Jorge Luis Borges is the writer who turned a library into a metaphor for the universe, yet his own life ran through very real places in Buenos Aires: a poor Palermo childhood, a basement library job, and eighteen years as director of the National Library.
This route follows him from his birthplace barrio and a famous café to the two library buildings he knew, with one fictional stop: the Calle Garay house where "The Aleph" sees everything at once.
Macondo is not on any map, but its author grew up on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Gabriel García Márquez was raised in Aracataca by grandparents who treated the extraordinary as perfectly natural, and that deadpan voice became the novel.
The route runs from Riohacha, where the Buendías begin, through the marsh and sierra country around Macondo to the railway, the banana company and the massacre, and ends in Mexico City, where the book was written. Macondo itself is fictional, so its stops are real stand-ins.
Lazarillo de Tormes follows a hungry boy serving cruel masters across Spain: the stone bull on Salamanca's Roman bridge, the grapes of Almorox, revenge at Escalona, a squire's empty house in Toledo. It is told in his own sly voice.
This route follows his early years: the stone bull, the grapes at Almorox, the revenge at Escalona, the miser priest at Maqueda and the squire's empty house in Toledo. Most places are named only as towns, so most pins are approximate.
Spain's oldest surviving epic poem follows Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid, from a humiliating exile out of Castile to the conquest of Valencia, and then to a trial in Toledo after his sons-in-law abandon his daughters.
The route runs from Vivar and Burgos through Cardeña and Valencia to Corpes and Toledo. The poem and the historical Cid differ in many details, and the site of Corpes is disputed.
The legend of Kitezh, the Russian Atlantis, says the city sank into Lake Svetloyar rather than fall to the Mongols. The route also visits Gorodets on the Volga, said to be Little Kitezh, and Kideksha near Suzdal, the name's folk origin. On calm days, they say, its bells can still be heard.
The route follows the story from the folk etymology of the name, through the town said to be Little Kitezh and the forests of the Kerzhenets, to the lake itself and the St Petersburg stage where the opera first sounded. Kitezh is a legend: the places are traditional identifications, not proof.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games send scavengers called stalkers through the Zone, a radioactive wasteland built from the real Chernobyl exclusion zone. The developers copied bridges, railways and buildings from photographs and visits, then bent the geography for gameplay.
This route goes from the edge of the Zone to the reactor, setting each game location beside its real counterpart. The real zone is restricted and trespassers are prosecuted, so this is a map to read, not a trip to plan.
Twenty years after a nuclear war, the survivors of Moscow live in the Metro, and a young man named Artyom must carry a warning from his home station across the whole network. The novel and the game built on it use real station names, so you can follow Artyom's trip on an ordinary city map.
The route runs from VDNKh in the north through Kitay-gorod, Paveletskaya and Kievskaya to the Ostankino Tower. The book and the game differ in places; where they do, the text says so. The library stop is a likely match, not a named place.
The novel was banned in the Soviet Union, so David Lean could not shoot his epic there. Instead he built Moscow in a field outside Madrid, turned the pine woods of Soria into the Urals and sent a second crew to the snows of Finland.
The route follows the story in order, from the dam of the frame story to the ice palace at Varykino, and shows where each scene was really filmed. Most pins mark general areas, not exact camera spots.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Zone, a fenced-off wilderness where a guide takes a writer and a professor toward a Room said to grant wishes, was largely shot around Tallinn, Estonia, among abandoned hydropower plants, a power station and an old chemical works.
This route follows the film's story through those places: the factory and power plant seen before the Zone, the gate, the river plants where the journey was shot, a highway bridge and the power station that smokes behind the final homecoming. Exact spots are often unrecorded, so most pins are approximate.
Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin's Soviet Holmes and Watson were made when filming abroad was impossible, so a Riga lane became Baker Street, a Petersburg station became Victoria and a waterfall in Abkhazia became the Reichenbach Falls.
The route follows the Lenfilm television films of 1979 to 1986 from the Riga street with the screen 221b to Peterhof, Saint Petersburg, the Gega Waterfall and Tallinn.
Gaidai's 1968 comedy The Diamond Arm films Istanbul in Baku's Icheri Sheher and Shirvanshahs' Palace, and its home town in Sochi and Adler. One watermelon rind, one "Damn it!", and the economist wears a smugglers' plaster cast full of jewels.
The route follows the film across its filming sites: the old streets and palace of Baku that play Istanbul, then the southern coast and a Moscow wasteland that play the heroes' home town. Only the Baku and Kiselyov Rock stops are pinned to a specific place; the rest are approximate.
Danila Bagrov comes home from the First Chechen War, goes to look for his older brother in Saint Petersburg and ends up a hitman by accident. In the sequel he is in Moscow and then Chicago, chasing the men who threaten a dead friend's twin brother.
The route follows Danila through Vitebsky Station, the Adamini House, a market and a cemetery in Petersburg, then Moscow and the American stops. Several stops are filming locations standing in for the story's places.
Walking the Streets of Moscow was shot across Moscow itself: Chistoprudny Boulevard, Krivoarbatsky Lane, GUM and Red Square, Gorky Park. Georgiy Daneliya's 1964 comedy follows one day in the lives of Kolya, a night-shift metro builder who cannot stop helping people, and Volodya, a writer just arrived from Siberia.
