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3 books match the query 'Mühling, Jens'
A Journey into Russia
Jens Mühling
Haus Publishing, 2014
When German journalist Jens Mühling met Juri, a Russian television producer selling stories about his homeland, he was mesmerized by what he heard: the real Russia and Ukraine were more unbelievable than anything he could have invented. The encounter changed Mühling’s life, triggering a number of journeys to Ukraine and deep into the Russian heartland on a quest for stories of ordinary and extraordinary people. Away from the bright lights of Moscow, Mühling met and befriended a Dostoevskian cast of characters, including a hermit from Tayga who had only recently discovered the existence of a world beyond the woods, a Ukrainian Cossack who defaced the statue of Lenin in central Kiev, and a priest who insisted on returning to Chernobyl to preach to the stubborn few determined to remain in the exclusion zone.
Unveiling a portion of the world whose contradictions, attractions, and absurdities are still largely unknown to people outside its borders, A Journey into Russia is a much-needed glimpse into one of today’s most significant regions.
Unveiling a portion of the world whose contradictions, attractions, and absurdities are still largely unknown to people outside its borders, A Journey into Russia is a much-needed glimpse into one of today’s most significant regions.
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Black Earth
A Journey through UkraineJens Mühling
Haus Publishing, 2018
An in-depth exploration of Ukraine through encounters with the many different people who live there.
“Will someone pay for the spilled blood? No. Nobody.” Mikhail Bulgakov composed this ominous and prophetic phrase in Kiev amid the turmoil of the Russian civil war. Since then, Ukrainian borders have shifted constantly, and its people have suffered numerous military foreign interventions. Ukraine has only existed as an independent state since 1991, and what exactly it was before then is controversial among its people as well as its European neighbors.
In Black Earth: A Journey through the Ukraine, journalist and celebrated travel writer Jens Mühling takes readers across the country amid the ousting of former president Viktor Yanukovych and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Mühling delves deep into daily life in Ukraine, narrating his encounters with Ukrainian nationalists and old communists, Crimean Tatars and Cossacks, smugglers, and soldiers. Black Earth connects all these stories to convey an unconventional and unfiltered view of Ukraine, a country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and the center of countless conflicts.
In this paperback edition, a new preface is included that takes into account recent developments up to the 2022 war between Russia and Ukraine.
“Will someone pay for the spilled blood? No. Nobody.” Mikhail Bulgakov composed this ominous and prophetic phrase in Kiev amid the turmoil of the Russian civil war. Since then, Ukrainian borders have shifted constantly, and its people have suffered numerous military foreign interventions. Ukraine has only existed as an independent state since 1991, and what exactly it was before then is controversial among its people as well as its European neighbors.
In Black Earth: A Journey through the Ukraine, journalist and celebrated travel writer Jens Mühling takes readers across the country amid the ousting of former president Viktor Yanukovych and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Mühling delves deep into daily life in Ukraine, narrating his encounters with Ukrainian nationalists and old communists, Crimean Tatars and Cossacks, smugglers, and soldiers. Black Earth connects all these stories to convey an unconventional and unfiltered view of Ukraine, a country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and the center of countless conflicts.
In this paperback edition, a new preface is included that takes into account recent developments up to the 2022 war between Russia and Ukraine.
[more]
Troubled Water
A Journey Around the Black SeaJens Mühling
Haus Publishing, 2022
A history of the countries bordering the Black Sea told through the stories of the people who live there.
Fringing the Black Sea is a diverse array of countries, some centuries old and others emerging only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Jens Mühling travels through this region, telling the stories of the people he meets along the way in order to paint a picture of the mix of cultures found here and to understand the present against a history stretching back to the arrival of Ancient Greek settlers and beyond.
A fluent Russian speaker with a knack for gaining the trust of those he meets, Mühling brings together a cast of characters as diverse as the stories he hears, all of whom are willing to tell him their complex, contradictory, and often fantastical tales full of grief and legend. He meets descendants of the so-called Pontic Greeks, whom Stalin deported to Central Asia and who have now returned; Circassians who fled to Syria a century ago and whose great-great-grandchildren have returned to Abkhazia; and members of ethnic minorities like the Georgian Mingrelians or Bulgarian Muslims, expelled to Turkey in the summer of 1989. Mühling captures the region’s uneasy alliance of tradition and modernity and the diverse humanity of those who live there.
Fringing the Black Sea is a diverse array of countries, some centuries old and others emerging only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Jens Mühling travels through this region, telling the stories of the people he meets along the way in order to paint a picture of the mix of cultures found here and to understand the present against a history stretching back to the arrival of Ancient Greek settlers and beyond.
A fluent Russian speaker with a knack for gaining the trust of those he meets, Mühling brings together a cast of characters as diverse as the stories he hears, all of whom are willing to tell him their complex, contradictory, and often fantastical tales full of grief and legend. He meets descendants of the so-called Pontic Greeks, whom Stalin deported to Central Asia and who have now returned; Circassians who fled to Syria a century ago and whose great-great-grandchildren have returned to Abkhazia; and members of ethnic minorities like the Georgian Mingrelians or Bulgarian Muslims, expelled to Turkey in the summer of 1989. Mühling captures the region’s uneasy alliance of tradition and modernity and the diverse humanity of those who live there.
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