Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

I was becoming numb to scenery. My stock of landscape adjectives was running low. On the road paralleling the Ingoda, the panoramas just kept  coming at us as if they were being brought to the windshield by a conveyor belt somebody had forgotten to turn off. The road was gravel and dusty, the sky blank and bright. From it a hawk flared suddenly right in front of us, its belly feathers white, and then was gone. In every direction the land rolled on--unfenced, untenanted, unvaried, still apparently unused. The idea of "scenery" implies a margin, a frame. What we were seeing had neither, and I couldn't exactly situate it in my mind.

Siberia is a big place. It contains almost 8% of the earth's land. Everyone knows two things about it: it's cold, and it's remote. That remoteness has a special importance: "Siberia" is the place in the restaurant, or classroom, that is farthest from the action, or perhaps closest to the bathroom. It's where the Tsars, and later, the Soviets, sent exiles. It's where no one wants to be. And yet despite that--or perhaps because of it--it has a certain allure. It is untouched, unknowable, and vast. It's these qualities that attract travel writer Ian Frazier, whose book Travels in Siberia covers a half dozen excursions into the Russian outback, some large and some small. On these excursions, Frazier sees firsthand the qualities that make Siberia so daunting, but also so attractive.

Frazier's dalliance with Siberia begins in western Russia, Moscow and St. Petersburg, where Frazier becomes enamored with Russia, and even begins to take courses in the nation's difficult language between excursions. It's from St. Petersburg, the "Window to the West," where he first begins to think about crossing into Siberia, turning his back on Europe and looking the other direction. His first trips to Siberia, however, are actually from the other direction: he enters western Russia from Alaska, hopping over to coastal outpost towns like Providenskaya, and even stopping to look at Russia from land on the tiny island of Little Diomede, a few short miles from Russia's Big Diomede. But it's not until he decides that he must cross Siberia by car that the journey really begins.

The crossing of the Siberian road, or Trakt, is the heart of the book: a seven-week journey over rough roads and difficult conditions. Frazier is ferried by a pair of guides, Sergei and Volodya, who are by turns ingenious and careless, affable and irascible, and as you might expect of strangers thrust together under such stress for nearly two months without ceasing, they begin to hate each other. The van, provided by Sergei, is a piece of junk that breaks down every couple of days, but the guide manages to hold it together, quite literally with wire and tape. They are bedeviled by thick clouds of mosquitoes, and everywhere in Russia seems to be littered with trash. But among the rewards are Siberia's beautiful yet remote cities, like Tobolsk and Irkutsk, and the wonder of Lake Baikal.

One of the nice things about Travels in Siberia is that it's a history book as well: Frazier devotes long sections to the conquest of the Mongols and the Golden Horde, to Russian exploration of the Far East, and to the fate of the unlucky Decembrists, a group of dashing sophisticates who, if they were not put to death, were exiled to Siberia after being foiled in their attempts to assassinate the Tsar. These sections elevate the book above a mere travelogue, and allow us to see, as Frazier does, history unfolding along the Trakt, memorialized in small dusty museums and grand statues all out of proportion with the towns they gaze down on. Siberia, as Frazier sees it, is beautiful and ugly, a testament to human daring and human cruelty. Sergei bristles at Frazier's constant desire to hunt down Soviet-era prisons, and a tense photo stop at an operating prison makes it clear that such places have not completely disappeared. The prisons, and the many bribes needed for safe passage, make Siberia out to be a place of danger. In an unexpected, and ironic, twist, Frazier and his guides arrive at their final stop in Vladivostok on September 11, 2001--real danger, it seems, having struck at home.

A few years later, Frazier makes a final journey to Siberia because he wants to see it in winter. In this final section of the book he visits the Siberian city of Yakutsk, the only major city in the world built on permafrost, and the coldest. He drives on the ice the entire length of frozen Lake Baikal; he visits a traditional village of Even natives. (How many Americans understand that Russia, like North America, has its own indigenous groups? Or that, like the ones here, they have managed to establish long communities in conditions most of us would find absurd?) Frazier feels he hasn't really seen Siberia until he's seen it in the cold, and it's hard not to agree: this final trip, which trades mosquitoes and trash for snow and sable martens, has the bulk of the book's charm.

