Everything but Borscht:

Exploring the Ambiguities of

Russia with Sara Wheeler and
Ethan Pollock
By Randy Rosenthal

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

WHEN DOSTOYEVSKY FIRST read  Anna Karenina, he

called the novel “boring.” Tolstoy, on the other hand, said he
did not know “a better book in all modern literature” than
Dostoyevsky’s  Notes from the House of the Dead.
Dostoyevsky was seven years older than Tolstoy, and three
years younger than Ivan Turgenev, who thought
Dostoyevsky’s ideas about mystical Russianness were
nonsense. When Turgenev was dying, he wrote to Tolstoy
“to say how glad I was to have been a contemporary of
yours.” Nikolai Leskov went further in his admiration,
becoming a devoted disciple of Tolstoy after meeting him in
1887. Decades earlier, Tolstoy was “in raptures” over Ivan
Goncharov’s novel Oblomov, which he called “a truly great
work” that he kept rereading. Chekhov was also fan,
praising Goncharov as “ten heads above me in talent.” But
Goncharov was jealous of Turgenev, and accused him of
plagiarism. Once, Goncharov saw Turgenev at a park in St.
Petersburg and ran away shouting, “A thief! A thief!”
With gossipy bits like these, Sara Wheeler’s delightful
book  Mud and Stars:  Travels in Russia with Pushkin,
Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Agereminds us
that the giants of the Russian 19th century were indeed
contemporaries, commenting on one another’s work as it
came out, supporting and rivaling each other. Besides
Alexander Pushkin and Tolstoy, the “other geniuses” of
Wheeler’s subtitle include Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail
Lermontov, Leskov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Chekhov, and, of
course, Dostoyevsky. For her, these are the stars of Russia’s
Golden Age, which she defines broadly as the period
between 1800 and 1910, the year of Tolstoy’s death.

Each chapter focuses on one writer, but Wheeler is not very

interested in biography. Yes, as she travels around their old
stomping grounds, we learn where the authors lived, whom
they married, how they died, and the various struggles they
faced — each experienced censorship and, at times, serious
oppression, a tradition that continued into the Soviet era and
beyond. But the book reveals more about Wheeler herself.
She first visited Russia when she was 11 and says she “has
been looking over [her] shoulder at it ever since.” Boldly
calling Russia a “kleptocracy” currently “in the grip of a
murderous dictatorship,” she nevertheless feels the country
“is lovable despite it all.”  Mud and Stars  seems to be
Wheeler’s attempt to understand her own ambivalent
Russophilia.

In the introduction, Wheeler claims there “is no such thing

as the Russian soul, or perhaps even Russian culture.” By
following in these authors’ footsteps, she aims to understand
instead the  emotional  landscape of Russia. Generally
avoiding Moscow and St. Petersburg, cities that she finds
“so unrepresentative of Russia,” she travels along the Volga,
the Oka, and the Velikaya rivers. She hikes around the
Caucasus and the Black Sea. She even trains out to Lake
Baikal in the midst of winter, stopping in the Siberian cities
and outposts along the way.

Wheeler prefers homestays over hotels, and her characters

are the Russian hosts and guides she meets during her trips.
She includes entries from her journals, and describes her
progress learning Russian (it’s never that good, but she can
at least read Chekhov in the original). She is fond of Russian
cuisine, and chapters are often paced by the dishes she
learns to cook. She notes there are 86 kinds of food
mentioned in Gogol’s  Dead Souls, and highlights the
author’s ode to  kulebyaka, a traditional fish pie that also
appears in Turgenev. Wheeler makes the dish at home in the
United Kingdom with her family, using a recipe
from Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, a book that “tells
the story of post-Revolutionary Russia through the prism of
one family’s meals.” She also relies on The Best of Russian
Cooking, by Alexandra Kropotkin, who warns, when
making pirozhki, that “your true Russian entertains a violent
passion for dill — and dill is an herb that can permeate your
life if you don’t watch it.” Often, Wheeler defines a locale’s
culture with a casual list of dishes; at a restaurant in Siberia,
she works her way through “cabbage soup, pickled herring,
liver stroganoff with watery mashed potatoes, pork
dumplings and doughy  pelmeni  packets.” And while
watching TV with her host Tamara, Wheeler writes, “We
ate bliny and a kind of stiff cottage cheese called tvorog with
bilberry jam spooned onto the plate.” She includes
everything but borscht.

Besides making your stomach growl with descriptions of

rich food, Wheeler also causes eyebrows to rise with her
stylistic flourishes. While studying Russian in Moscow, she
notes: “Cherry trees outside the classroom window, foaming
with blossoms, glowed in late afternoon sun.” Foaming?
Very nice. Driving near Pskov, she writes, “Light the colour
of an unripe lemon slanted through the birch forest.” It’s
the  unripethat made me blink. In the Siberian region of
Chukotka, Wheeler enters a cathedral for an evening service
and describes the scene:

Inside, candlelight flickered over painted faces, the tidal

drone of a male choir rose and fell and ponytailed
young monks strode around noiselessly, following the
muttered instructions of the priest, a tall, broad figure
whose stomach swelled tight against the black fabric of
his robe. Puffs of incense smoke trailed woozily among
the dozen worshippers, who shifted from foot to foot,
touching their headscarves.

If you’ve never set foot in a Russian Orthodox Cathedral,

you now know what it’s like to do so. What could be more
Russian, you might ask? Perhaps the banya.

