A dreamer’s list of literary pilgrimages around the world
Now that I can fly everywhere, except China and, well, North Korea, maybe even the tiny island country Nauru in Micronesia and Turkmenistan, I dream of going to…
…Vyra, Russia
This is where my favorite writer Vladimir Nabokov spent what he would describe as the never-ending summers of his childhood and later as “the ever-present past,” along with his mother Elena’s home St. Petersburg, 80 kilometers up north. “Vyra and its surrounds,” according to Nabokov expert Brian Boyd, “are the places loved more than any on earth.”
…Long Island, New York
Of all the places in which F. Scott Fitzgerald lived, like Saint Paul, Minnesota and Montgomery, Alabama, Long Island held the most meaning for him. For one, it inspired his great American novel The Great Gatsby. And it was also where Fitzgerald started to write it. To this day, Long Island is a worthy location for a Fitzgerald pilgrimage. I dream of putting myself in his head while bobbing up and down on Manhasset Bay on a boat and reimagining how the old-money mansions on the Long Island coasts, such as Sands Point on Port Washington and Kinds Points on the Great Neck, helped Fitzgerald conjure up the iconic tale of his masterpiece.
*****
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again. —Vladimir Nabokov
*****
…Prague, The Czech Republic
I was in Prague early this year and I’ve been to Prague more times than I’ve ever been to any other city in the world, except maybe Hong Kong and Paris, but I’d like to go again to retrace the steps of Milan Kundera, who set his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being there. At the handover of the European Union presidency from France to the Czech Republic, I was invited by the French and Czech embassies to moderate a talk on Milan Kundera, a Czech dissident who self-exiled to Paris on account of oppression from and displeasure with the Communist regime. In the context of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, it was meant to dissect the idea that history repeated itself and that current events in Europe were exact mirror images of what happened in Kundera’s time.
…Edinburgh, Scotland
Edinburgh is not the first city in the world to be recognized as UNESCO City of Literature for nothing. It is home to Irvine Welsh, whose first novel Trainspotting went over my head, and J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter I could only stand to read until the fifth book The Order of the Phoenix. Oh and—“Auld Lang Syne”—Robert Burns! In a world where libraries (and even bookstores) have become a rarity, it’s good to know that Edinburgh still has 60 libraries per 100,000 people, one of highest concentrations of libraries in the modern world.
…Ischia Island, Italy
On this a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Truman Capote stayed in a cheap hotel, the Pensione di Lustro, for three months with neither electricity nor running water. Nevertheless, in a letter he wrote to his editor, he described it as “a strange and strangely enchanted place…populated mostly by winegrowers, goat herders, W.H. Auden, and the Mussolini family…” In this “encantada in the Mediterranean,” where he sought refuge after launching his 1948 novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, he and his lover Jack Dunphy were against their wishes joined by Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, whom they wished every minute would leave them alone to do their long walks through the grape arbors and their exploration of the hidden beaches, where “it was the greatest pleasure to sit there and let the waves rush up and over you.”