Literary Places Read online

  These are the ideas plaguing Raskolnikov, whose inner turmoil is mirrored in his external world. The novel shuns St Petersburg’s magnificence and instead roams its squalid back rooms, brothels and spit-sticky inns. The action is centred on Sennaya Ploshchad, the Haymarket district. In the 19th century it was a notorious slum area, cramped and chaotic. It’s been razed and cleaned up now, though one of the original buildings around the old market remains, the yellow Guardhouse – where Dostoyevsky himself spent two days imprisoned for a censorship violation in 1874.

  Raskolnikov measures the footsteps – all 730 of them – between his rented attic and the home of the pawnbroker, and it’s possible to walk to the scene of the crime, just as he did. The antihero lived on the corner of Stolyarny and Grazhdansky streets; a plaque now marks the building, its words roughly translating as: ‘The tragic fates of the people of this area served as the basis of Dostoyevsky’s passionate sermon on good for all humankind.’

  When finally fixed on robbing and killing the pawnbroker, Raskolnikov procures an axe and takes a roundabout route, heading slowly south along Stolyarny, which was then an alley of ‘unbearable stench’, heaving with dingy taverns and drunks. Dostoyevsky himself lived here, at the corner of Kaznacheisky Street, while writing Crime and Punishment.

  Raskolnikov follows Stolyarny to Kokushkin Bridge – then wooden, now metal-railed – which spans the Griboedov Canal. Pre-revolution, this waterway through the heart of St Petersburg was officially known as Ekaterininsky, after Empress Catherine the Great. However, those who lived within sniffing distance called it kanava (ditch) – back then it was an open cesspit. These days it’s one of the city’s finest thoroughfares, cleaned up and flanked by resplendent buildings.

  From the bridge, Raskolnikov walks via Yusupov Gardens, where he dreams of installing fountains to ‘refresh the air’; now it’s a public park where you can laze by the lake. After 20 minutes, he arrives at the pawnbroker’s apartment. It’s thought to be 104 Griboedov Canal, an apartment block with exits onto both the canal and a side street – perfect for an escaping felon. You can’t see inside – it’s a private home. For a more intimate encounter with Dostoyevsky, pay a visit to 5/2 Kuznechny Alley, the house where he died, and which is now a museum. Or head out to Alexander Nevsky Monastery to pay your respects at Dostoyevsky’s tomb.

  SIERRA DE GUADARRAMA

  Which?

  For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)

  What?

  Magnificent Spanish mountain range that became a theatre of war

  IT’S LATE afternoon and the sun is setting over the mountains, sliding off the slopes of Spanish gorse, juniper and pine; sinking down the gorge, into the stream, behind the lonesome bridge. The air – cool up here – grows cooler still as the day draws to a close. The forest is quiet, serene. Hard to imagine the thousands of bodies subsumed by this soil – though, scuff around, and there are bullet casings still scattered amid the rocks, dirt and fallen needles. This place of peace, once a battleground …

  The Sierra de Guadarrama rises from the parched meseta, just north of Madrid. Scorching in summer, snow-bitter in winter, these hefty mountains now provide a fresh-aired playground for Madrileños, but once rang with gunfire and ran with blood. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), when pro-democracy Republicans fought – and were ultimately defeated by – General Franco’s right-wing Nationalists, the sierra saw some of the fiercest skirmishes. These peaks were a savage border area between Nationalist and Republican lines; guerrillas hid, plotted, ambushed and massacred within the granite folds.

  Ernest Hemingway knew both the conflict and the mountains well. He spent time in Madrid during the war, working as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He would file copy as Nationalist shells rained down on the city, and he would head off into the sierra on foot or horse. These forays, and his first-hand experience of war-torn Spain, furnished his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, the story of American language professor Robert Jordan who ends up fighting for the Republicans amid the mountains. Like Hemingway, Jordan is a man in love with Spain – with its fiery passions, its bullfighting and machismo, its vitality and intensity. ‘That I am a foreigner is not my fault,’ says Jordan, ‘I would rather have been born here’.

