Journey Into Russia
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
At the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union remained one of the most impenetrable and misunderstood nations on earth, the intrepid South African writer and explorer Laurens van der Post ventured behind the Iron Curtain and returned with a portrait of breathtaking depth and humanity. Journey Into Russia chronicles his remarkable odyssey across the vast Soviet landscape — from its teeming cities to its remote rural heartlands — where he sought not the machinery of ideology, but the soul of the Russian people themselves. With the eye of an anthropologist and the sensibility of a poet, van der Post uncovers the paradoxes of a civilization simultaneously ancient and brutally modern, intimate and monolithic, fearful and profoundly hospitable. Van der Post's prose is characteristically lyrical and searching, drawing on his lifelong fascination with the inner lives of cultures often dismissed or caricatured by the Western gaze. Much like his celebrated works on Africa, this account argues that true understanding of a people demands patience, humility, and a willingness to listen — qualities that transform what might have been a political travelogue into something far more enduring: a meditation on the human condition itself. For anyone who has ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of history's most enigmatic empire, this extraordinary journey offers answers that are as unsettling as they are illuminating.
Author: Laurens Van Der Post
Format: Hardback
Genre: Travel & exploration
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
At the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union remained one of the most impenetrable and misunderstood nations on earth, the intrepid South African writer and explorer Laurens van der Post ventured behind the Iron Curtain and returned with a portrait of breathtaking depth and humanity. Journey Into Russia chronicles his remarkable odyssey across the vast Soviet landscape — from its teeming cities to its remote rural heartlands — where he sought not the machinery of ideology, but the soul of the Russian people themselves. With the eye of an anthropologist and the sensibility of a poet, van der Post uncovers the paradoxes of a civilization simultaneously ancient and brutally modern, intimate and monolithic, fearful and profoundly hospitable. Van der Post's prose is characteristically lyrical and searching, drawing on his lifelong fascination with the inner lives of cultures often dismissed or caricatured by the Western gaze. Much like his celebrated works on Africa, this account argues that true understanding of a people demands patience, humility, and a willingness to listen — qualities that transform what might have been a political travelogue into something far more enduring: a meditation on the human condition itself. For anyone who has ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of history's most enigmatic empire, this extraordinary journey offers answers that are as unsettling as they are illuminating.