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British writer Peter Ackroyd declared Wednesday that he rated Russian 19th-century authors such as Pushkin and Gogol above even Shakespeare as he set out on a "literary pilgrimage" in western Russia.
"I'm hoping to try and capture or recognise or glimpse some aspect of the Russian soil and the Russian character," Ackroyd said ahead of a visit to literary sites associated with his heroes, about which he will write for the Russian edition of Esquire magazine.
"It's a pilgrimage towards the writers who I believe to be the greatest in the world bar none -- not even bar Shakespeare or Goethe," Ackroyd told journalists.
Explaining his passion for the Russian literary greats Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Pushkin and Tolstoy, Ackroyd said: "I find them more alert, more enterprising, more exciting. The one exception might be Dickens".
On his tour Ackroyd was to visit Staraya Russa, where Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov", as well as the family estate of Alexander Pushkin at Mikhailovskoye.
Ackroyd, who is known for his biographies of English literary giants William Blake, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare, as well as a string of novels, said he would take a similar approach to his journey in Russia, an approach he described as being in the "cockney visionary tradition" of Blake and Dickens.
"I'm sure there are highly characteristic locations and people who bear the marks of a long inheritance and I want to find them. I want to find the remnants, the echoes of the past in the lineaments of the present," he said.
The author has just completed a novel and a study of the River Thames and is starting a book on Venice.
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AFPEntertainment-Russia-Britain-literature-history-people
AFP 161047 GMT 08 06
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