Category: Russia

November 22, 2025 – Uralsk, Kazakhstan

The city is now descending into winter. At 9:00 A.M., the sky is unlit, and even at noon, the sun barely makes its presence felt. But I love strolling around despite the dark and the freezing temperature and seeing the onion domes of Orthodox churches appear through the mist, adorable babushkas wrapped in headscarves who are up before everyone else, and the warm lights emanating from old windows that reveal hidden coffee shops that offer respite from the cold. The baristas do not speak English; hardly anyone does, but they have smiles that translate enough warmth to this strange, shivering girl with a book.

Its side streets and residential areas are pages out of a Gogol story. It is, after all, quite a literary city. It was here that the first and enduring public library in Kazakhstan was established in 1871. Pushkin, Tolstoy, Sholokhov and other literary greats have come to Uralsk and made their mark here. I booked at the Pushkin Hotel, predictably.

The distance between Almaty and Uralsk is several chapters or a few hundred pages of a Russian novel. For a different perspective: Uralsk is closer to Kiev, Moscow, Warsaw, Vienna, and Helsinki than it is to Almaty. The oldest city in what is now Kazakhstan, Uralsk was founded by Cossacks in 1584 as a border outpost of the Russian Empire.

Perched on the European bank of the Ural River, it is geographically within Europe. It is where Central Asia ends, or begins, depending on where you’re coming from. But if you’re coming from a book, as I am, it is where Russian literature comes alive.

November 21, 2025  – Uralsk: Pushkin, Pugachev, Sholokhov Museums

The Pushkin Museum was my first stop, but no matter how the attendant and I tried to communicate regarding the entrance fee (signal was weak, Google Translate wouldn’t load), she would laughingly start with another stream of Russian, and I would answer in English. After a few minutes of the futile but funny exchange, she suddenly stopped when she saw me holding a Pushkin book. “Ah!!!” She nodded in recognition, gestured at the book with approval, waved me away, and signaled for me to enter without paying. (Kids, it’s true what they say: Books open doors for you! Haha)

Pushkin came to Uralsk in 1833 to do research and prepare for two significant works, The History of the Pugachev Rebellion and The Captain’s Daughter. The residence of the Cossack leader that hosted him now houses the Pushkin Museum.

Pugachev was a Cossack during the reign of Catherine the Great who led the largest peasant revolt in the history of the Russian Empire. Needless to say, the well-preserved Pugachev House Museum was my second stop.

Finally, the Sholokhov Museum in the village of Dariinsk, close to the Russian border — so close that the driver had to make sure I had my passport with me in case we encountered border patrol. This is where Sholokhov and his family spent the wartime years. It was also where Sholokhov received news that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It felt surreal being allowed to sit at his desk and play a Rachmaninoff passage on the broken piano.

There are a few things to note regarding museums in Uralsk: The captions are all in Russian; I was the only guest in the three museums that I visited; the museum attendants do not speak English, but they are all genuinely kind and warm, and try their best to communicate; these establishments remind you that one of the things that make Russian Literature great is that, whether political, spiritual, or existential, they stand for things that are eternally relevant. 

November 20, 2025 – Kazakhstan and Dostoevsky

It’s been over a decade since my last Dostoevsky, and I’m glad this month’s travel destination prompted me to pick him up again and pointed to this lesser-known work, one which is ironically seen as the start of his forceful return to literature, which Turgenev compared to Dante’s Inferno, and which Tolstoy thought to be his most outstanding piece.

I began reading this on November 11 (Dostoevksy’s birthday) and finished reading it on November 16 (my birthday). Dostoevsky may not be the most popular choice for a birthday read, but I maintain that, despite the horrors described in his novels, his works are ultimately about spiritual redemption. Dark, yes, but also, glorious. Besides, birthdays are existential!

Notes from a Dead House is a harrowing account of prison life that is not without Russian dark humor. If not for the fictional character’s crime, most of it is autobiographical as Dostoevsky writes from his experiences as a political prisoner in Siberia. The passage that will remain embedded in my mind, is the part where the main character is finally allowed to acquire books after seven years of being prohibited from reading and owning any! Isn’t that the worst kind of punishment, especially for someone like Dostoevsky?! One can only imagine the quenching that ensued!

Dostoevsky being Dostoevsky provoked the powers that be by putting up a printing press and publishing a letter that offended the Orthodox Church and Imperial Russia, and was arrested for participating in a secret socialist society. In 1849, he was sentenced to hard labor. His sentence was revised to four years in Siberia, followed by four years of military service in Kazakhstan.

It was here in Kazakhstan where he served as a private, ripe with experience and brimming with ideas and plans for writing. Nearing the end of his sentence, he started writing Notes from a Dead House.

