Travels In Siberia - Part III

“Because I am interested in ruins, I decided to drive over to the town site.” This is from the astonishing “Nicodemus” chapter (Chapter 9) of Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989), a work I hold dear, one of only three books I took with me in my pack when I headed North a few years ago. (The other two were Seamus Heaney’s Preoccupations and Zbigniew Herbert’s Barbarian in the Garden). I’m pleased to see that Frazier’s interest in ruins continues undiminished in Travels In Siberia. Among the highlights of Part III are his exploration of an abandoned church near his campsite on the Severnaya Dvina River (“One of the lower towers had a broken dome and a good-sized birch tree growing straight up through it”), a look at the vacant lot in Yekaterinburg where the house in which Nicholas II was murdered had been located (“It reminded me of an erasure done so determinedly that it had worn a hole through the page”), and, most memorably, a viewing of a section of the Sibirskii Trakt, which many thousands of exiles had walked in tsarist times (“Longing and melancholy seemed to have worked themselves into the very soil; the old road and the land around it seemed downcast, as if they’d had their feelings hurt by how much the people passing by did not want to be here”). I enjoyed these visits tremendously. Anyone interested in the role of the imagination in factual writing could profit from a study of Frazier’s contemplations of ruins. His imagination doesn’t so much press back against reality; it takes off from it. “In the ruts of the old Trakt,” he says, “I tried to picture its former magnitude.” Here’s what he pictured:

I imagined parties of prisoners tramping along it, chains jingling, and sleighs slipping by in winter, and imperial couriers on horseback bound for Peking, and troops of soldiers, and runaway serfs, and English travelers, and families of Gypsies, and hordes of tea wagons in clouds of dust.

That “hordes of tea wagons in clouds of dust” is very fine. I notice that the New Yorker version of this passage has a semicolon after “jingling.” I question the need for an extra long pause there; it seems to me that the comma in the book version is all that’s needed. It appears that most of the New Yorker text has made it into the book unchanged. But I did spot a couple of subtle amendments. For example, in the “Convicts Road” section of “Travels In Siberia – I” (The New Yorker, August 3, 2009), Frazier says, “I had seen some lonesome roads, but this one outdid them.” Whereas, in Part III of the book, he says, “I had seen some lonesome roads, but this one outdid them all” (emphasis added). In “The Vagon” section of “Travels In Siberia – II” (The New Yorker, August 10 & 17, 2009), Frazier says, “The guys who drive this long-distance shuttle tend to wear muscle shirts, shiny Adidaa sweatpants, and running shoes, and their short, pale haircuts stand up straight in a bristly Russian way.” In the book, “guys” is changed to “entrepreneurs.” The same section of the magazine piece contains this wonderful description of the view from a moving train: “At this speed I could see the trackside weeds, curved like shepherds’ crooks by the spiderwebs attached to them, the frost on the web strands glistening in the sun.” Interestingly, the book version of the foregoing passage deletes the comma after “weeds.” With regard to most changes (as I say, there aren’t many), I think the book version is slightly better.

One aspect of the magazine articles that I really like, which is not included in the book, is the map work by Laszlo Kubinyi. The maps are beautifully tinted and decorated. For example, in the upper left corner of the map illustrating “Travels In Siberia – I,” there’s a miniature of the white Renault step van that Frazier and his two guides traveled in. The tiny picture shows the van with its hood raised and two figures peering in at the engine. This is a witty reference to the frustrating mechanical troubles that plagued the van throughout the five and a half week trip. I take the liberty of reproducing this handsome map here.

Part III was a great source of reading pleasure. It contains the complete nine thousand mile journey. It’s endlessly quotable. I will conclude with a quotation of my favorite passage, a description of a scene glimpsed through the windshield of that temperamental van:

Vistas kept appearing until the eye hardly knew what to do with them – dark green tree lines converging at a distant yellow corner of the fields, and the lower trunks of a birch grove black as a bar code against a sunny meadow behind them, and the luminous yellows and greens of vegetables in baskets along the road, and grimy trucks with only their license numbers wiped clean, their black diesel smoke unraveling behind them across the sky.