Siberian Jesus incarnation and Taiga hermit

In "My Russian Adventure", journalist Jens Mühling tells how he travelled to a hermit in the taiga. And the strange stories he encounters along the way. Mühling will be reading in the university library hall on 20 November. We spoke to him in advance.

QUESTION: "Mein russisches Abenteuter" begins with Yuri, a Russian TV producer in Berlin who produces fictional stories from Russia for German media - because the true stories are so unbelievable that nobody would believe them, according to Yuri. Was your encounter with Yuri a kind of initial spark for you to get involved with Russia?

MÜHLING: Yes, because before that I had had little to do with Russia, and with Yuri I suddenly developed this idea of a country where the true stories are more incredible than the made-up ones. I really wanted to see this for myself, and when I travelled to Russia for the first time shortly after meeting Yuri to get to know the country, I had the impression that there really was something to Yuri's words. On one of my first evenings in Moscow, I got into a fight between an Orthodox monk and his secret lover. I decided to come back at all costs.

QUESTION: Whether the mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, who believes that 1000 years of Russian history have been invented and tries to prove this with complex graphics and calculations. Or Vissarion, a former traffic policeman who has a revival experience during the perestroika era, believes himself to be the Siberian incarnation of Jesus and from then on gathers 5,000 disciples around him: the stories of the people in your book are also stories of faith. Is this an experience you have often had?

MÜHLING: You could go on and on: I met fanatical orthodox Christians on my journey, old-faith hermits, esoterics, Slavic neo-pagans - and ardent communists, which is also a kind of religion. This focus of my book has to do with the fact that since the collapse of Soviet ideology, a very conspicuous search for new life content has begun in Russia, for answers to the question of who Russians actually are now that they are no longer Soviet people.

QUESTION: And people are rummaging through the Russian past to find answers?

MÜHLING: Yes, the search is mostly backward-looking. Many are looking for remnants of the pre-revolutionary era from which they can construct a new identity. Religious ideas are often revived - partly because they were so strictly taboo in the Soviet era, but also because Russia always had a strong tendency towards the metaphysical, which also strongly characterised Soviet communism.

QUESTION: You worked for the Moscow German newspaper from 2003 to 2005, learnt the language and spent a whole year on the road for the book, mainly in the provinces. Is that where the real stories are hidden?

MÜHLING: You can also find the most amazing stories in Moscow and St Petersburg, but you are perhaps more likely to find them in the provinces if you are looking for "Russian" Russia. Looking back on my time at the Moscow-based German newspaper, I would say that in my journalistic work at the time, I mostly measured Russia against what I knew from the West. I intuitively looked for similarities, I saw the differences as something temporary, as deficits that the country would eventually overcome. This is exactly the impression many foreigners get in Moscow: the city is somehow Western and somehow not, and as a foreigner you intuitively see its Western aspects as the future, as the direction of travel.

QUESTION: A deceptive view of things?

MÜHLING: I realised that when I got to know Russia a little better. When I was researching my book, I was no longer so much interested in similarities, but above all in the differences, in Russia's otherness; I was looking for people whose world of thought was foreign to me. And you're more likely to find them in the provinces than in Moscow.

QUESTION: The main destination of your journey is a hermit who has lived in the taiga since birth. And who only learns in adulthood that there is a civilisation beyond her forest. That sounds like one of those stories that Yuri thinks nobody would believe. How did you come up with this topic?

MÜHLING: I first came across the name Agafja Lykowa in a Russian newspaper - it talked about a family of hermits who had fled from the Bolsheviks into the taiga before the Second World War and who were only rediscovered by chance 40 years later. The newspaper clipping I read said that in the meantime only the youngest daughter was left, who was still living in the taiga, but nobody really knew whether she was still alive.

QUESTION: What exactly fascinated you about it?

MÜHLING: On the one hand, the obvious uniqueness and, on the other, because the story spans a wide arc through Russia's past, it's all connected to it, so to speak: the Christianisation of the Slavs in the 9th century, the great church schism in the 17th century, which triggered the eternal dispute between western-oriented reformers and supporters of a Russian special path, and finally the revolution. All of these events were necessary to drive the Lykov family into the taiga - and so the search for Agafja Lykowa became a journey through Russian history for me.

QUESTION: Actually tracking down the hermit turns out to be difficult. The first attempt goes badly wrong ...

MÜHLING: I came across a boat driver who got drunk on industrial alcohol at the wheel, only to suddenly realise halfway through the journey that he had packed plenty of booze but not enough petrol. A bitter setback that sounds much funnier in the retelling than it felt when I experienced it. After that, I needed a longer break in Siberia. On my second attempt, I had more luck - and at the end of a gruelling walk through the taiga, I actually stood in front of Agafja Lykowa, the hermit.

QUESTION: You accompany her for several days, empty the fish trap with her and feed the goats. And at some point you can also follow the hermit's stories, her life story - which reads like a very rare glimpse into another era.

MÜHLING: That's exactly what it was. For me, the most astonishing thing about Agafja is the way she mixes the biographical with the biblical in her storytelling. She talks about her father, and the next moment she is in the middle of an episode from the Gospel of John, without an outsider being able to recognise a noticeable transition. For Agafja, there is no clear boundary between her memories, her liturgical books and her tangible surroundings. Everything is inseparable from her world, everything is equally real. Immersing myself in this world of thoughts was the greatest adventure of my journey.