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Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in a Deep Heartland

Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in a Deep Heartland

by SusanRichards (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2009

    $5.25
Synopsis

Far from Moscow and St Petersburg, there lies another Russia. Overlooked by the new urban elites and almost unknown to the West, in the great provincial hinterlands of the Volga River and Siberia, Russians struggle to reconcile their old traditions with the new ways of living. Returning again and again to the deep heartland of this rapidly evolving country from 1992 to the present, Susan Richards struck up some extraordinary friendships.With Anna, a questing journalist struggling to express her passionate spirituality within the rules of the new society. And Natasha, a restless spirit, transplanted from Siberia in a bid to escape the demands of her upper class family and her own demons. And Tatiana and Misha, whose business empire has blossomed from the ashes of the Soviet Union but who, despite all their luxury, seem uneasy in this new world. Through their stories and her own experiences Susan Richards demonstrates how in Russia the past and the present cannot be separated. Lost and Found in Russia is a magical and unforgettable portrait of a society in transition.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 320
 Edition: New ed.
 Publisher: I B Tauris & Co Ltd
Published: 13 May 2009
ISBN 10: 1848850239
ISBN 13: 9781848850231

Media Reviews
'A work of great thoughtfulness and enterprise, it sheds a uniquely intimate light behind the facade of the new Russia.' - Colin Thubron; 'A uniquely personal chronicle, and a testament to friendship. Susan Richards's political fact-finding is set ablaze by her intimacy with the discomforts and dangers of life in these remote regions, where the magic of the natural world challenges urban degradation, and where physical deprivation coexists with a richness of belief-systems as strange as the mountains of the moon.' - Victoria Glendinning; 'Susan Richards has long been one of the very best writers on Russia. Her new book is a remarkable blend of travel and reflection, as she introduces us to the vivid gallery of people she meets in the provinces. The result is a brilliant, poignant evocation of a society in transition.' - Robert Service; 'Once again, Susan Richards gives a rare and wonderful evocation of ordinary lives in Russia. People fall in love, fall ill, make money, lose money; some are nobly defeated, some shamelessly successful. Each one tells us more about the lethal tides of recent Russian history than years of newspaper reports.' - Philip Marsden; 'Russia exerts a peculiar pull for English travellers...Susan Richards's version shines because she knows her subjects very well. These are stories of friendships across the miles, not just brief encounters plundered for material...This traveller's tale, with all the absorption and detail of the genre, is also the story of an entire country.' - Anne McElvoy, Evening Standard; 'Lost and Found in Russia is intense reading...bursting with good material...For a rich portrait of the new Russia, grab this off the shelf and skip all those biographies of Vladimir Putin.' - Thomas de Waal, Sunday Times; 'wonderful...Lost and Found in Russia is beautifully written, with arresting images on almost every page... It is a travelogue as rich and compelling as a novel' - Lesley Chamberlain, Independent; 'moving, sometimes perplexing, even distressing...Susan Richards combines fluency in Russian with great tact, curiosity and a capacity for friendship which overcomes the barriers that defeat most foreign attempts to chronicle post-Soviet Russia...her book, being a bottom-to-top account, is perhaps equally important [as Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia]...as admirable as it is honest'. - Donald Rayfield, Literary Review
Author Bio
Susan Richards is the author of Epics of Everyday Life, which won the P.E.N. Time-Life Award for Non-Fiction and the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in 1990. She edits open Democracy Russia, part of open Democracy, the website about global affairs which she co-founded. After her doctorate on Alexander Solzhenitsyn from St Antony's College, Oxford University, she initiated the programme of talks, conferences and debates at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts and worked as a film producer. With her husband, the television producer Roger Graef, she started Bookaid, a charity which sent a million English language books to public libraries throughout the Soviet Union.