  The novel takes place over four nights in late May 1937. Its backdrop of chaos is real enough: as well as Republicans fighting Nationalists, there was divisive infighting between anarchist and communist factions on one side, and Francoists and Falangists on the other. The novel also references real offensives – at Valladolid, Segovia, El Escorial – placing it in the build-up to the Republican attempt to relieve the long siege of Madrid. But the exact events of For Whom the Bell Tolls – the blowing up of a particular metal bridge – are fictional.

  Some posit that Hemingway based his bridge on the stone span across the Rio de las Lombrices (River of Worms), north of the Navacerrada Pass. There’s no evidence this bridge was ever bombed. But take a walk in the beautiful, pine-cloaked mountains nearby and there’s plenty of evidence of war. Bunkers, trenches and emplacements dot the slopes. However, there are no caves: though Hemingway’s rag-tag Republicans are said to live in caves, the hard granite of the sierra actually provides no such hidey-holes.

  In the novel, Jordan is told that the larger goal of his attack is for the Republicans to take Segovia, the historic city across the sierra from Madrid. The historical Segovia Offensive occurred between 31 May and 6 June 1937 – a defeat for the Republicans. Fortunately the fairytale-like city, with its soaring Roman aqueduct and Disney-inspiring Alcázar palace, remains intact, as does the Méson de Cándido restaurant where Hemingway once tucked into his favourite, cochinillo asado (roast suckling pig).

  Also intact is the foothills town of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, where in the 16th century King Philip II ordered the construction of a vast monastery-palace, burial site of almost every Spanish monarch since Philip’s father. After winning the war, Franco chose a nearby spot for his own contribution to heritage and remembrance. Marked by an enormous granite cross, the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) is a big, Brutalist, highly controversial and slightly sinister monument to those who died during the Civil War, as well as housing the tomb of Franco himself.

  LA MANCHA

  Which?

  Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1615)

  What?

  Windswept Spanish plains of windmills, wheatfields and literary giants

  THE SUN slips earthwards, its last rays caressing the endless plateau of nodding wheat, saffron blooms and ancient olive groves. The light glows, too, on a phalanx of hulking white giants, lording the hillside and waving their long arms as if urging a fight. Yet these mighty monsters, so pugnacious from a distance, prove harmless up close. Not ogres but windmills, transformed by the day’s late haze and the flights of a fanciful mind …

  The late Middle Ages heralded Spain’s Siglo de Oro – Golden Age. From around 1492, following the end of the Reconquest, to the middle of the 17th century, the arts, architecture and exploration flourished on the Iberian peninsula. Columbus set off for the New World, Velázquez and El Greco dazzled with their paintbrushes, the royal monastery at El Escorial was built. And writer Miguel de Cervantes penned Don Quixote – not only the best-ever Spanish novel, but arguably the best novel of all time.

  Cervantes’ hefty tale follows Alonso Quixano, a middle-aged hidalgo (nobleman) and reader of medieval romances who titles himself Don Quixote, pulls on a suit of armour and sets out – with his squat squire Sancho Panza – like a Renaissance, horse-riding Batman to right wrongs and resurrect chivalry. But his escapades seldom go to plan; the ‘Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance’ frequently gets painfully trampled or beaten. In his magnum opus, Cervantes spoofs the genre Alonso so loves, and introduces the world of literature – hitherto fixated on myths and monsters – to universal truths and a fat dose of reality.

  Don Quixote’s domain is La Mancha, the wild, fertile plat
eau south of Madrid, and Spain’s least densely populated region. Like the novel, the landscape here is epic: big deep-blue skies stretching over a near-infinite roll of red earth, flaxen crops and vine stripes, the occasional whitewashed windmill, the odd ruined castle, a scatter of country inns. It’s a place where grand adventures might be had, or where the scale and the heat and the teasing horizon – always seeming just out of reach – might simply drive you mad.

  Cervantes names few specific places; also, his settings can be slippery, transformed in Quixote’s florid imagination, which turns inns into castles and farm girls into princesses. But it’s still possible to trace a quixotic route across La Mancha – not least thanks to professors at a Madrid university, who spent years deciphering clues and postulating donkey speeds in order to pinpoint Don Quixote’s home, ‘somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember’. The scholars settled on the town of Villanueva de los Infantes, stranded on the tableland 225 kilometres (140 miles) south of Madrid. Regardless of whether the Cervantes connection is valid, it’s a charming little town, with many 16th- and 17th-century churches and palaces, and statues of Quixote, Panza and their steeds wandering across the handsome Plaza Mayor.

