being too harsh, maybe when this book was originally published in the first flush of post-Communist freedom, it still carried that thrill of the unknown. But today in the over-familiar age of social media, even folks as odd as the Doukhobors and the Molokans, even landscapes as gorgeous and conflicts as baroque as those found in the Caucasus have lost some of their wonder and mystery. This loss may be just a sign of the times, but there were times reading this book when yet another casual encounter with a Viktor Stepanovich or a Fyodor Mikhailovich or Pyotr Maximovich no longer held its supposed charm.
Yet there are compensations. Memorable characters, like Father Gyorgy who builds a giant church in a tiny village along the marshes of the Azov Sea. And plenty are the flotsam and jetsam of the post-Soviet age. Pushkin the doctor who tends to his village flock on less than a shoestring, mountain flowers and healing grass taking the place of a full medicine cabinet. Mara the Armenian widow, her son dead, she reduced to begging in the Tbilisi metro. And the trio of Russian border guards, as forlorn as Vladimir and Estragon, abandoned in their rusty copper mine not just by the government or the military, but as if by humanity itself.
There are people here with long memories and longer histories. Ancient peasants who at the time of writing still remembered starving in the Siege of Leningrad, marching with the Red Army into Berlin, even the black shadow of Stalin's purges in the thirties (the 118 Cossacks decapitated by the Cheka perhaps the cruellest story of the lot). One of the most interesting diversions in the book is Caucasian longevity, which is just as impressive or even more so (given their relative poverty) as that of the Japanese. The discussion on the vanished race of Scythians and their extraordinary burial practices was something that first gripped me in Ascherson's "Black Sea" - one of the great attractions of this London season is the British Museum exhibition on these same mysterious Scythians. Coming on the heels of countless dazzling exhibitions on Russia in this centenary year, this show should fill what is a serious personal gap, and I appreciated the timely primer ahead of a visit to the museum.
So all in all a decent book, not a great one. The promise of those names - Rostov and Stavropol, Kislovodsk and Pyatigorsk, Maikop and Gori, Yerevan and Tbilisi - remains still unfulfilled. It is what next year is going to be all about.
February 1, 2013
I picked up this slim paperback from the dollar rack of a local bookstore, even though I generally avoid travel writing. The authors always seem to be living the high life. How difficult is it to wax lyrical about dining in the finest restuarants or sleeping in five-star hotels? Being a Russophile, and having already failed to finish several massive tomes about the history of that country (The New Russians, Inside Russia Today), I figured a buck was an acceptable risk. This book was such a compelling read, I finished it in a few sittings. A worthwhile investment, and I'll keep it to read again.
After a long winter spent in the Lenin library in Moscow, reading romantic tales of Cossacks and the pre-schism Christian sects, author Philip Marsden was overcome with a desire to journey south to meet these legendary characters. He traveled through Russia and the former provinces mainly by walking and hitching rides, or taking local busses and trains, staying overnight with the remarkably hospitable natives, most of whom were complete strangers to him. Sometimes, he sleeps out-of-doors or in abandoned buildings. There were no five-star hotels or haute cuisine in the remote villages of the mountains and steppes, where he seeks to interview those who defied the state religion of the Czars and the atheism of the communist regimes. He meets people of the various pre-schism sects with names rendered vivid in the translation: Spirit-Wrestlers, Milk-Drinkers, Fleshers, Fasters, Spiritual Christian Jumpers, Yezidi. Most reject the priesthood and some also reject printed Scripture. Although their philosophy varies a great deal, nearly all of the sects were persecuted by the Czars, the Communists, and assorted tyrants who perceived their religious dissent as a threat. Parts of the book are unbearably sad, as Marsden talks to older practitioners who were orphaned or rendered destitute by religious intolerance, persecution, deporations, exile, execution, collectivization, and other forms of oppression. But their faith is unwavering and the descriptions of their spiritual practices are fascinating reading.
