Journey Into the Mind's Eye: Fragments of an Autobiography [Paperback]

A stunning tale set in England, Paris, and Moscow, chronicling Blanch's love for an older Russian man and the passionate obsession that takes her to Siberia and beyond.

“My book is not altogether autobiography, nor altogether travel or history either. You will just have to invent a new category,” Lesley Blanch wrote aboutJourney into the Mind’s Eye, a book that remains as singularly adventurous and intoxicating now as when it first came out in 1968.
 
Russia seized Lesley Blanch when she was still a child. A mysterious traveler—swathed in Siberian furs, bearing Fabergé eggs and icons as gifts along with Russian fairy tales and fairy tales of Russia—came to visit her parents and left her starry-eyed. Years later the same man returned to sweep her off her feet. Her love affair with the Traveller, as she calls him, transformed her life and fueled an abiding fascination with Russia and Russian culture, one that would lead her to dingy apartments reeking of cabbage soup andpiroshkion the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s, and to Siberia and beyond.“Blanch’s brilliance lies in her honesty about the subjectivity of her work. For her, travel is neither an act of discovery nor an explication….but the endless attempt to bridge that vast land of otherness with the worlds we’ve created in our own minds….If Blanch’sJourneyisn’t a traditional travelogue, it’s not because she can’t write about the Russia in front of her. It’s because that Russia…can never be the only one she sees.” —Tara Isabella Burton,The Paris Review
 
“She was incapable of writing boringly or badly…[Journeyis an] incomparably eccentric exercise in autobiography.” —Philip Ziegler,The Spectator
 
“Everything about [Blanch] was abundant…She reminded you irresistibly of a gillƒ5