I really enjoyed Ian Frazier’s series of articles on traveling through Siberia he wrote in the last couple of years for The New Yorker (only the abstracts seem to be online, but they’re worth looking for). I had hoped that the scope of the project meant there was a book in the works, and I was really happy to see that hope fulfilled when I noticed it on the racks at City Lights bookstore when I was in San Francisco last month. The book is a smorgasbord of Russian delights; stories and legends of Siberian history, beautiful details of Frazier’s several journeys across the cold, mosquito-ridden steppes, amusing scientific arcana. Here are some favourite passages.
On the sage Ch’ang ch’un’s journey to meet the Genghis Khan, after being summoned by the Mongol leader:
Ch’ang ch’un and his companions went across much of Asia. Maybe they were in southern Siberia part of the way, maybe not. The disciples kept a diary; here is a sample: “There was a stony river, more than fifty li long, the banks of which were about a hundred feet high. The water in the river was clear and cold, and bubbled like sonorous jade.” (One of the best river descriptions ever: bubbled like sonorous jade.) Crossing hot deserts in the cool of the night, they feared being charmed by goblins.
On holdouts against the reformation of the Orthodox church, with its minor changes to liturgy and ritual that included stuff like crossing oneself with three fingers instead of two:
In 1978, a team of Soviet geologists prospecting by helicopter for iron ore happened to see garden rows on a mountainside in remote taiga 150 miles from the nearest village. Upon investigation, they found a family of five Old Believers who had seen no other humans for forty years. As the geologists and the family talked, someone mentioned Nikon, the patriarch of Moscow who had instituted the reforms more than three hundred years before; at his name, the family spat and crossed themselves defiantly with two fingers.
On life under Tsarist exile:
Did any exiles or prisoners ever escape? A reader cannot help hoping that somehow some did. The historian S. V. Maksimov, in his Sibir’ i Katorga (Siberia and Prison), tells the story of a prisoner named Tumanov who, during a display of gymnastics before the regional governor, leaped from the top of a human pyramid and landed outside the prison palisades and got away. The escapee left behind part of his costume, a flax beard, which the prison commander was forced to wear until his dying day.
On the anarchist Bakunin’s own escape:
His old friend Herzen, who like many people had assumed Bakunin was permanently buried in Asiatic exile, was understandably surprised when the long-lost anarchist popped up in London. According to one account, “after a stormy, moist embrace [Bakunin’s] first words to Herzen were, ‘Can one get oysters here?’ ”
On tigers:
Back then tigers could be seen even on the outskirts of Vladivostok, where they sometimes made forays to kill and carry off dogs. Arsenyev describes how tigers in the forest sometimes bellowed like red deer to attract the deer during mating season; the tiger’s imitation betrayed itself only at the end of the bellow, when it trailed off into a purr.