The author narrates the history of Russia by describing conversations with its marginalized people. He picks up rumours of a Doukhobor or Molokan living here or there and follows their trail to meet and interview them. The dialogue of these characters make the book so memorable. Most are friendly and welcoming, offering rides, food, a place to sleep for the night, and extensive descriptions of their personal histories and spiritual practices. Very few are suspicious and drive him away - the OMON (Special Operations State Militia) he meets in a bar threaten him into leaving, saying "This is our country!" although one of them later apologizes and reveals that they are battle-weary from the horrors in Chechyna. Authorities prevent him from crossing the border into Georgia although he later finds a back way in. He is turned away from a village in Adygeya when he asks to see the local ataman. The residents tell him "We don't like strangers here." But they are in contrast to the other characters in the book, who apparently enjoy welcoming travellers into their homes, their cars, and most of all, to their tables, as food and drink is shared quite freely.
Marsden also writes about the history of the mysterious ancient peoples of the steppes: the Sycthians, the Alans, the Circassians, and other "horse tribes," most of whom have long since vanished from the regions. Cossacks appear throughout the book, and many of them are optimistic with the spirit of the Cossack revival of the 90s. They claim kinship with the ancient horse-tribes, and though their way of life is similar, there is no documentation of a historical blood-tie between the modern Cossacks and the vanished ancient peoples. Like many Russians, and many Americans as well, the ancestry of the Cossacks is an amalgam of various native and migratory peoples. The Cossacks have a bad reputation as militants who blindly followed the cruel orders of the Czars, even while struggling to retain their status as self-ruling people. Marsden does not shy away from the bigotry of the Cossacks he meets, some of whom express strong dislike for the Muslims, Jews, Turks, Armenians, and various other ethnic and religious groups. Many Jews today still dislike the Cossacks, believing them to have slaughtered 100,000 Jews in the most cruel way imaginable. Yet there is also contradictory evidence that the Cossacks were called in to stop the mob violence of the pogroms and restore order to the streets. The truth is murky and probably lies somewhere between the two extremes. I recall a Jewish classmate, seeing my Cossack calvalry dog-tag, expressing an extreme dislike of those people for what they did to his ancestors. It was a strange moment for me as an American, since my country also has a bloody history of genocide and oppression of blacks and Native Americans. I'm sure that many people dislike me in the same way that Jews dislike the Cossacks. And no doubt my German Aryan and Hungarian Jewish ancestors would be turning over in the graves to see their blood-lines mixed. I believe it is better not to let the sins of the fathers be visited upon the children. I would prefer to be judged by my own actions rather than those of my ancestors.
The book is also filled with trivia and tidbits of Russian history and folk customs. But the characters Marsden meets are the real stars of the book. Through their dialogue, I got a real sense of the Russian people, and particularly their generosity even in the face of poverty, and their fortitude under the most grevious conditions imaginable. It's a fascinating read and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in Russian history.
After a long winter spent in the Lenin library in Moscow, reading romantic tales of Cossacks and the pre-schism Christian sects, author Philip Marsden was overcome with a desire to journey south to meet these legendary characters. He traveled through Russia and the former provinces mainly by walking and hitching rides, or taking local busses and trains, staying overnight with the remarkably hospitable natives, most of whom were complete strangers to him. Sometimes, he sleeps out-of-doors or in abandoned buildings. There were no five-star hotels or haute cuisine in the remote villages of the mountains and steppes, where he seeks to interview those who defied the state religion of the Czars and the atheism of the communist regimes. He meets people of the various pre-schism sects with names rendered vivid in the translation: Spirit-Wrestlers, Milk-Drinkers, Fleshers, Fasters, Spiritual Christian Jumpers, Yezidi. Most reject the priesthood and some also reject printed Scripture. Although their philosophy varies a great deal, nearly all of the sects were persecuted by the Czars, the Communists, and assorted tyrants who perceived their religious dissent as a threat. Parts of the book are unbearably sad, as Marsden talks to older practitioners who were orphaned or rendered destitute by religious intolerance, persecution, deporations, exile, execution, collectivization, and other forms of oppression. But their faith is unwavering and the descriptions of their spiritual practices are fascinating reading.
