Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #198567 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Philip Marsden is the author of A Far Country: Travels in Ethiopia, The Crossing Place: Among the Armenians (which won the Somerset Maugham Award) and The Bronski House, and is the editor of The Spectator Book of Travel Writing.

Customer Reviews

Excellent read!
This is a beautifully written book about Philip Marsden's visits to the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union, an area now better known for its civil wars than for its deeply intriguing past, though both are undoubtedly intertwined. He clearly has a love of Russia and its peoples and manages to describe evocatively the many odd characters he comes across in his travels, reaching some of the most remote and often inhospitable corners of the region. He tells of the splinter sects of the Russian Orthodox church, their comparatively recent history and their curious customs and beliefs and of course their depleted numbers, slowly dying out in the remoteness of their villages. Then there was his meeting with the Yezidi,... that curious Islamic sect whose religion is a mixture of Islam and traditional folk beliefs and including influences from Judaism and Christianity. This is a fascinating book about a little known area, less than a day's travel from Western Europe.

Visit a land filled with mystery
Philip Marsden takes you on a journey in to the heart of the land and the people of Russia. It is a very different country than the Russia, we have read so much about. It is a journey like no other journey you may have taken; a journey where miracles are a part of daily life, a journey where you will encounter spirituality in many different ways - and it is a journey you will wish did not end - as you turn the last page.

Philip Marsden writes excellently using his pen as a paintbrush - painting unique and lively images of everyday life in Russia amongst mystics and spirit-wrestlers. This book is written with love and magic. It is in itself - an small miracle.

Facinating view of a corner of Russia today
Marsden travels in a country ravaged by communism seeking out individuals with a connection to the pre Bolshevik past. In doing so, he describes parts of the vast area bordered by the Black Sea, the Caspian and the Caucasus, observing, barely influencing, but bringing it to us in such light and sensitive prose that the you can smell the oil of the icons and the dust of the steppes. A wonderful book about one of the lesser known edges of Europe in a period of transition.