Travels In Siberia - Part V

In Part V, the concluding section of this great book, Frazier makes his fifth (and shortest) Siberian journey, a trip to Novosibirsk in the fall of 2009. Why Novosibirsk? Frazier says, “I had wanted someplace cold, dark, remote, and hibernating. Novosibirsk at five thirty on a November morning seemed to be all of those.” He describes coming out of the airport and smelling the air: “My lungs filled with a familiar, delicious Siberian combination of second-hand smoke and bitter-cold air. One basic purpose had been accomplished. I had breathed the air.”

During his first few days in Novosibirsk, he walks the city, visiting the Novosibirsk Regional Museum, the Novosibirsk State Art Museum, the Pobeda (Victory) Theatre, the Museum of Siberian Communications (displaying, among other interesting things, a “1950s TV that many older Russians remember because it had a tiny screen over which was superimposed a large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water”) and a giant shopping mall called the Mega-Ikea (“The only part of the mall I really liked was right at the door, in the rush of heated air that pushed back against the exterior cold”).

He takes the bus to Akademgorodok to meet Ivan Logoshenko, a friend of his brother-in-law. He gets off the bus in Akademgorodok and, while waiting for Logoshenko to come pick him up, observes a group of boys horsing around. His description of this scene is one of the best passages in a book brimful with great writing:

The boys continued to play all around me, oblivious, like fish around a scuba diver. One kid climbed partway up a nearby fir and began to shake snow down on his companions. This got a laugh. Then a boy who was hopping here and there doing karate kicks happened to kick an aluminum light pole. Atop the light pole was a shade like a broad, flat hat, carrying a tall accumulation of snow. The kick sent some snow down on another kid’s head. Great hilarity. All the kids then began karate kicking the light pole, which responded with satisfying dull bongs and cascade after cascade of snow. Meanwhile, several mothers pulled up in their cars and were chatting with one another, occasionally interrupting themselves to tell the boys to quit kicking the light pole. The boys only kicked more, and finally one of the boys, with high exuberance, began singing “Jingle Bells,” in English, in time to his kicks. Snow tumbling off the light pole in showers, “Jingle Bells,” bong, bong, bong, great laughter. He knew the words and sang them perfectly, without accent.

How fine that “Snow tumbling off the light pole in showers, ‘Jingle Bells,’ bong, bong, bong, great laughter” is! Frazier works his magic, strings these words together, and – presto! – a slice of Novosibirsk life springs into being.

Frazier ends his book on a humble note. Even though he’s shown us a huge, rich chunk of Siberia, its people and its history, he says, “What I’d seen of Siberia was only a tiny part.” He then proceeds to identify some of the things he didn’t see: bears, hydropower dams, reindeer herds, forest fires, climate scientists, a drunken forest (“a forest in which the thawing of the supporting permafrost causes the trees to lean every which way”), and so on. It’s quite a list and an effective way of emphasizing Siberia’s hard-to-comprehend complexity and vastness.

In “Acknowledgments” at the back of the book, Frazier says of Mike Peed, of The New Yorker’s fact-checking department, that he “pursued factual accuracy with rigor while never neglecting to listen for the poetical – a rare skill.” It seems to me that these words could be used to describe Frazier’s work, as well.

I think Travels In Siberia is a masterpiece. I can easily imagine someone fifty or a hundred years from now reading it and being so inspired that he or she tries to follow in Frazier’s footsteps, retracing his routes, searching for the places that he visited (e.g., Severobaikalsk’s amazing winter garden, with its “ficuses, banana plants, wild grapevines, cacti, pineapple plants, and lemon trees growing this way and that in the bath of the heat”), just as Frazier himself was inspired by George Kennan’s Tent Life in Siberia, and tried to find the pillar – “this grief-consecrated pillar,” as Kennan described it - that marked the spot where exiles walking the Trakt officially crossed into Siberia.