One of my favourite pieces of non-fiction writing last year was Ian Frazier’s two-part series (only the abstracts are online for non-subscribers, but the linked piece gives a good précis) detailing a road trip he took across Siberia for The New Yorker*. I think everybody knows something about Siberia, at least in the abstract, but the details, the hugeness of the place, its strange geography and climate and history, were all new to me, and his first-person reporting was so vivid. Endlessly fascinating.
In the August 30 issue, Frazier returns to Siberia and visits an old Stalin-era prison camp, abandoned for 50 years but perfectly preserved by the cold. The story is haunting, overall, but one image stands out for me, one of the strangest and awfulest things I have ever read, a second-hand story that sort of perfectly crystallizes totalitarian terror, body horror, and something very ancient and weird. It is an image out of nightmares, almost Surrealist in its unexpected and horrifying juxtaposition. Frazier is talking about the extremes of hunger to which labour camp prisoners were driven: eating grass, motor grease. And then this:
In “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn tells of a work crew in Kolyma who were doing excavations when they came across a frozen-solid, perfectly preserved ancient stream, complete with prehistoric fish and salamanders. He said that a magazine of the Soviet Academy of Sciences reported that unfortunately these interesting specimens could not be studied, because the workers who unearthed them ate them on the spot. The magazine did not identify these workers as convict laborers, he said, though from that detail an astute reader would understand that they were.
* I know I talk about the NYer a lot here, sometimes I feel like I should start newyorkerreviewsreviews.tumblr.com