The route follows the film in order through seven places, from Chistoprudny Boulevard to Universitet station. Some scenes were shot in a different street from the one the story names, and the text says where.
On New Year's Eve a Moscow surgeon goes to the bathhouse with his friends, wakes up in Leningrad and walks into a flat that looks exactly like his own. The Soviet classic that Russia still watches every 31 December starts as a joke about identical buildings and ends as a love story.
The route follows Zhenya's night from his new flat and the banya to the Leningrad airport, the identical building, and the station, then back to Moscow. The caveat: both the "Leningrad" and the "Moscow" houses were shot in the same Moscow district, and the story's street had been renamed years before.
On 19 October 1812 the Grande Armée walked out of Moscow after five weeks of occupation. Six weeks later, what was left of it scrambled across the Berezina on two hastily built bridges. In between lay a blocked road, a burning town, a depleted depot, a blizzard and a river full of ice.
The route follows six places on that march, from the mined Kremlin through Maloyaroslavets, Vyazma, Smolensk and Krasny to the crossing at Studienka. Most pins mark a town or village, not a battlefield.
In January 1959 a group of ten experienced hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute set out on a ski trek into the northern Urals. Nine never came back: they cut their way out of their tent on a mountain slope one February night and died in the snow, and the cause is still discussed.
This route follows the group from the institute in Sverdlovsk by train and lorry to the last village, then up to the mountain and the pass now named after them, and ends with the survivor's memorial. It sticks to the record; the explanations are left to the reader. The exact tent site is approximate.
In 1961 Yuri Gagarin trained at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield, launched from Baikonur and came down near Engels. Less than two hours in space made the pilot a worldwide celebrity; his capsule is kept in a museum in Korolev City.
This route follows Yuri Gagarin from the training ground at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield to the launch pad at Baikonur, the field in the Saratov region where he came down, the Kremlin ceremony and the museum that keeps his capsule. The museum pin marks the Energia company site rather than the museum itself.
In 1466 or 1468 a merchant from Tver set out down the Volga to trade around the Caspian Sea. He was robbed on the way, crossed Persia, sailed from Hormuz to India and wrote down what he saw in A Journey Beyond the Three Seas.
This route follows him from Tver through Derbent, Hormuz and the coast of India to Bidar, and home to Caffa on the Black Sea. Dates are debated, and most stops are marked by area only because his notes name towns rather than buildings.
Tolstoy's Last Journey follows the flight of November 1910: at 82 he left Yasnaya Polyana in secret, passed through Optina Monastery and Shamordino Convent, and died at Astapovo station ten days later.
It covers six stops in the Tula, Kaluga and Lipetsk regions. Three stops are approximate: two railway stations pinned by map search, and Astapovo, pinned on its village.
In the spring of 1890 the playwright and doctor Anton Chekhov left Moscow, crossed Siberia and sailed to Sakhalin, a convict island north of Japan, to count its inhabitants one by one. He kept the plan secret until January, travelled 82 days across Siberia, and came home months later by sea.
The route follows his way from his Moscow house through Tomsk, Irkutsk and the Amur to the penal posts of Sakhalin and back to Vladivostok. Several pins mark whole towns, because Chekhov's lodgings are not recorded.
Pushkin's only completed novel follows Pyotr Grinev, a young officer sent to a log-fenced fortress on the Orenburg steppe, where he falls in love with the captain's daughter Masha and crosses paths with Pugachev, the rebel who claims to be Emperor Peter III. The book is a romanticized account of Pugachev's Rebellion of 1773-1774, not a record of it.
The route follows the novel from besieged Orenburg through the Belogorsk fortress, Berda, Kazan, Tsarskoye Selo and Moscow. Each stop separates what Pushkin invented from what history records; Belogorsk exists only on the page, with the real fortress of Tatishchevo as its stand-in.
In Gogol's Petersburg nothing is what it seems: the grandest street is a liar, a nose walks about in a state councillor's uniform, and a dead clerk tears coats off passers-by. Three of his stories share one city, and most of their stops can still be walked.
The route runs along Nevsky Prospekt and its neighbouring streets, from the painter's and the lieutenant's chases in Nevsky Prospekt, through The Nose's barber, cathedral, bridge, garden and shop, to the Kalinkin Bridge where the ghost of The Overcoat is said to prowl. A few stops are approximate, since Gogol seldom gives house numbers.
Grigory Pechorin, bored and brilliant, drifts through the Caucasus leaving damage behind him: a smuggler's hut at Taman, the spa season at Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, and a duel on a cliff ledge. Lermontov wrote five linked tales and was himself killed in a duel at Pyatigorsk in 1841.
The route follows the book's order, from a snowy pass and a seaport to the spring, the harp pavilion and the rock gate where Pechorin plays his games, ending on Mashuk where the author met his own fate. Some pins mark real places that only stand in for the novel's.
The Twelve Chairs crosses the Soviet Union: Moscow's Prague restaurant, the Proval cave in Pyatigorsk, the Darial Gorge and Yalta. A former nobleman and a con man chase twelve dining chairs; Syzran and Kozmodemyansk are candidate models for the invented Stargorod and Vasyuki.
The route marks six stops; Stargorod and Vasyuki are invented, so their pins are only candidate stand-ins.
