Amazon Prime Free Trial
FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button and confirm your Prime free trial.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited FREE Prime delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-45% $8.79$8.79
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$1.21$1.21
$3.98 delivery January 31 - February 1
Ships from: glenthebookseller Sold by: glenthebookseller
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Among the Russians Paperback – December 26, 2000
Purchase options and add-ons
"There is no travel writer working today in English who possesses such a remarkable combination of the observant and the lyric gifts--the most poetic of us all." — Jan Morris
The first book in Thubron's Russian trilogy AMONG THE RUSSIANS, called "superb" by the New York Times Book Review, recounts Thurbon's 10,000 mile journey throughout half of Russia's cities and countryside.
Here is a fresh perspective on the last tumultuous years of the Soviet Union and an exquisitely poetic travelogue. With a keen grasp of Russia's history, a deep appreciation for its architecture and iconography, and an inexhaustible enthusiasm for its people and its culture, Colin Thubron is the perfect guide to a country most of us will never get to know firsthand. Here, we can walk down western Russia's country roads, rest in its villages, and explore some of the most engaging cities in the world. Beautifully written and infinitely insightful, Among the Russians is vivid, compelling travel writing that will also appeal to readers of history and current events—and to anyone captivated by the shape and texture of one of the world's most enigmatic cultures.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateDecember 26, 2000
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- ISBN-109780060959296
- ISBN-13978-0060959296
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
"There is no travel writer working today in English who possesses such a remarkable combination of the observant and the lyric gifts--the most poetic of us all." — Jan Morris
From the Back Cover
Here is a fresh perspective on the last tumultuous years of the Soviet Union and an exquisitely poetic travelogue.With a keen grasp of Russia's history, a deep appreciation for its architecture and iconography, and an inexhaustible enthusiasm for its people and its culture, Colin Thubron is the perfect guide to a country most of us will never get to know firsthand. Here, we can walk down western Russia's country roads, rest in its villages, and explore some of the most engaging cities in the world. Beautifully written and infinitely insightful, Among the Russians is vivid, compelling travel writing that will also appeal to readers of history and current events—and to anyone captivated by the shape and texture of one of the world's most enigmatic culture.
About the Author
Colin Thubron is an acclaimed travel writer and novelist. His first books were about the Middle East – Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled by car into the Soviet Union, a journey he described in Among the Russians. From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind the Wall: A Journey through China (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Award), The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia (Prix Bouvier), Shadow of the Silk Road and To a Mountain in Tibet.
Among other honors, Colin Thubron has received the Ness award of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Memorial Medal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. In 2007 he was made CBE. He was elected President of the Royal Society of Literature from 2010 to 2017, and named an RSL Companion of Literature in 2020.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Among the Russians
By Thubron, ColinPerennial
Copyright © 2004 Colin ThubronAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060959290
Chapter One
Across White Russia
I had been afraid of Russia ever since I could remember. When I was a boy its mass dominated the map which covered the classroom wall; it was tinted a wan green, I recall, and was distorted by Mercator's projection so that its tundras suffocated half the world. Where other nations--Japan, Brazil, India--clamoured with imagined scents and colours, Russia gave out only silence, and was somehow incomplete. I grew up in its shadow, just as my parents had grown up in the shadow of Germany.
Journeys rarely begin where we think they do. Mine, perhaps, started in that classroom, where the green-tinted mystery hypnotized me during maths lessons. Already questions rose in the child's mind: why did this country seem stranger, less explicit, than others? Why was it untranslated into any precise human expression? The questions were half-formed, of course, but the fear was already there.
Perhaps it was because of this that thirty years later the land glimmering eastward from the Polish frontier struck me as both familiar and foreboding. It flowed away in an undifferentiated calm, or rose and fell so imperceptibly that only the faintest lift of the horizon betrayed it. I saw nobody. The sky loomed preternaturally vast. The whole world seemed to have been crushed and flattened out into a numinous peace. My car sounded frail on the road. For three hours it had been disembowelled by border officials at Brest, and its faultilyreplaced door panels rasped and squealed as if they enclosed mice.
Even now I was unsure what drew me into this country I feared. I belonged to a generation too young to romanticize about Soviet Communism. Yet nothing in the intervening years had dispelled my childhood estrangement and ignorance. My mind was filled with confused pictures: paradox, cliché. 'Russia,' wrote the Marquis de Custine in 1839, 'is a country where everyone is part of a conspiracy to mystify the foreigner.' Propaganda still hangs like a ground-mist over the already complicated truth. Newspapers, until you know how to read them, are organs of disinformation. The arts are conservative or silent.
