This book is about traveling overseas, real or fictional, for two centuries. The Traveler searches for the Other; the writer talks about himself. Double focus generates semantic games, revealed in parallel readings. The focus of this book moves from utopias to geopolitics, from nostalgia to espionage, from authorship to incest. Alexander Etkind's readings change the perception of the most famous texts of Western tradition, from Democracy in America to Pale Fire, and the most famous heroes of Russian history, from the Decembrists to Trotsky. Chapters of the book tell that Pushkin read from Tocqueville; how sexual experimentation in America encouraged Russian radicals; why the American ambassador entered Bulgakov's novel; how the philosopher from Leningrad influenced America's financial leader; how the plots of Nabokov and Pasternak were unpredictably intertwined. Analyzing his own method, A. Etkind characterizes it as a "new historicism": a combination of intellectual history, political theory and intertextual analysis in travel through texts, genres and eras.