1 1

Journey into the Mind's Eye

Journey into the Mind's Eye

Fragments of an Autobiography

by Lesley Blanch, introduction by Georgia de Chamberet

$18.95
$0.00 $18.95
Available as E-Book Biography & Memoir Literature in English
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble

July 2018 selection for the NYRB Classics Book Club.

“My book is not altogether autobiography, nor altogether travel or history either. You will just have to invent a new category,” Lesley Blanch wrote about Journey 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 and piroshki on the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s, and to Siberia and beyond.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681371931
Pages: 400
Publication Date:

Praise

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’s Journey isn’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…[Journey is an] incomparably eccentric exercise in autobiography.
—Philip Ziegler, The Spectator

Everything about [Blanch] was abundant…She reminded you irresistibly of a gilded cupid, knowing neither vice nor virtue, but playful and loving, pouring out affection, humour, ideas, plans, stories, words from her rich cornucopia of personality.
—Anne Scott-James

This book is a jewel: the prose is immaculate, the delineation of the human heart is unclouded by sentiment.
—Kevin McGrath, Harvard Review

It is hard to classify her as a writer, unless as a scholarly romantic in a school of her own. Such is the depth of her research that other writers plunder her books shamelessly.
—Maureen Cleave, The Daily Telegraph

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it