Even in novels, which so often paint the ordinary nature of things, the visionaries and drunks who inhabit the pages of nineteenth century fiction have shrivelled to the poor wooden heroes of modern socialist realism. It is as if a great lamp had been turned down.
As for me, I was entering the country too impatiently to be well equipped. I spoke a hesitant Russian, but had read very little. And I was deeply prejudiced. Nobody from the West enters the Soviet Union without prejudice. I took in with me, as naturally as the clothes I wore, a legacy of individualism profoundly different from anything east of the Vistula.
But I think I wanted to know and embrace this enemy I had inherited. I felt myself, at least a little, to be on his side. Communism at once attracted and repelled me. Nothing could be more alluring to the puritan idealist whose tatters (I suppose) hung about me as I took the road to Minsk; nothing more disquieting to the solitary. All my motives, when I thought about them, filled up with ambiguity. Even my method of travel was odd. The Russians favour transient groups and delegations, which are supervised in grandiose hotels. But I was going alone, in my own car, staying at campsites, and planned to cover ten thousand miles along almost every road permitted to me (and a few which were not) between the Baltic and the Caucasus. My head was swimming in contradictory expectations. A deformed grandeur still hovered about this nation in my eyes.
So for more than two hundred miles between Brest and Minsk, I travelled in a state of nervous fascination. There was almost nothing else on the road: dust-clogged lorries carrying wood, cement, cattle; a rare bus; and once a truck packed with frosty-eyed Brueghel peasantry. Every twenty miles or so, in glass and concrete checkpoints raised above the highway, grey-uniformed police fingered their binoculars and telephones. The land was haunted by absences--no advertisements, no pylons, often no telegraph poles. The cluttered country of industrial Europe was smoothed out into a magisterial stillness. Grasslands, farmlands, forests. All huge, all silent. The eye could never compass any one of them. The forests, in particular, looked deep and unredeemed. They lapped against fields and roads in rich, deciduous masses of oak, beech, silver birch. This was Belorussia, 'White Russia', a state of rye and timberland which stretched half way to Moscow. The deadening pine forests still lingered about its pastures and stencilled every horizon in a line of coniferous darkness.
I gazed at all this with the passion of a newcomer, and scribbled it in a diary before I should forget the feel of ordinary, important things.
These first hours shone with a peculiar intensity. In the fields of potato and alfalfa, labourers moved through a soft July sunlight-men and stout women in headscarves wielding billhooks and pitchforks. No collectivized glamour, no tractors or combine harvesters intruded into the sodden ritual of their haymaking. Instead, where marshy fields elbowed through the forests, black and white cattle grazed in isolated herds, and troops of herons paced nonchalantly across the meadows.
After a hundred miles I stopped the car and lay on the verge among butterflies and lupins. The country was steeped in silence. In this limitless terrain, details of plant or insect shone with the exposed distinctness of things seen in the desert. A dragonfly clattered onto my knee. Bright yellow toadflax squeezed up between my fingers. They were obscurely comforting.
But I was conscious above all of the stunned desolation which seems to permeate these plains. It has to do, I think, less with their actual poverty-sandy soil, poor drainage-than with the inarticulate vastness of which they form a part...
Continues...Excerpted from Among the Russiansby Thubron, Colin Copyright © 2004 by Colin Thubron. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : 0060959290
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; 1st Perennial ed edition (December 26, 2000)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780060959296
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060959296
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.5 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,193,439 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #125 in General Russia Travel Guides
- #368 in General India Travel Guides
- #2,737 in Russian History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book well-written and readable. They appreciate the author's observant writing style and find it interesting.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers appreciate the book's language. They find it well-written, readable, and engaging. The text is described as poetic in parts, but convoluted at times. Overall, readers enjoy the writing style and craftsmanship of the book.
"Colin Thubron is a wonderfully observant and quite literary writer. I marveled throughout the book at the beauty of its crafting...." Read more
"...I was thoroughly impressed with the language of the text that in certain aspects it was very rich, almost poetic but sometimes convoluted and..." Read more
"a very interesting and well written book...." Read more
"This is a well-written book, for the pre-Chornoble era. So much has changed since 1983, it is now a history book...." Read more
Customers appreciate the author's observant and literary writing style. They find the book interesting and well-written.
