What a great essay! I feel it's absolutely true that if you love literature, you want to visit Russia. Tolstoy, Akhmatova, and Nabokov all inspired me to study Russian, even though I started off with Latin in high school and Japanese in college. Then, of course, Tolstoy and Nabokov made it imperative for me to also study French. Thank you for mentioning Nabokov's translation of "Eugene Onegin." Too many people discount it without ever having read it.

Falen's translation of "Eugene Onegin" is much, much better than any other one I've seen, including Johnston's. It reads exactly like the original. Other than that (and the curious absence of Bulgakov - surely "The Master and Margarita" belongs among the Russian classics?), I quite enjoyed the essay.

During the Soviet era, literature was an occupation slightly less dangerous than coal mining, and its best output was done while Stalin was still consolidating his power in the late 1920s and 30s. Some of these works include Yevgeny Zamyatin's futuristic dystopian novel "We," Mikhail Bulgakov's surrealistic Moscow adventure "The Master and Margarita,"

Nice essay but I have a couple of corrections.

First, Zamyatin wrote "We" in 1920-21, not the late twenties. Even then, before Stalin had consolidated any power, it was considered too politically incorrect for publication.

Second, Bulgakov worked on "Master and Margarita" straight through the peak of the Stalinist repression. He was still dictating revisions on his deathbed in 1940.

And third, M&M is technically magic realism, not surrealism.

There are many places in Moscow one can visit that are mentioned in M&M. Indeed, I would suggest reading "Master and Margarita" to anyone who intends to visit Moscow, because reading it can really change the way you see the city and its history. For example, I'll never look out over the Sparrow Hills again without seeing a naked woman flying a broomstick and her maid following behind her, riding a flying pig.

The "sinister apartment" at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Apt. 50, where the Devil stayed in the novel, used to be an underground fan pilgrimage site and is now a museum.

It's about two blocks from the Mayakovsky metro station, so you have the added experience of seeing Mayakovsky Square, which is where the Soviet equivalent of the beatnik movement took place in the late fifties and early sixties.

In the nineties there was a fantastic Armenian bakery across the street but I don't know if it's still there now.

Natasha Randall's superb new translation of "We" was published recently by Modern Library.

1. Peredelkino, the writer's colony just outside the city, where Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak's house has been miraculously well preserved as a museum. They even keep up his potato garden in the front yard.

2. Novodevichy Cemetery, where Mayakovsky, Bulgakov and Gogol are buried. Also among the dead VIPs are Shostakovich, Scriabin, Stanlislavsky, and Khrushchev.

The grave monuments here are very ornate, often to the point of kitsch, and specific to the person buried. This tree-lined cemetery is a way cool place to spend a summer afternoon browsing Russian and Soviet history, culture and artistic sentiment towards the dead.

Or indeed, anything from after the Great Patriotic War?

When I traveled through there, it reminded me more of a Third World bus station than a modern airport. Only C terminal at Newark International even came close to PHL's unpleasantness.

For a hilarious slice of Soviet life and all its absurdities, read this novel. To really mine its astonishing depth of symbolism and miracles both, read it again and again and again, as I have over the last 27 years.

One might also mention Ivan Goncharov's classic, Oblomov, about a Russian aristocrat who can't get out of his bed (for about the first 100 pages or so), which is just out in a new translation, and whence we get the English word Oblomovism (or Oblomoffism) which Lenin made famous in many party speeches (describing the Tsarist state). But this is political reductionism. The novel and character are much more complex and...lovable.

Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago in the late fifties. He died in 1960. His grave is a short walk from his house in Peredelkino.

Then there's Solzhenitsyn, who is still alive, so they haven't had a chance to create a memorial yet.

Mayakovsky Square is the location most associated with influential dissident poets like Bella Akhmadulina and Natalia Gorbanevskaya from the early sixties.

Gorbanevskaya was put in a psychiatric hospital for her participation in a very brief demonstration on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968.

Pushkin Square is where physicist Andre Sakharov and his dissident crew used to hold their also very brief demonstrations back in the 1970s, before he was put on ice in Gorky because the government believed he MIGHT organize a protest movement against their planned invasion of Afghanistan.

AND THEN if you want to have the ultimate 1970s Soviet literary experience in Moscow, try this:

Get a copy of "Moscow to the End of the Line" by Venedikt Erofeev, and follow poor Venichka's journey on the train, trying to match him drink for drink and hallucination for halluicination at every stop.

Another important landmark for literary Moscow after WWII would be the courthouse in central Moscow where Andre Sinyavsky and Yulie Daniel were put on trial for having their science fiction short stories published in a Polish literary journal that was circulated in Paris.

They were convicted, of course, and sentenced to five to seven years in a labor camp.

Incidentally, the two writers ended up in Mordovian Camp No. 10, the same place where they sent that American college kid who was busted for weed where the police couldn't say in court whether they'd caught him with an ounce or a joint because they didn't have the evidence any more and didn't remember.

Mordovian Camp No. 10 is also where they sent Boris Pasternak's mistress after he died. She was sent there basically for her part in getting the novel published in Italy.

Speaking of camps, if you travel to Vladivostok, then you can see where poet Osip Mandelstam died, most likely of typhus, while awaiting shipment to a labor colony in 1938. His terrible crime was writing a sarcastic poem about Stalin.

And then there's Kolyma, the labor camp immortalized in "Tales of Kolyma" by Varlam Shalamov. Many of those stories take place after the war, when the surviving prisoners were trying to re-enter "normal" Soviet life.