Things I learned from Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia:
· When traveling in Siberia, don’t ever, ever use an airport bathroom, a rest stop bathroom, or any public latrine what-so-ever. Apparently Russians have as little regard for sanitary public bathrooms, as giraffes have for anthills. They’re simply beneath their notice.
· Likewise, don’t ever try to “rest” at a roadside rest stop. If you do, you’ll have to spend twenty minutes or more clearing away the garbage, plastic bottles, tin-cans, and miscellaneous pieces of old cars and mysterious wires just to create a square foot of space in which to sit.
· Don’t ever try to bathe in a stream or a river. That little piece of soap you take in won’t protect you from the slicks of industrial pollution or from the voracious leeches that have somehow managed to survive in the slicks of industrial pollution.
· Never try to buy a car, van, bus, truck, or a vehicle of any sort in Russia. All modes of conveyances in that gargantuan country are possessed of an ill will toward things that breathe. They will break down frequently and often and always in the most extreme weather when you’re furthest from help.
· Do travel under the flag or signage of the Ministry of Extraordinary Situations (a sort of Russian emergency rescue service). Labeling your vehicle with their emblems will protect you from hooligans, roustabouts and robbers. It may even get you night’s lodging in a place with a clean bathroom.
· Do, if you travel in the summer, bring along plenty of insect repellant, mosquito nets, and protective clothing. Much of Siberia presents itself as a swamp in the summer, and its gleeful denizens are, literally, billions of mosquitoes.
When I purchased Frazier’s Travels in Siberia, what I was expecting, dimly, in the back of my mind, was a book about reindeer herds, and impenetrable forests and snowy landscapes, with a few troikas and isolated villages thrown in. My mind, somehow, had made no accommodation for a modern Siberia with paved roads, high-rises, and department stores. What Frazier’s Travels in Siberia does for the reader is to bring this region, which comprises one-twelfth of the land on earth, sharply into the present.
Between 1993 and 2009, Frazier made five trips into Siberia. The result is a book laced with beauty, irony, and absurdity. Siberia, as Frazier depicts it, is a land of corruption, lawlessness, and endless, monotonous highways. But it is also a land of sudden epiphanies and glimpses into a vast, poetic paradigm. Frazier records these glimpses with insight and sensitivity. A river, he notices, amplifies the light into a city. In a hot, close room, he sees how the dancing of some Chukchi girls with a California lineman, causes “the entire room to come into focus—the floors of bare wood, the beige curtains with their decorative pattern of cattail plants, and the color of the silver radiators along the walls.” On a train ride, he remarks on the way the frost rims “the leaves of the birch trees,” and on the way the haystacks steam, with “each wisp of steam [leaning] eastward,” in the direction the train is going.
Like all good travel writers, Frazier integrates the history of the land with its present. Thus we learn how Dostoyevsky was flogged twice in a Siberian prison, “once for complaining about a ‘lump of filth’ in a fellow prisoner’s soup, and once for saving another prisoner from drowning after he had been ordered not to.” We learn how the long Trakt from western Russian to the gulags in Siberia is bordered by countless burial mounds, and we learn how George Kennan, the author of Tent Life in Siberia, discovered that “no darkness can match Russian darkness.”
Travels in Siberia is a large, complicated book. It embraces the region and its contradictions in much the same way that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass embraces America in the Civil War era. It is a mark of the author’s strength that he does not excerpt the unpalatable aspects of the land but, instead, trusts the reader to take them in as part of the whole of Siberia’s variegated immensity. It is also a mark of the author’s strength, that he does not offer, or try to lead the reader to an easy summary. There is a poem by Tyutchev that Frazier quotes in the book:
Russia cannot be understood by the mind,
She cannot be measured by ordinary measure;
She has her own particular stance—
All you can do is believe in her.
With wit, vision, and, sometimes, dogged determination, Frazier shows us Siberia’s stance.
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