As a playful juxtaposition, in the background is the Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Uralsk. Its foundation stone was laid by Tsarevich Nicholas, who would later become Tsar Nicholas II, the last tsar of the Russian Empire.

Kazakhstan is not globally known as a place of literary significance, but I hope to dust off a bit of snow from that reputation.

The Georgia Book Stack

A light rain was falling, a fine spray, unlike what rain is in the tropics. Within a couple of hours the deep purple of evening entered through that same window and transformed the spray into delicate snowflakes that vanished even before you could touch them; inconspicuous magic in the micro details when one season gives way to another.

It was toward the end of the trip when I took this photo of my traveling companions on the windowsill. Absent from the stack, but verily lodged in my consciousness, are Euripedes’ Medea and Percival Everett’s For Her Dark Skin.

I went to Georgia accompanied by seven books, and after jaunts to Tbilisi’s charming bookshops, a modest number of three Georgian masterpieces were read on the train and during long drives, then added to the pile. 

The eclectic curation is an education in itself as it includes a Greek tragedy, a rather feminist and modern retelling of the tragedy, a wonderful and informative chronicle of Georgia’s unique wine culture, journalistic reports and stories from the early years of post-Soviet Georgia, the greatest love story of the Caucasus, literary criticism, a portrait of young Stalin that is also a portrait of a nation, a painful recollection of the Georgian-Abkhazian armed conflict in the 90s, epic poetry, and Tolstoyan short stories.

Once again, people wondered whether I had gone to another destination just to read. But I know they’re only kidding. 

For who isn’t aware that reading and traveling are not separate experiences? They are halves of a whole that lend clarity and depth to each other.

In our travels, what we notice, perceive, and experience — and what we contribute to meaningful interactions, or how we overflow — largely depend on what is already inside us. “Nothing flows out of a jar except that already inside it,” writes the preeminent Georgian author, Shota Rustaveli in The Knight in the Panther’s Skin.

In life, reading and traveling are merely expressions of how one chooses to take their fill.

Alina Bronsky: Baba Dunja’s Last Love

“Boris tells me what he’s seen on television. Lots of politics in the Ukraine, in Russia, and in America. I don’t pay too close attention. Politics are important, of course, but at the end of the day, if you want to eat mashed potatoes it’s up to you to put manure on the potato plants. The important thing is that there’s no war.”

Alina Bronksy’s wit has been on my radar for quite some time but it took one Sunday that badly begged for light reading to make me read her.

Having parents who are advancing in years, I find myself increasingly drawn to elderly protagonists. And so it was a joy to discover Baba Dunja. Her spunk, her kindness, her practicality, and her comic observations make her one of the most endearing characters one will encounter in books. 

But don’t think it’s all light-hearted fun. Alina Bronsky, being a Russian-born German writer, seems to have married dark Russian humor with good old Teutonic political satire.

Even though the government appears to be apathetic about this town near Chernobyl, and despite warnings of radiation levels, Baba Dunja and her cast of amusing friends and neighbors are undeterred by the discrimination against its residents and consider Tschernowo home. And I think that’s what this book is all about — the idea and process of home that we choose and make for ourselves, no matter what.

Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia

Before Iran, before Persian history, it was Russia, its music, literature, and history that I was preoccupied with for years. (Remember how I named a pet fish “Shosta,” after Shostakovich, who leapt out of the fishbowl to his doom, and died a very dramatic Russian death?) Adulting eventually distracted me from this obsession until Iran took over and began to burn as big a flame in my consciousness.

This book brought me back to my teen years of being fascinated with Russia. As I turned the last page of this beauty, the traveler, the pianist, and the lover of stories in me were all brimming.

After all, Russia is the country of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, of Rachmaninoff, and “piano music has run through the country like blood.”

Sophy Roberts, however, zones in on Siberia, that immense region that covers eleven percent of the world’s land mass, and home to ninety percent of Russia’s natural resources.

So, what does it have to do with pianos? A lot, apparently. This account traces how the instrument began to grip the heart of the country during the reign of Catherine the Great, how this mania was fueled by concert tours by Liszt and Clara Schumann, and how political prisoners from Poland, the land of Chopin, and Decembrist intellectuals (members of the unsuccessful revolt against Tsar Nicholas I in December 1825) who were exiled to Siberia made culture flourish in the hinterlands by bringing their books, their learning, and their music with them, leaving precious pianos in their wake. It also poignantly mentions that the only thing that survived the Romanov massacre was the piano that the young tsarevnas brought with them and on which they played during their last days.

But who would be insane enough to go to Siberia and track the lost pianos of Russia’s history? Sophy Roberts. And she’s my kind of insane. This book is already making me dream of becoming this kind of journalist and writing this kind of book when I grow up. Haha

Which lost things should I go looking for? 

