JOURNEY INTO THE MINDS EYE

JOURNEY INTO THE MIND'S EYE, Fragments Of An Autobiography
"I must have been about four years old when Russia took hold of me with giant hands" writes Lesley Blanch. When a friend of her parents whom she simply calls The Traveller blew into her nursery, muffled in heavy furs and full of the fairytales of Russia, with gifts of Fabergé eggs and icons, he instilled in her a lifelong passion. She was twenty when he swept out of her life, leaving her in the grip of a tremendous obsession. The search to recapture her great love, and the Russia he had planted within her, takes her to dingy apartments reeking of cabbage soup and piroshkis on the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s; to Siberia and beyond — journeying deep into the romantic terrain of the mind's eye. Part travel book, part love story, Lesley Blanch's memoir is pure intoxication.