What is the best balm in bewildering, uncertain times?

All of my appliances are kaput, so I’ve been running to the laundromat on the weekends and washing dishes by hand in the evenings. And washing dishes, it turns out, is far more relaxing and strangely satisfying than loading the dishwasher.

One evening last week while tending to the evening kitchen chores, I listened to the beginning of Mud & Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age. The first chapter opens like so:

“Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a lubricious, bawdy, impetuous, whoring gambler who seldom missed an opportunity to pick a fight.”

Oooh!

Apparently the only time Pushkin finished any writing was when he was resting and recovering from some venereal disease or another. Unable to fuck, he had time to write. And in addition to many other delicious tidbits, I learned that Pushkin married his “113th love,” despite his apprehensions about marriage—“lawful cunt castrates the mind.”

Right. Can you imagine a woman saying “lawful prick is the oophorectomy of the mind?” No. Good grief.

I also love this understatement: “Like many great artists, Pushkin lacked something in the human department.”

Indeed.

Anyway. I bought Mud & Stars that day I decided to finally use my Audible credits—but then I’d forgotten about it. None of my library books interested me that evening, so I had tried listening to the news. Big mistake. I hadn’t listened to NPR for about a year, and at first it was a comfort, those voices I recognized. Like a surprise visit with long lost friends. And then it was too surreal—so many stories about people living their lives as if this were not the Apocalypse, smack next to stories about Afghanistan, Texas’s oppressive theocracy, climate disaster, more virulent and deadly variants of the COVID virus.

It’s difficult to find a place to hold the enormity of our current global crises in our minds and hearts, and I’ve been slow to construct coping mechanisms. But I find solace where I can, usually in the garden. But sometimes in surprising places—like the Hopi notion that we are at the end of one world and the beginning of another.

If this is true, if we are navigating between worlds, a book like Mud and Stars is perfect. She charts her own journey through the physical spaces occupied by these “geniuses” —spaces inaccessible to most of us right now—and along the way weaves in the politics and personalities that shaped the changing stories we have told over the years about them.

I was surprised to see that Mud & Stars has a lot of “meh” reviews on Goodreads, and I wish I had not read them. Sometimes I wonder if people give poor reviews because they haven’t paid attention to what the book is, and then judge it based on what they had wanted it to be. If you want a deep dive into literary criticism, this is not for you. The author is a travel writer. It’s right there in the title, Travels in Russia.

So if you think of the book as the tour you cannot take during a global pandemic, there is nothing “meh” about it. I mean, castration of the mind! Bless his misogynist heart—deeply flawed, capable of alarming beauty. Human.