I enjoyed Frazier's style, which is knowledgeable but loose. He seemed of a type, to me, with Paul Theroux, both aging white guys who come off a little befuddled and out of place on their grand excursions, but not so much that you find yourself wondering, Who let this doofus travel the world and not me? I could do without the constant rib-jabs about how beautiful Siberia's women are, but the contentious relationship between Frazier and his guides provide a humor that makes the book feel human and--especially important, for a book about such a cold place--warm.

Zuleikha by Yuzel Gakhina

Sometimes it seems she is already dead. The people around her are emaciated, pale, and spend entire days whispering and quietly weeping: so who are they if not the dead? This place--frigid and crowded, the stone walls wet from damp, deep under the ground, without a single ray of sun--what is it if not a burial vault? Only when Zuleikha makes her way to the latrine, a large echoing tin bucket in the corner of the  cell, and feels her cheeks warm with shame is she convinced that, no, she is still alive. The dead do not know shame.

Zuleikha lives with her husband Murtaza and mother-in-law--a domineering woman she thinks of to herself as the Vampire Hag--on a small farm in Tataria, in the south central Soviet Union. She is a devout woman, dedicated to the service of her husband, whom she believes Allah has placed over her, but sometimes she sneaks an offering of candy to the local spirits, to convince them to protect the graves of her daughters, all three of whom died in infancy. Murtaza and the Vampire Hag make her life a hell, but Zuleikha does not know there are darker days to come: when Murtaza is killed by a Red Army officer--because he is a kulak, or peasant landholder, who refuses the collectivization of his farm--Zuleikha, pregnant again, is placed on a train to Siberia, where she will be dekulakized. That is, interned in a distant gulag.

Zuleikha has the scope of a grand historical novel: its subject is not just Zuleikha, whose meekness will be molded into assertiveness and self-determination by the harsh life of the gulag, but the gulag itself, which is a conglomeration of other kulaks and political prisoners from Leningrad, all of whom must come together to form a community in Siberia. The dissident painter, the agronomist, the denounced doctor, each of these takes their role in the gulag, which grows from a clearing in the forest--there aren't even any buildings when they first are dropped off and forced to build shelter to survive the coming winter--to a bustling village in its own right. This happens under the aegis of Ignatov, the officer who killed Zuleikha's husband, and who himself experiences a kind of exile, flung by his superiors to the corner of the country, and who quickly falls in love with the widow of the man he's killed.

Zuleikha has a funny historical perspective on the gulag. On one level, it's clearly a condemnation of the haphazard and zealous way that collectivization and the gulag system tossed thousands into suffering and death, but it's possible to see the ultimate success of the outpost, which becomes a town named Semruk, as a vindication of these systems also: hasn't it turned these people into productive citizens after all? Zuleikha struggles, I think, with the passing of time; seven years pass by in an instant, but when its pace slows it's full of wonderful moments. I liked, for instance, how Murtaza gives Zuleikha a poisoned lump of sugar to feed their livestock if he's taken; the lump sits in her pocket during the long godforsaken train ride like a ticket out of pain. But at the last minute, during a disastrous river crossing, the sugar melts away, showing symbolically that Zuleikha has only one option: to move forward.

Last summer I joined a website called Postcrossing that facilitates the sending of postcards to strangers around the world. I like to ask my would-be pen pals to recommend a book from their country; Zuleikha is the first of these suggestions I've been able to read. I can see why my Russian pen pal was so enamored with it--I don't know if the book is super-popular in Russia, but the fact that it has an English translation is probably a clue--it's the kind of sweeping historical tale that we seem to have mostly forgotten how to write these days. It reminded me of, perhaps, Doctor Zhivago with a little more mass appeal--which is pretty strong praise, I think.