Mapped
A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles
One hotel, three decades. A count sentenced in 1922 to house arrest lives out the whole Soviet era inside the Metropol, just off Theatre Square. The map is a single block: the hotel and its rooms, with the Bolshoi, Theatre Square, and the Kremlin walls at Red Square a few steps beyond the revolving doors.
6 places →
A Hero of Our Time
Mikhail Lermontov
Lermontov's portrait of the bored, brilliant, destructive Pechorin plays out across the Russian Caucasus of the 1830s. Its heart is the spa society of Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, where Pechorin toys with Princess Mary and kills the vain Grushnitsky in a duel on Mount Mashuk, the very mountain where Lermontov himself would die in a duel a year after the book appeared. Two further tales range out to the smugglers' port of Taman on the Black Sea and to a frontier fort on the Georgian Military Road.
5 places →
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Moscow, Petersburg, and the railway between them. Anna arrives in Moscow past a man crushed at the station, and dies under a train at Obiralovka before her story ends. Levin's Pokrovskoe is invented; Tolstoy drew it from his own country life at Yasnaya Polyana. The line between the two capitals is the most important place in the book.
6 places →
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A hot July in the Haymarket district, 1865. Dostoevsky censored his own street names, and this walk reconstructs them.
12 places →
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol
The smooth swindler Chichikov travels the Russian provinces buying up 'dead souls', serfs who have died but still count on the tax rolls, in a scheme to mortgage them for a fortune, and in doing so exposes a whole gallery of grotesque landowners. Gogol maps a satirical but recognisable Russia: the provincial town where Chichikov charms the officials, the estates of the misers and dreamers he visits, and the endless road along which his carriage rolls.
5 places →
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
A life pulled apart by history: a Moscow doctor and poet is carried from his family's city through revolution and famine, then east by train across Russia to the towns and forests of the Urals, where he loves Lara. The map runs from central Moscow more than a thousand kilometres to Perm, the real Ural city that stands behind the novel's Yuriatin, and to the taiga beyond it.
5 places →
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
The young graduate Arkady brings his friend Bazarov, a self-declared nihilist who believes in nothing but science and reason, home to his father's estate, and the clash between the generations plays out across the estates and towns of provincial Russia. Turgenev maps a real rural world: the Kirsanov estate of Maryino, the provincial town and its society, the estate where Bazarov meets the woman who defeats his creed, and the humble farm of his devoted parents.
5 places →
Life and Fate
Vasily Grossman
Grossman's vast novel turns on the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–43 and braids it with the two great terrors of the century, the Nazi camps and Stalin's own. The city on the Volga is the fixed centre: the ruined streets, the encircled strongpoint the novel calls House 6/1, and the height of Mamayev Kurgan fought over yard by yard. Beyond it the book reaches to the Berdichev ghetto, where the physicist Shtrum's mother writes her last letter, and to the Lubyanka in Moscow, so that the war and the two tyrannies are held in one frame.
5 places →
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
In a small Russian town, the dissolute Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons, the sensual Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan and the saintly novice Alyosha, are drawn toward the old man's murder and the questions of faith, doubt and guilt that surround it. Dostoevsky's fictional Skotoprigonyevsk is drawn from Staraya Russa, where he wrote the novel: the family house, the monastery of the Elder Zosima, the taverns of Dmitri's ruin, and the courtroom of the trial that closes the book.
5 places →
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's second great Petersburg novel, mapped from the terminus of the Warsaw railway through the salons and the merchant streets to the leafy summer resort of Pavlovsk, thirty kilometres south, where much of the second half unfolds. A companion to Crime and Punishment: the same city, a different fever.
6 places →
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Devil comes to atheist Soviet Moscow and turns it inside out. The map runs through the real city Bulgakov wrote from: a bench by Patriarch's Ponds, the writers' club drawn from Herzen House on Tverskoy Boulevard, and the haunted flat modelled on his own rooms on Bolshaya Sadovaya. A second thread, Pontius Pilate's Jerusalem, runs outside the city as a story within the story.
6 places →
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Across the Napoleonic Wars of 1805 to 1812, Tolstoy follows the Bezukhov, Bolkonsky and Rostov families through the salons of Petersburg, the society of Moscow, the country estates, and the battlefields where private lives and vast history collide. The novel maps a real geography: the imperial capital and the old city, the Bolkonsky estate in the provinces, the field of Austerlitz where Prince Andrei looks up at the infinite sky, and Borodino, after which Moscow burns and the French begin their ruinous retreat.
5 places →