“A fascinating, horrifying and inspiring journey – praise seems scant reward for his efforts. The man deserves a medal.”
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.
Winner of the Thomas Cook ‘Travel Book of the Year’ Award
“So otherworld, so strange and so fabulous are the characters who people The Spirit-Wrestlers that the reader might be forgiven for imagining he had dipped by mistake into some ancient book of fairy tales.”
“What’s really seductive about this book is not its sense of being in at the end of something important, nor the battery of ‘characters’ that it assembles, but rather Marsden’s own lovely errancy, the kind of Brownian motion that tosses him from collision to collision.”
“Having turned the last page of Philip Marsden’s book, I sincerely regretted it was my first encounter with this excellent travel writer. The Spirit-Wrestlers charmed me with its genuine spirituality – Marsden himself deserves to be called a spirit-wrestler’.”