P.S. One simple paragraph also made me understand the rise of Putinism and why he still has a strong following. This doesn’t mean I’m going to start being a Putin apologist, far from it. But it is a sign of a good work of journalism when it makes you see the other side of the coin.

Maylis de Kerangal: Eastbound

What a ride! How Kerangal builds suspense that makes the entire book feel like one long, deep, drawn breath that you would not want to interrupt!

The majesty of Russia’s landscape appears through the window of the trans-Siberian train, but it is surprisingly subtle in portraying a vulnerable Russia.

Yes, it is a serendipitous train ride shared by a man and a woman, but don’t expect the deep conversations of Celine and Jesse from Before Sunrise. Aliocha and Hélène practically pantomime their way throughout the journey; he being Russian and she being French.

Yes, it concerns an army conscript who wants out, but don’t expect Francis Mirković of Mathias Enard’s Zone. Aliocha won’t sing to you a threnody of the crimes of nations. He is only concerned about his escape.

I love the aforementioned titles and I feel relieved that Eastbound did not turn out like any of those. They are only alike for the reason that they are each in a league of their own.

On the surface, it stays true to its promise of being an adventure story, but I see it as an intelligent political novel. Not because the characters discuss politics, they don’t. But can there be a more political story than two people pursuing their individual freedoms?

Vladimir Nabokov: The Defense

“…and when Luzhin left the balcony and stepped back into his room, there on the floor lay an enormous square of moonlight, and in that light — his own shadow.”

The awareness of this being a story of a man possessed by chess (“…sleep could find no way into his brain; it searched for a loophole, but every entrance was guarded by a chess sentry…”) makes the allusion to the white square of a chessboard more impeccable.

Nabokov is a writer that allows a reader to experience cinematography in literature. The deliberate composition of each frame is so visually satisfying that I’m tempted to say it’s the reason I read him. But I would be lying. I’m also here for the traces of his synesthesia.

“Hearing” the chess moves — “combinations like melodies”, chess notations synthesize with musical scores, games begin “softly, softly, like muted violins” then without the least warning, a chord sings out tenderly, a trace of another melody manifests, some other deep, dark note chimes elsewhere…

Sometimes I, too, ask myself if I’m missing the point and reading Nabokov incorrectly by fixating on those passages and often forgetting that this is a tragic tale about how our sanctuaries can turn into obsessions and lead to madness, or the fact that this novel belongs up there with Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story; but then I find myself falling for those passages all over again. Part of me asserts that if this is me reading him wrong then I’m reluctant to be right!

Svetlana Alexievich: The Unwomanly Face of War

During WWII, women served in all branches of the military: 225,000 in the British, 450,000-500,000 in the American, and about a million in the Soviet army. The women in the Soviet army contributed to the German defeat, but little was known and little was said about them and the price they had to pay for victory.

Over the course of twenty six years, Svetlana Alexievich sought out many of these women and became the repository for their untold stories. This is part of the body of work that earns her a place as one of only seventeen women out of a hundred and fifteen Nobel Laureates in Literature.

Maybe it’s because Svetlana Alexievich says that she isn’t writing about war nor the history of a war, “but about human beings in a war… the history of feelings.” Maybe it’s because she is what she says she is, “A historian of the soul.” Maybe it’s because she believes, for good reason, that suffering is “a special kind of knowledge,” “the highest form of information,” that suffering has a direct connection with the mystery of life. (“All of Russian literature is about that. It has written more about suffering than about love. And these women tell me more about it…”) Maybe it’s because she makes this book of unburdening into an overwhelming choir of over two hundred voices singing a soulful rendition of an unsung threnody for the first time, that it answers my question as to why a piercing account of war can be so beautiful and so important. 

Special thanks to Gabi for encouraging me to read this and for giving it to me as a birthday present last year. 🤍

Lev Ozerov: Portraits Without Frames

“Fifty shrewd and moving glimpses into the lives of Soviet writers, composers, and artists caught between the demands of art and politics.”

Fifty portraits in words by this man born in Ukraine when it was part of the Russian Empire, this man with Jewish origins who extraordinarily survived the Shoah, and who walked among Akhmatova, Pasternak, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich and many others “who lived / in times that were hard to bear.”

Fifty poignant poems, written “so that those who did not know will know” and read by this reader as “what happened long ago / becomes current again.”

Fifty intimate portraits that initially seem to be of individual people but soon become apparent as an exceptional, panoramic depiction of an era of art choked by tyranny.

Little did I know that it would become one of my most treasured volumes of Russian literature. I love how clueless we sometimes are of a book’s value until we read it and become acquainted with its soul.