The author narrates the history of Russia by describing conversations with its marginalized people. He picks up rumours of a Doukhobor or Molokan living here or there and follows their trail to meet and interview them. The dialogue of these characters make the book so memorable. Most are friendly and welcoming, offering rides, food, a place to sleep for the night, and extensive descriptions of their personal histories and spiritual practices. Very few are suspicious and drive him away - the OMON (Special Operations State Militia) he meets in a bar threaten him into leaving, saying "This is our country!" although one of them later apologizes and reveals that they are battle-weary from the horrors in Chechyna. Authorities prevent him from crossing the border into Georgia although he later finds a back way in. He is turned away from a village in Adygeya when he asks to see the local ataman. The residents tell him "We don't like strangers here." But they are in contrast to the other characters in the book, who apparently enjoy welcoming travellers into their homes, their cars, and most of all, to their tables, as food and drink is shared quite freely.
Marsden also writes about the history of the mysterious ancient peoples of the steppes: the Sycthians, the Alans, the Circassians, and other "horse tribes," most of whom have long since vanished from the regions. Cossacks appear throughout the book, and many of them are optimistic with the spirit of the Cossack revival of the 90s. They claim kinship with the ancient horse-tribes, and though their way of life is similar, there is no documentation of a historical blood-tie between the modern Cossacks and the vanished ancient peoples. Like many Russians, and many Americans as well, the ancestry of the Cossacks is an amalgam of various native and migratory peoples. The Cossacks have a bad reputation as militants who blindly followed the cruel orders of the Czars, even while struggling to retain their status as self-ruling people. Marsden does not shy away from the bigotry of the Cossacks he meets, some of whom express strong dislike for the Muslims, Jews, Turks, Armenians, and various other ethnic and religious groups. Many Jews today still dislike the Cossacks, believing them to have slaughtered 100,000 Jews in the most cruel way imaginable. Yet there is also contradictory evidence that the Cossacks were called in to stop the mob violence of the pogroms and restore order to the streets. The truth is murky and probably lies somewhere between the two extremes. I recall a Jewish classmate, seeing my Cossack calvalry dog-tag, expressing an extreme dislike of those people for what they did to his ancestors. It was a strange moment for me as an American, since my country also has a bloody history of genocide and oppression of blacks and Native Americans. I'm sure that many people dislike me in the same way that Jews dislike the Cossacks. And no doubt my German Aryan and Hungarian Jewish ancestors would be turning over in the graves to see their blood-lines mixed. I believe it is better not to let the sins of the fathers be visited upon the children. I would prefer to be judged by my own actions rather than those of my ancestors.
The book is also filled with trivia and tidbits of Russian history and folk customs. But the characters Marsden meets are the real stars of the book. Through their dialogue, I got a real sense of the Russian people, and particularly their generosity even in the face of poverty, and their fortitude under the most grevious conditions imaginable. It's a fascinating read and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in Russian history.
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July 22, 2015有時候我很懷疑
這些旅行家到底是從哪裡知道
這麼多民族，地區的複雜歷史恩怨與紛爭呢??
我把書裡幾個我覺得有興趣的民族或地名都查出來了
光網頁資料應該就是這本書的兩倍厚了
如果要做一個有系統的旅行計畫
(本書作者顯然有這樣的計畫書存在)
當然不可能只是像我這樣按圖索驥
得對南俄有相當的認識才行
這背後是多少參考資料啊???
以下是我查道的東西
太多了不想一一放連結了
��也沒看完
斯基泰人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythians
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%96%...
阿蘭人
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E9%98%...
霍波爾
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukhobor
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/e...
http://sc.hrd.gov.tw/ebintra/Content....
薩爾美沙人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarmatians
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E8%90%...
阿蘭人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alans
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%A5%...
保羅派
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulicia...
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E4%BF%...
清潔派
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%8D%...
老東正教教徒
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Beli...
莫斯維奇汽車
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskvich
莫洛干
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molokan
歐西夏人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetians
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%A5%...
阿布哈茲人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhaz_p...
