She was a traveller rather than an explorer not interested in map-making

She was a traveller rather than an explorer, not interested in map-making, but rather in understanding the people among whom she found herself “I wanted to forget that we had inevitably to return home. I even lost the desire to return, and would have liked the journey to last for the rest of my life.”The Cruel Way (1947) recounts a journey from Geneva to India via Persia and Afghan-istan made in 1939 with a friend who was recovering from drug addiction. She spent much of the war in India visiting ashrams and gurus, way ahead of her time, and stayed for some time with Ramana Maharshi in southern India. He cured her of some of her restlessness and she came to the realisation that “the world with its countless aspects cannot give us the fundamental answer: only God can And God can be met nowhere but in ourselves. .”Her travels had always been a search rather than an escape, but after her time in India she achieved a greater serenity. I remember her coming into the Travel Bookshop in London as an old lady, sitting peacefully on the sofa but still exuding an air of curiosity. It was that, combined with a prodigious energy that made her into such a good traveller and an inspiration to women travellers of today.

Her aim was “to push the nose of my sailing boat into every creek and to point my skis down every possible gully of the mountain.”In 1949 Maillart became one of the first travellers to the newly opened Nepal and wrote about the people, who reminded her of her native Swiss, in Land of the Sherpas (1955). That was her last travel book but she continued to write occasionally and to lecture and accompany tours abroad.She retired to a chalet in Chandolin, one of the highest villages in the Swiss Alps, but went on taking tours to far-off places well into her eighties. In her old age she managed to achieve one of her ambitions by going to the South Pacific and aged 83, she went to Tibet on her last major expedition. Three years ago she went to Goa and spent her remaining years reading about India and Indian religions.Ella Maillart, traveller and writer: born Geneva, Switzerland 20 February 1903; died Chandolin, Switzerland 27 March 1997.. For quarter of a century Vladimir Soloukhin, a major contemporary Soviet writer from the 1960s to the 1990s, led a campaign to stop the destruction of an important part of the Russian national heritage – Russian Orthodox churches.

His “Letters from a Russian Museum” (1966), and “Black Panels” (1968) were spectacular protests in literary form and in their time created a sensation, making their author a national celebrity. But it had taken 20 years for his feelings about the subject to come to maturity. Vladimir Alexeevich Solouk-hin was born in Alepino, a village in Vladimir Oblast, in 1924, a few months after the death of Lenin. His father, Alexei Soloukhin, was a so-called Stolypin peasant and was one of millions of victims of Stalin’s bloody collectivisation campaign responsible for the destruction of rural Russia in the 1930s – 20 million died through artificial starvation.
Vladimir was a student at an engineering school in the town of Vladimir, near Moscow, from 1938 to 1942. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 he was incorporated as a soldier into an elite squad of guards responsible for the security of the Kremlin His ambitions, however, lay in literature.

By mid-1945 his peasant background and war record had helped him to get into print – poems and short stories of no literary value.In 1946 he was accepted as a student at the elite Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. From 1951 on he contributed regularly to the weekly magazine Ogonek, again mainly poems and short stories. Rozhdenie Zernograda (“Birth of Zernograd”, 1955) was a contribution to Khrush-chev’s propaganda campaign targeted at young people to go and work in the so-called tselinnye zemli – new, previously untouched lands in far away areas such as Kazakhstan, where sub-human conditions prevailed.In 1957 Soloukhin received official recognition for his Vladimirskie poselki (“Vladimir Villages”), in which he described his visits to villages in his native territory – poor, delapidated, and abandoned – in the beautiful literary style for which he became known. In his devotion to the government, the following year he took part in a vicious official campaign of harassment against Boris Pasternak; as he later wrote, he was to regret this action all his life. Nonetheless, this public loyalty secured his acceptance as a member of the Presidium of the Union of Writers of the Russian Federation.In 1964 he published an autobiographical novel, Mat’ Machekha (“Step- Mother”). During the Brezhnev years he travelled extensively around the country searching for and studying icons and churches.

It was at this time that he returned to his peasant roots, and his researches into Christianity, collectivisation and icons changed his heart and turned him against the politics of the Soviet Government.It was about these subjects that he wrote his two most important books, Pisma iz russkogo muzeya (“Letters from a Russian Museum”) and Chernye doski (“Black Panels”), about the systematic destruction by the Soviet Government of Russian icons and Russian Orthodox churches They made him a national celebrity. But the price was that he was attacked by the Soviet literary establishment. From this time he was completely unpublishable in Russia, but his London publisher, Vladimir Chuguev of Iskander Ltd (Iskander was the 19th-century writer Alexander Herzen’s pseudonym during his London exile) published Rodnaya Krasoca (“Native Beauty”, 1968) and later other books.Meanwhile in Russia his popularity grew. From the Seventies onwards he wrote for the important Novy Mir magazine and others and made public appearances in response to invitations from all over the country, speaking out on what was happening to Russian churches. The authorities realised it was too late to silence his views so had to tolerate him, and in 1979 he was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation.