Friday, September 16, 2011

Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia

I have now read and liked three of American writer Ian Frazier's books. On the Rez (2000) and Great Plains (2001) are about the American west, and both interweave history with accounts of his own travels and conversations. I just finished listening to his latest, Travels in Siberia (2010), read by Frazier himself. I enjoyed it very much.

In middle age, he says, Frazier found himself overtaken by fascination with Russia. He got to know Russians living in New York, read hundreds of books about Russia, began learning the language, and traveled to Russia a dozen times. He was especially fascinated with Siberia. His book follows the same basic strategy as his American titles, structured around his own adventures but also including much material on the history of Siberia and especially the accounts of previous Siberian travelers. I like Frazier's travel writing because of his historical interests and because of his marvelous sense of humor. He finds amusement everywhere, and not in a mean way but because he is always struck by the absurdity of the world. In modern Russia, absurdity is a constant companion, so Frazier's book is often hilarious. But it is much more than that. Frazier meditates on what makes a person fall in love with a place, on natural beauty, on environmental degradation, on friendship, and on the relationship between Siberia's present and its haunted past.

Frazier recounts four major Siberian trips: one to the Bering Straight region, one to Lake Baikal, a winter trip to Nova Sibirsk, and an epic crossing of Siberia's 6,000-mile expanse in the company of two Russian guides. That trip is the book's highlight. Siberia is one twelfth of all the land on earth, a dozen timezones across, a vastness that defies the imagination but contains only 30 million people. To cross it by car takes two months of hardships (mosquitoes, break downs, roads that just end) and wonder. I loved Frazier's account of this journey but was glad I hadn't gone along.

Siberia has of course been a place of punishment and exile since the 1600s. Frazier has read dozens of memoirs of Siberian exile, from the Old Believers of the early 1700s to the victims of Stalin. He visits places of exile and tells many stories of the exiled. He is especially fascinated by the Decembrists, a group of young, reformist army officers who staged a coup against the Tsar in 1825, hoping to introduce a constitutional monarchy. Many came from Russia's noblest families, so instead of execution they were punished with relatively lenient exiles to remote towns. In exile they made new lives and reflected on their hopes for Russia. Frazier admires them deeply, and he made me admire them, too.

The modern story of Siberia, though, is dominated by the crimes of Stalin. Stalin sent at last half a million soviet citizens to their deaths in Siberia, perhaps as many as 3 million. Siberia is full of roads, railroads, dams, mines, and even whole cities that were built by the slave labor of Stalin's victims. Frazier visits the ruins of abandoned camps, still nearly intact because of the cold, remembering the horrible narratives of survivors. He tells us, to take one example, that in the 1930s about half the gold mined in the world came from the Kolyma region of Russia, and that for every ton of gold extracted from the Kolyma mines, the lives of 700 to 1000 prisoners were lost.

For me Travels in Siberia was the perfect mix of amusement and serious thought, of distraction and information. Listening to it has turned the drive from my house to my fieldwork in Delaware into a real pleasure, and I recommend it to every curious person.

1 comment:

Bundle Brent said...

But did he mention his Siberian tic-tac-toe hustling? I recommend this little bit from radiolab: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2011/sep/06/three-row/