It might sound unpleasant to sweat in 200-degree heat while

being thrashed by birch branches, but it’s rather exhilarating.
Resting between steams at a banya in Mtsenk, Wheeler tells
her host Natasha that “the banya reflects something
immutable about Russian history, despite the cataclysm of
events.” Natasha replies, with typical Russian resignation,
that each cataclysm produces the same results, and nothing
ever changes; be that as it may, Wheeler’s observation is
true. As professor Ethan Pollock writes in  Without the
Banya We Would Perish, “Whenever and wherever there
have been Russians, there have been banyas.”

In fact, banyas may date even earlier. In 440 BCE,

Herodotus wrote in Histories that the Scythians (of present-
day Ukraine and southern Russia) went under wool
coverings and threw cannabis seeds onto blazing-hot stones,
which produced a euphoric vapor in which they bathed. I
wouldn’t be surprised if someone in Los Angeles opened up
a Scythian banya, but traditional Russian ones don’t involve
cannabis. What makes a banya distinct from, say, the dry
Finnish sauna, is the steam — and also the birch branches
(venik), which are used to bring heat to the body and open
up the capillaries. And rather than one room, a banya
usually has three components. There is an entrance and
changing area (predbannik), where in between steams
people snack and sip beer or  kvas, a drink made from
fermented bread. In the steam room (parnaya), stones are
heated by a fire until they’re red hot, and then water is
poured on the stones to create steam. Then there is also a
washing room, which today often includes a shower, but
historically was where people dumped buckets of cold or
hot water over themselves. It’s also common for people to
jump into icy pools or roll in the snow between steams.

For centuries, the banya was the primary way for Russians
to bathe. An early description of banya activities is found
in  The Primary Chronicle  — a 12th-century history of the
founding of Kievan Rus, the state that gave rise both to
Ukraine and to Muscovite Russia — suggesting, as Pollock
writes, that “the banya was always inseparable from the very
idea of Russia and Russians.” From the 16th century on, the
banya was lauded as a medicinal cure-all, a place to become
physically as well as spiritually clean. But it was also
condemned on moral grounds; offering privacy and
anonymity while allowing nudity, banyas are ideal places for
prostitution and sexual liaisons of all sorts. Early tsars
supported banyas because their fees brought in tax revenue,
Catherine the Great championed them as evidence of
Russian hygienic advancement, and Boris Yelstin treated
them as secular sites of revelation. The banya perhaps
reached its own golden age in the last years of the Russian
Empire and its low point during the Civil War, when most
were closed and, as a result, thousands of Russians died
from typhus and relapsing fever. During the Soviet period
the banya was “socialist in principle but capitalist in fact,”
meaning that although it was ostensibly free to enter, fees
were required for services, which were usually quite bad.
In Pollock’s account, the banya is an inarguably
quintessential Russian institution, but also reveals perennial
institutional dysfunction. This refrain is repeated so often
that Without the Banya We Would Perish can feel somewhat
repetitive; Pollock pushes through history, but it feels like
we’re standing still. Perhaps Wheeler’s host Natasha was
right after all? Ironically, it wasn’t until the prevalence of
indoor plumbing and private showers, in the 1980s, that the
banya, instead of going obsolete, secured its present status
in Russian culture as a place for relaxation and socialization,
not merely somewhere to get clean. In the early post-Soviet
period, the banya may have been the only secular institution
that provided Russians with a unifying tradition and a safe
connection to the past.

By then, the banya played a prominent role in many of

Russia’s most beloved films, but it had always captured the
fascination of the nation’s best writers. Pollock mentions
stories by Pushkin, Chekov, Dostoyevsky, and Teffi that take
place in banyas. Vasily Rozanov, a popular and controversial
writer of the late Imperial period, declared that “the banya
remains,” having survived a millennium from Kievan Rus
through the Revolution. And as for Dostoyevsky, he was
“drawn to the ambiguity of the banya — as clean and dirty,
as pure and corrupt, and as a potential gateway to both hell
and salvation.” According to his confidant and biographer,
Nikolai Strakhov, Dostoyevsky once raped an underage girl
in a banya. No one knows if this rumor is true, but because
of it, Pollack grandly writes that “[t]he banya was at the
unknowable core of Dostoevsky, just as it was at the
unknowable core of Russian identity more generally.”

This rumor of rape is deeply troubling, of course, as is the

blatant antisemitism of Dostoyevsky’s columns and letters,
which Sara Wheeler mentions in  Mud and Stars. But I’m
also troubled by Wheeler’s own take on
Dostoyevsky’s  Notes from Underground, which she admits
she found “almost unreadable — there is a kind of shattering
dullness about it — and had little idea what it was about.”
This confession hit me like a punch in the gut, because if
you don’t understand  Notes from Underground, you don’t
understand one of the central trends in Russian thought. We
enjoy a toothache, says the Underground Man, because we
get to complain about it and elicit sympathy from others.
And even though we know two plus two is four, we’ll fight
against it, because we value freedom more than logic. We’ll
make choices that devastate our lives, simply for the hell of
it. Yes, there’s a strong current of irrationality in Russian
culture, and Dostoyevsky captures it unforgettably in his
slim proto-existentialist novel. Wheeler might think that
there’s no such thing as the Russian soul, and many of us
might agree, but I bet Dostoyevsky would argue otherwise.

Randy Rosenthal teaches writing at Harvard University,

where he is also an Associate of the Davis Center for
Russian and Eurasian Studies.