  The foothills village of Puerto Lápice is explicitly mentioned in the novel. Here, Quixote persuades an innkeeper to knight him; today, a reconstructed inn gives flavour if not authenticity. Also named in the book is El Toboso, home of Dulcinea, the ‘superhuman beauty’ with whom Quixote is infatuated. The traditional 16th-century farmhouse once belonging to the woman who inspired Dulcinea is now a museum, complete with old iron and copper kitchenware, horse tack and a wine cellar and olive press. It’s a place more befitting the peasant girl Dulcinea really is rather than the highborn lady that delusional Quixote believes her to be.

  However, perhaps the most Quixote moment is to be found by driving across La Mancha’s mind-messing emptiness towards Campo de Criptana. The town looms like a ghost, its whitewashed old Moorish centre seeping over a slope below a handful of hilltop ‘giants’ – site of Quixote’s ‘fearful and never imagined adventure of the windmills’. In Cervantes’ time, around 30 or 40 windmills were clustered here; now 13 remain, waving their sails at the featureless plain, still stirring visions of Spain’s great, flawed hero.

  DAVOS

  Which?

  The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)

  What?

  Timeless Swiss alpine idyll almost removed from the real world

  THE VIEW from the hotel terrace is like a tonic; like sinking into a beautiful ice bath, thrillingly, rejuvenatingly fresh. Snow blankets everything; the rocks, hollows, tree boughs and high peaks have been cloaked, plumped and softened. Everything sparkles too, winter sun scattering diamonds across the powdery slopes. Up in the magical mountains, the real world seems far, far away. Who wouldn’t feel better after spending a week, or even years, here …?

  The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann is the tale of young and naïve Hans Castorp who goes to visit a tubercular cousin at a Swiss sanatorium – and doesn’t leave. Instead, Castorp sinks rather happily into the insularity and decadence of sanatorium life. And while doctors try to improve his physical health, conversations with fellow patients end up expanding his mind.

  A bit like Thomas Mann. An ardent patriot during the First World War, the German author revised his outlook in the conflict’s dark aftermath. By 1924, when The Magic Mountain was published, he was leaning leftwards towards democracy and liberalism. But this is not the sole ideology of the novel: it doesn’t propose any one answer; it makes clear that there are many contradictory ways to understand the world.

  The Magic Mountain is also a meditation on the nature of time, which passes differently in the rarified air and seclusion of Davos’s Berghof sanatorium. Here, shielded from external cares, the hours, days, months, years are a ceaselessness of extravagant meals, proscribed rest, woodland walks, intellectual discussion. To the latter end, an international cast – Russian, Italian, Asian, Polish; the planet in microcosm – is assembled in safe, neutral Switzerland to debate culture and philosophy. But as the patients in the sanatorium seek a cure, Europe beyond is sick. The novel begins in the first decade of the 20th century, the continent on the brink of war. When Castorp eventually leaves his alpine bubble seven years later, it’s for the trenches. The final pages leave him limping across the mud, bombs falling, alive but with ‘prospects poor’.

  The hellish trenches are certainly a far cry from Mann’s bewitched Swiss valley setting, where ‘the towering statues of snow-clad Alps’ can awaken ‘feelings of the sublime and holy’. The high mountain town of Davos, in the canton of Graubünden, is now best known for hosting the annual World Economic Forum. But, from the mid-19th century, it was a popular spot for the sick. Many doctors believed the town’s alpine air and microclimate were ideal for combatting illnesses, in particular tuberculosis. Some two dozen sanatoriums opened here, and patients spent hours sitting on terraces, wrapped in blankets, soaking up the sunshine; they’d take constitutionals, drink creamy milk and wine and breathe in deep lungfuls of the crisp, clear air.

