A Vagabond in the Caucasus: With Some Notes of His Experiences Among the Russians

He arrives in Moscow shortly after the 1917 Revolution and is arrested on the spot by soldiers. This is just the beginning of his misadventures: robbed on a train, detained for trying to take photographs, constantly navigating the suspicion and chaos of post-revolutionary Russia. Yet Stephen Graham keeps walking, bag in hand, camera at his side, determined to reach the Caucasus. What follows is a wanderer’s portrait of a region suspended between Europe and Asia, where ancient traditions meet the tremors of a world remaking itself. Graham meets farmers, monks, soldiers, and bandits. He sleeps in village huts and shares bread with strangers who speak languages he doesn’t understand. His photographs capture what words alone cannot: the weathered faces of beer-house women, the blurred figure of a soldier on his beat, the fleeting textures of a world about to change forever. This is travel writing at its most alive, less a guidebook than a confession of irreducible curiosity.