Sadko is a poor gusli player from Novgorod whose music wins the favour of the Sea Tsar, a golden fish and a fortune, until the sea demands payment. The story is best known abroad through Rimsky-Korsakov's opera.
The route follows the tale through the real geography it grew from: the merchants' market, Lake Ilmen, the Volkhov trade route, the river's source, and the Novgorod church of the man Sadko may be based on. None of the places is named exactly in the tale, so all pins are approximate.
Jules Verne sends a Czar's courier 3,400 miles across Russia: from a night fête in Moscow, through the Urals and the Tartar invasion, to besieged Irkutsk. Michael Strogoff carries one letter, a false name and a promise to the Czar.
The route follows the book from the Kremlin through Nizhny Novgorod, the Urals, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and Lake Baikal to Irkutsk. Verne names towns rather than buildings, so every pin is approximate.
Tolstoy's novel begins on a Moscow railway platform and ends on another. Between them Levin finds Kitty on a skating pond, Anna meets Vronsky off a train, and the lovers' story runs through snowstorms, a racecourse and a spa town before they flee to Italy.
The nine stops follow the novel's order across Russia, Germany and Italy. Tolstoy rarely names the buildings, so most pins mark the station or town the scene points to.
In 1927 a former nobleman and a charming con man chase twelve dining chairs, one of them hiding family jewels, across the Soviet Union. Ilf and Petrov's comic novel follows them from a sleepy provincial town through Moscow and the Volga to the spa of Pyatigorsk, the Caucasus road and the Crimean coast.
The route marks six stops; Stargorod and Vasyuki are invented, so their pins are only candidate stand-ins.