卡拉柴人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachai
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%8D%...
印古什人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingushes
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%8D%...
切爾卡西亞人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassians
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%88%...
耶濟迪人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yezedi
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E9%9B%...
庫爾第傑夫
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurdjieff
這些旅行家到底是從哪裡知道
這麼多民族，地區的複雜歷史恩怨與紛爭呢??
我把書裡幾個我覺得有興趣的民族或地名都查出來了
光網頁資料應該就是這本書的兩倍厚了
如果要做一個有系統的旅行計畫
(本書作者顯然有這樣的計畫書存在)
當然不可能只是像我這樣按圖索驥
得對南俄有相當的認識才行
這背後是多少參考資料啊???
以下是我查道的東西
太多了不想一一放連結了
��也沒看完
斯基泰人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythians
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%96%...
阿蘭人
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E9%98%...
霍波爾
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukhobor
http://www.worldlingo.com/ma/enwiki/e...
http://sc.hrd.gov.tw/ebintra/Content....
薩爾美沙人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarmatians
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E8%90%...
阿蘭人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alans
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%A5%...
保羅派
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulicia...
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E4%BF%...
清潔派
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%8D%...
老東正教教徒
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Beli...
莫斯維奇汽車
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskvich
莫洛干
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molokan
歐西夏人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetians
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%A5%...
阿布哈茲人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhaz_p...
卡拉柴人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachai
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%8D%...
印古什人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingushes
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%8D%...
切爾卡西亞人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassians
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%88%...
耶濟迪人
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yezedi
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E9%9B%...
庫爾第傑夫
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurdjieff
May 1, 2022
"I watched like everyone else the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, sensing that what happened in Russia would somehow define the new century ... But the more time I spent ... at its centre, the more I felt drawn back to its rim, to its burning radicals, to its remoter villages and the ambiguities of its fraying southern border."
I bought The Spirit-Wrestlers when it came out in the late 1990s, but it has taken over 20 years for me to return to it. I feel a real need to read books about Russia and the ex-Soviet countries at the moment, to try and find out about the way people in those countries think.
It helps that the writer is fluent in Russian, so the words of the people he meets come through unmediated. It also helps that he is a wonderful travel writer, noticing the tiniest details of the landscapes he passes through, so you can almost smell the grass and feel the wind from the mountains.
This book, about the peoples of the Caucasus, is a fascinating blend of history and religious thought, giving a flavour of the intensity of belief that runs through the various communities' lives - from the ancient Scythians and their cult of the stag, to the doukhobors ("spirit wrestlers") and Old Believers of the Russian empire, to the Yezidis and their acceptance of evil as well as good in their view of creation.
As one of the Old Believers tells the author, "In the world now, everything depends on Russia." In today's conflicts around the Black Sea, some accounts stress the role of religious belief as well as political dogma in inflaming the conflict. This absorbing book gives a brief but vivid insight into the currents of faith and thought among some of the people at the centre of the conflicts.
I bought The Spirit-Wrestlers when it came out in the late 1990s, but it has taken over 20 years for me to return to it. I feel a real need to read books about Russia and the ex-Soviet countries at the moment, to try and find out about the way people in those countries think.
It helps that the writer is fluent in Russian, so the words of the people he meets come through unmediated. It also helps that he is a wonderful travel writer, noticing the tiniest details of the landscapes he passes through, so you can almost smell the grass and feel the wind from the mountains.
This book, about the peoples of the Caucasus, is a fascinating blend of history and religious thought, giving a flavour of the intensity of belief that runs through the various communities' lives - from the ancient Scythians and their cult of the stag, to the doukhobors ("spirit wrestlers") and Old Believers of the Russian empire, to the Yezidis and their acceptance of evil as well as good in their view of creation.
As one of the Old Believers tells the author, "In the world now, everything depends on Russia." In today's conflicts around the Black Sea, some accounts stress the role of religious belief as well as political dogma in inflaming the conflict. This absorbing book gives a brief but vivid insight into the currents of faith and thought among some of the people at the centre of the conflicts.
