Mud and Stars Quotes

“There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian people, and without it their happiness is incomplete - Dostoyevsky”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“According to a much quoted Russian saying 'the country has two eternal problems, roads and idiots'.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“Turgenev complained in a letter that Spring in Europe lacked the explosiveness of that season in Russia.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“A resident [of Chukotka] had stuck a flyer on a telegraph pole advertising his flat in exchange for a one-way ticket to Moscow. Unemployment runs at seventy per cent in the surrounding villages.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“We stopped for the driver, Sergei, to take a bathroom break in the woods. He had taken a dislike to me. 'What would you have done', he asked, 'if it were minus thirty, which it might well have been, and you were wearing those light trousers?' I said that the fabric was high-tech and I had worn the trousers in the Arctic, and showed him my merino leggings underneath, and two pairs of thermal socks. at this news he changed tack. 'Far too much for this mild weather'.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“You can only appreciate the engineering feat of the Trans-Siberian railway by travelling along it in winter. They might as well have laid tracks across Antarctica.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“Their [500 Siberian Tribes] presence predated Russians by thousands of years. Yet they are routinely referred to as 'half-thawed humanity' and 'descendants of fish'...”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“[it was] perceived that it was easier to rise upwards east of the Urals. A man who left Russia as a common soldier became a sergeant in Tobolsk, a captain in Yakutsk and a colonel in Kamchatka.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“The quickest way from St Petersburg to Kamchatka in furthest Siberia is still often westwards via New York.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“The sun never sets there [Siberia] - one end wakes up when the other is going to sleep. In parts it is so cold that living trees explode with a sound like gunfire...”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“Russian's claim the banya as their first doctor, vodka being the second and raw garlic the third.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“Forbidden zones were familiar to the point of institutionalisation in the Soviet System, but more than forty 'sensitive' cities remain shut off.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“Their lives were and are consumed with the generally dreadful business of being Russian.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age

“Tolstoy was obsessed with truth, but only told it in his novels. Dostoyevsky, obsessed not with truth but with God, was a compulsive gambler. He pawned his watch so many times that his saintly second wife said she never knew what time it was.”
― Sara Wheeler, Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age