Leskov is moreskov

 There's always been a more natural, organic way of making one's way across the complex terrains of literature, music and painting. It's by following up connections in the way that Classic FM once did, maybe still do, in a programme called (something like) If You Like That, Then Try This.

It works. Moving backwards from James Joyce many years ago, I found George Moore and Turgenev. Moving into other Japanese literature from Banana Yoshimoto and Murakami I found a whole new culture with Mishima, Tanizaki, Kawabata and all. Taking up every signpost offered by Thom Gunn I was directed to August Kleinzahler, Mina Loy, Dick Davis and other names well worth knowing as well as some more dubious.

But that's how it works and it works much better than a reading list provided by a course.

Shostakovich led eventually, the delay being entirely of my own making, to Nikloai Leskov, author of Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. One gets an idea of what he's on about after a few of his long short stories. The religion in some of them is off-putting until one realizes that his point is about the 'spiritual values' as espoused if not so often put into practice by Christianity, is how they are better demonstrated when coming from within rather than taken in more wholesale fashion from the church. As such, his sympathies are more with itinerants or vagrants who abolish material things in their way of life. And it comes as not much of a surprise that he found something of a soulmate in Tolstoy who moved from an interest in reform of Russian agricultural policy to his own line of Christian anarcho-pacifism. We know from years of student-like obsession with those things that called themselves 'left' that Russia was always the place to look for undigestible strung-together manifestos like krypto-syndicalist-anarcho-collectivism.

Perhaps my teenage years reading Solzhenitsyn in the 70's weren't such a waste of time after all. This week's walk was non-routine in a number of ways but included the serendipitous highlight of meeting the wife of a friend of a friend in more detail than I've met her before.

My friend and his friend only really want to talk about football but I've mentioned chess and the good lady, as it turns out, was introduced to Garry Kasparov at the age of 14 by her International Master chess-playing father. Who only then turns out to have been a crossword compiler. She herself, it turns out, is fluent in at least six languages but even then not quite the obvious ones.

I could still be there now exchanging names and notes and thoughts on chess players, Eastern Europe and languages but I came home and ordered The Bridge over the Drina by Ivo Andric instead.

One thing leads to another, but always in a direction of your own choosing. That's not free will, it's factors beyond your control pushing you in one direction rather than another, for better or worse. One was always going to do what one did. If Sartre could have made his philosophy more determinist rather than making it all our own fault by saddling us with the grim responsibilities of free will, he might have been on to something but 13 episodes of The Roads to Freedom will stay saved up to see about on those glorious long, dark winter days and nights.

There's a lot of territory to navigate out there. We each have to find our own way through. We are glad of any help we get. I can't help but want to fill in celebrity questionnaires whenever they appear. I've never done My Cultural Fix in The Times on Saturday and can sometimes find the choices of younger people almost things to pity them for but it was Melvyn Bragg this week, elderly by now and thus comparatively sensible. So let's have a go at the questions he answered (above).