October 5, 2013
Forget the usual travelogue. This is a an insightful and fascinating voyage of discovery through the beliefs and spiritual traditions of peoples from Moscow to Armenia. Written from a very personal perspective, the book could have been pretentious; its not. Its tightly written, with beautiful descriptions of people and the places they inhabit. The author's astute observations about the soul of the communities he engages with tells us more about them than than any number of sociological treatises could do. Well worth a read.
August 29, 2018
A complex book which has far less to do with travel (it was advertised as a travel book) than with regional history, politics and the enduring faiths of a variety of people who trace their ancestry back across ages. Marsden paints a ruthless, damning portrait of the 'Soviet century.' Everywhere he goes, people have few stories to tell that don't involve pogrom, persecution, war, or just plain murder ... and the 1990s were a chaos of corruption and gang warfare -- this was the decade in which the trek was made and the book compiled from journals, photos, probably tape recordings (unless Marden has an eidetic memory: he either recalls perfectly enormously intricate conversations word for word or, more likely, carried one of those micro-tape recorders and nursed his batteries carefully in regions where electricity was a fantasy).
Reviewers in the legitimate press frequently praised his "sparse prose," and it's true that he writes without recourse to a single unnecessary syllable. The austere style works well, but from time to time I found it so bare-bones, I had to fall back on my own imagination to fill in his blanks. (For instance, is he referring to an old woman, a young woman, smiling or sad or -- what?) The sparse narrative certainly moves along with breakneck pace, jumping from one town to another, and it's probably a good thing Marsden didn't linger too long over one place or topic...
The fact is, close to the end of the book,the relentless stories of murder and atrocity became rather depressing, at least for me. No, no: I'm NOT saying for one moment that these stories shouldn't be told, or that people outside Russia don't *need* to know this history! But the reading, the learning, is far from pleasant or uplifting. Yes, of course I finished the book. Yes, I'm the richer for knowing this appalling history of these poor people. No, I didn't enjoy the read, though I was moved, saddened, and ended somewhat disillusioned by what this book demonstrates about the darkness of human nature. *sigh* Will I read it again? I doubt it. Am I glad I read it? Yes.
So ... four stars, for me. It's a bare-bones account of a quasi-spiritual journey which might be tough for gentler readers to get through. It's also sometimes beautiful, evocative, touching -- or just downright frightening, when you remember that much of the bloodletting we're reading about happened well inside the lifespans of Marsden's readers. Such things shouldn't happen, but they do. And there's no answer to that.
Reviewers in the legitimate press frequently praised his "sparse prose," and it's true that he writes without recourse to a single unnecessary syllable. The austere style works well, but from time to time I found it so bare-bones, I had to fall back on my own imagination to fill in his blanks. (For instance, is he referring to an old woman, a young woman, smiling or sad or -- what?) The sparse narrative certainly moves along with breakneck pace, jumping from one town to another, and it's probably a good thing Marsden didn't linger too long over one place or topic...
The fact is, close to the end of the book,the relentless stories of murder and atrocity became rather depressing, at least for me. No, no: I'm NOT saying for one moment that these stories shouldn't be told, or that people outside Russia don't *need* to know this history! But the reading, the learning, is far from pleasant or uplifting. Yes, of course I finished the book. Yes, I'm the richer for knowing this appalling history of these poor people. No, I didn't enjoy the read, though I was moved, saddened, and ended somewhat disillusioned by what this book demonstrates about the darkness of human nature. *sigh* Will I read it again? I doubt it. Am I glad I read it? Yes.
So ... four stars, for me. It's a bare-bones account of a quasi-spiritual journey which might be tough for gentler readers to get through. It's also sometimes beautiful, evocative, touching -- or just downright frightening, when you remember that much of the bloodletting we're reading about happened well inside the lifespans of Marsden's readers. Such things shouldn't happen, but they do. And there's no answer to that.