"Colin Thubron is a wonderfully observant and quite literary writer. I marveled throughout the book at the beauty of its crafting...." Read more
"...author tried to understand the Russian soul and observed with as much insight as possible people and the places he visited...." Read more
"a very interesting and well written book...." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2022Colin Thubron is a wonderfully observant and quite literary writer. I marveled throughout the book at the beauty of its crafting. One thing only bothered me and made the last part of the book comparatively hard to enjoy as much. Beginning with the section on Armenia, the editing went to hell in a hand basket- almost as if the proofreader just decided to uncritically accept all spellcheck and autocorrect changes and go home to his slippers and beer. Still, the fact that it was written about a time when all these places were still part of the Soviet Union does not seem to compromise his portrait of the people and their lives.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2015Following my recent trip to St. Petersburg, this was an interesting read. I must admit, I read only the Leningrad and Tallinn portions of Thubron's book, but it is a heartfelt recounting of his amazing trip. Some of the language is little overblown for me, but it was his journey, and he tells the story well. I enjoyed the walkabout in St. Petersburg and Tallinn story of the pastor.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2018An amazing journey at the end of an era. The author tried to understand the Russian soul and observed with as much insight as possible people and the places he visited. I was thoroughly impressed with the language of the text that in certain aspects it was very rich, almost poetic but sometimes convoluted and difficult to understand. Greatly enjoyed reading this book and I think it is a unique travel memoir.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2010As a cultural anthropologist who was been living and working in St. Petersburg, Russia for several years I can recommend this book for only what it is now. This is a travel narrative written over a period of weeks by one person, who did not speak Russian, in a tightly regulated tourist industry. Firstly, most people would agree that not speaking a language of a culture seriously inhibits your ability to assess what is actually happening and why. Secondly, at the time this was originally written, the Soviet Union, nor anyone else thought that it was in decline (1980 was also the year that the Olympics were held in Russia and an year after the invasion of Afghanistan)and seeing it as such is only because of hindsight.
Thuborn's travel is from the in-tourist perspective, several other Western travelers who visited for conferences and business trips might explain something completely different. I know one such American photographer, Demarest Peterson, who traveled to Russia in the 1950's who was virtually uninhibited by the tourist guides from the in-tourist department, and was even able to take pictures of worshipers in a Russian Orthodox church during this time!
Consider the alternative, imagine a Russian who was able to visit the US, under false pretenses, at about the same time, alone, poor in English and by car (if this would ever have been allowed). Would they be allowed to travel independently? Probably not. Would they be monitored by governmental officials? Probably yes. Would they be requested to join an official tour group to "give them a better traveling experience" (to keep an eye on them)? Yes, most certainly. Would their documents have been examined? Yes. Seeing it from the other side may help to explain the experiences that Thuborn had. Very few traveled to Russia from the West during this time which may help to explain the enigma of Russia more than one persons two week journal.
I can recommend this book from only this perspective, as a historical narrative, and not as something to be considered for 2010. Russia has changed greatly in the last 10 years alone and it resembles nothing of the Soviet Union in 1980. If taken as a guide this book, now, will only heighten one's sense of cultural shock. And when you return, write of your own experiences, they are sorely needed.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2014a very interesting and well written book. Mr Thuron has a knack for describing unusual encounters with people and his descriptions of places visited is poetic at times and starkly realistic as well. His very subtle sense of humour reveals itself in the most unexpected ways. An insight into how things were in russia not that long ago!
- Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2016This is a well-written book, for the pre-Chornoble era. So much has changed since 1983, it is now a history book. In fact, it is word-for-word "Where the Nights are Longest," published by Colin Thubron in 1983, save for a few lines in the Foreword. The "2001" copyright is therefore misleading--it is a a 1983 book.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2016I love everything this man writes.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2014Loved it, beautiful!
Top reviews from other countries
- J. Scott-mandevilleReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 13, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Authentic Russia from a leading travel writer
Colin Thubron is No. 1 in my estimation as a travel writer. He captures personal and objective visions and ideas in every sentence. His meetings with Russians in this book are brilliantly evoked and bring this vast and bewildering country and its people to life. Although this book was written some years ago, the Russian character does not, I believe, change, and I recommend this short and brilliant piece of writing by this writer par excellence who never fails to interest, amuse, and educate.
- Gloria A. GibbinsReviewed in Canada on January 6, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars I felt as if I was in Russia and loved the
Colin Thubron never fails to please. I felt as if I was in Russia and loved the book
- BIGSKIESReviewed in Germany on July 29, 2013
5.0 out of 5 stars Wunderbar
Evocatively written even though twenty years ago...very illuminating.
The book was cheap and quickly despatched...highly worthwhile as a read.
Thank you.
- jgr Now know it never needs to be taken off. Beautifully engraved. Lovely small size and just hope it will be noticed in an emergency!!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 10, 2020
4.0 out of 5 stars Massive of detail about the 1980s
Published in the 1980s so things will have changed. Found some of the descriptions about architecture a bit heavy and skipped some, but found the interviews most interesting. Overall, enjoyed it a lot.
- Antony JohnsonReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 24, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant book
Brilliant book