  Though not a precise version of Thomas Mann’s fictional Berghof, the Schatzalp is a good approximation. Floating high on the mountainside above Davos, it opened as a luxury clinic in 1900. The funicular train, which conveyed patients up in minutes, is still the only way to get there, other than on foot. Being higher up the valley, the Schatzalp receives more sunshine than the town below, and the sanatorium was built facing south to optimise exposure to natural light. Its long, wind-sheltered verandas allowed patients to recline on deckchairs in the sun, enjoying the very best views.

  The Schatzalp was converted into a hotel in the 1950s, when innovations such as penicillin killed the sanatorium industry. It has retained much belle époque charm, from its stained glass and painted peacocks to the hundred-year-old plumbing. There are also nods to its medicinal history – the lightbox panels above the bar reveal that this used to be the X-ray room.

  A Thomas Mann Way walking path, dotted with quotations from The Magic Mountain, now connects the Schatzalp to Davos, via the Waldhotel – formerly the Woodland Sanatorium. This is where Katia Mann was recuperating from a lung complaint when her husband, Thomas, came to visit in spring 1912 and decided that this could be the setting for a good story …

  BATH

  Which?

  Northanger Abbey & Persuasion by Jane Austen (1818)

  What?

  Splendid English city, setting for a send-up of Georgian high society

  THE CRESCENT’S honeyed stone glows in the afternoon sunlight, a radiant architectural swoosh between the neat green lawn and cloudless blue sky. A long procession of Ionic columns and sash windows sweeps away in perfect symmetry, while the footsteps of the slowly strolling curious – faces up-turned, mouths agape – slap on worn-smooth slabs. Such splendour! But look behind the flawless facade and this elegant terrace tells a different story. Round the other side it’s an untidy irregularity of annexes and add-ons. A Queen Anne front, a Mary-Anne back. A public face concealing darker truths …

  ‘Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?’ Who indeed. In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s playful satire on the Gothic novel, heroine Catherine Morland speaks of the allure of the Somerset city in the early 19th century – an allure that continues to this day. In England, there is nowhere else quite like it; nowhere as perfectly, homogeneously preserved. To walk along its sweeping crescents and golden streets now is almost to step straight back into Austen’s pages, minus the bonnets and breeches.

  Bath nestles within a loop of the River Avon, on the southern edge of the rolling-green Cotswold Hills. The city owes its situation and success to its hot springs, unique in Britain, and first developed by the Romans who built an elaborate bathing complex here, which they called Aquae Sulis. Though the Roman temple fell into disuse, and was eventually forgotten – until its rediscovery in 1775 – these healing waters continued to be sought after. From
the 17th century, following a succession of royal visits, Bath became the resort du jour, with society’s finest coming here for ‘the season’ to bathe, drink, see, be seen, gossip and matchmake. Befitting its status, the city was given a stylish Georgian facelift, with father-and-son architects John Wood the Elder (1704–1754) and Younger (1728–1782) remodelling the city, using the local golden limestone. Between them they designed many splendid streets and edifices: Queen Square, the perfect Palladian ring of The Circus, the grand Assembly Rooms, the Royal Crescent’s curve of 30 classical townhouses. By the time Jane Austen moved to Bath in 1801, living here until 1806, it was the most coherent and majestic of cityscapes, even if its fashionability was beginning to wane.

  Austen herself wasn’t especially enamoured with Bath. She was a creature of the countryside and found the city’s superficiality and ostentation overbearing. But it provided rich creative pickings. An entire city obsessed with manners and class was a useful backdrop for her brand of quick-witted, acerbic social commentary. Two of her novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which were first published in one volume in 1818 shortly after Austen’s death, are partly set in the city. They offer not only a picture of Bath, but of English high society during the Regency era.

  Balls and parties were an integral part of fashionable life. Jane herself, as well as Northanger’s Catherine and Persuasion’s Anne Elliot, attended gatherings at Bath’s Assembly Rooms, opened in 1771, where four public rooms – the Octagon, Ball Room, Card Room and Tea Room – allowed for all sorts of socialising. The huge 18th-century crystal chandeliers, under which Austen’s envoys would have danced and whispered, still dazzle from the soaring ceilings; now the building also houses the Fashion Museum, where you can try on Georgian hats and dresses.