January 7, 2016
This book was given to me by a friend after they read my novel set in Siberia. The Dragunov Deception. Philip Marsden's work is a meditative account of his fascinating solo journey through remote parts of Russia. This is a really first rate piece of writing and transcends travel journalism, deserving to be a future classic. He observes, comments but never crudely judges what he sees. He moves into the landscape not merely across it as a traveller. He has left an account of much that is quietly heroic or tragic (in the 2nd year of Gorbachev's ban on alcohol 11,000 Soviet citizens died from drinking home-made alcohol substitutes) and is quite simply a compelling account of a place and people that makes for compelling reading.
September 12, 2019
This Marsden book is part travel, part history, and part journalistic encounters in the post-Soviet Caucasus in the mid-1990s. He sets out from Moscow to investigate the historic Steppe in search of minority religious groups (Doukhobor and Molokan sects, Yezidis, Alans and Old Believers) and remnants of various groups of the famed Cossacks.
He travels, drinks and sleeps with ordinary citizens and priests on the fringes of the old USSR from Krasnador in the West through Karachai-Cherkessia and North Ossetia and on to Armenia and Tbilisi, Georgia in the East. Marsden has a relaxed nature and narrative and seems to hit it off with most villagers he encounters. They open up to him and answer his questions, draw him localized maps, as well as proudly show off landmarks and historical sites they want him to visit.
As he travels, he seems to be passed across the Steppe from cousin to friend of a friend in search of the somewhat obscure and less-known populations still surviving in pockets far away from the bright lights of Moscow, living, in part, their traditional ways. "The Spirit Wrestlers" is a journey into the lives of simple folk, steeped in faith and unique cultures, scattered throughout rough terrain. I feel enriched by exposure to the characters, communities and lives he uncovers.
The writing flows, making it very readable, and I'm sure everyone could learn something interesting from this book.
He travels, drinks and sleeps with ordinary citizens and priests on the fringes of the old USSR from Krasnador in the West through Karachai-Cherkessia and North Ossetia and on to Armenia and Tbilisi, Georgia in the East. Marsden has a relaxed nature and narrative and seems to hit it off with most villagers he encounters. They open up to him and answer his questions, draw him localized maps, as well as proudly show off landmarks and historical sites they want him to visit.
As he travels, he seems to be passed across the Steppe from cousin to friend of a friend in search of the somewhat obscure and less-known populations still surviving in pockets far away from the bright lights of Moscow, living, in part, their traditional ways. "The Spirit Wrestlers" is a journey into the lives of simple folk, steeped in faith and unique cultures, scattered throughout rough terrain. I feel enriched by exposure to the characters, communities and lives he uncovers.
The writing flows, making it very readable, and I'm sure everyone could learn something interesting from this book.
February 24, 2021
Well written account of the author's journey through Souther Russia and the nations of the Caucasus region in search of various religious minority communities such as the Russian Doukhobors and Old Believers as well as Yazidis. Along the way we listen in on Marsden's many conversations with a variety of people he meets including several in the break-away republics who have (or are) still living in war ravaged conditions.
August 3, 2020
A very good, and forensically close, look at the cultures and religions of the oppressed peoples in the Caucasus mountains at the bottom of western Russia. The fact there are still internecine wars going on there, and that these mountains never change, means this barely feels a month out of date when it's actually 22 years old.
June 7, 2023
What a phenomenal account of the sheer vastness of Russia.
June 12, 2012
Strange journey from the banks of the Don to the Caucasus in the footsteps of the weird sect of the Doukhobors, the 'Spirit wrestlers'. Not sure I follow the logic of the book sometimes, but some of the characters and situations and anecdotes made this an enjoyable read for me. Especially the Caucasus section.
July 30, 2021
A fascinating and well-written insight into the Russian Soul, filled with interesting characters and anecdotes. For anyone that's spent any time in the former Soviet Union, you will find much to relate to in the book.
February 19, 2010
Reveals mysticism in rural Russia so ingrained that decades of oppression couldn't snuff it out. Fascinating stuff!
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August 2, 2011Took me quite a while to get through but I found it very interesting and it provided a lot of history.
February 8, 2016
I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13845794
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13845794
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