3 More for the Road: Ian Frazier's "Travels in Siberia"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favourite travel books – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan's Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Travels in Siberia.

The travels described in this great book would not likely be possible today due to the Ukraine war. Just recently, the U.S. State Department issued an advisory: “Russia – Do Not Travel.” Frazier lucked out. His infatuation with Russia occurred at a rare moment in history, between the fall of the Soviet Union (1991) and Putin’s annexation of Crimea (2014), when American relations with Russia weren’t so bad. His book is a window on that particular time and place – a window that is now shuttered, possibly for a long, long time. Is that why I decided to reread it? To visit Russia when it isn’t at war? To experience Russia-love, not Russia-hate? No, not really. I reread it because I wanted to once again experience the pleasure of its prose. It’s a sublimely written narrative – one of the most engaging, satisfying, enjoyable works of literature I’ve ever read.

The book is divided into five Parts:

Part I – Tells about Frazier’s first trip to Russia, in late July, 1993, when he visited Moscow, and then went to Omsk and Lake Baikal, in Siberia. This Part is memorable for, among other things, his description of the men’s room at the Omsk airport:

The men’s room at the Omsk airport was unbelievably disgusting. Stepping through the door, or even near the door, was like receiving a blow to the face from the flat of the hand. No surface inside the men’s room, including the ceiling, was clean. There were troughs and stools, but no partitions, stalls, or doors. Everything done was done in full view. The floor was strewn with filth of a wide and eye-catching variety. At the urinal raised cement footprints offered the possibility of keeping your feet out of the flooding mire, but as the footprints themselves were hardly filth-free, the intention failed. Certain of this place’s images that I won’t describe remain inexpungible from my mind. I got out of there as fast as was practical and reeled away into the terminal’s dim lobby.

Part I also tells about several trips Frazier took to Anchorage and Nome, culminating in a 1999 flight from Nome to the city of Provideniya, in Chukotka, Siberia. From there he went by truck, and then boat, to a Chukchi fish camp at the mouth of the Hot Springs River. This is one of my favorite parts of the book. Frazier and his guide, Vladimir Bychkov, hiked to an ancient burial site marked by a line of large bowhead whale skulls:

A distance away in the knee-high grasses, two whale jawbones of great length had been set upright; they curved toward each other like parentheses, making an almost-completed arc against the hillside backdrop of green. To me, the minimalist eloquence of native sites tops the fanciest cathedral any day. Vladimir told me there was also a cemetery hundreds of years old on the crest of the hill above. While he took photographs of the skulls, I hiked to it – no easy deal, given the steepness and the thick growth of angelica plants. Here and there a large bear had preceded me, pressing down the plants and leaving tufts of ginger-colored fur. When I reached the cemetery, an unfenced saddle of bare ground inlaid with rectangular stone graves, I saw that the drop from it on one side was as precipitous as the first hill on a rollercoaster. For a moment the clouds and fog over the ocean opened out and afforded a view that was, approximately, eternal. With just bare land, sky, and empty sea up ahead of me, I had for the first time an astronomical awareness that I was standing on a planet – perhaps the way a visitor would feel walking on Mars.

Frazier enjoyed his time at the fish camp (as did I, through his writing). He was there only about a week in all, but he says, “I felt I could have lived there for months. The routine suited me.”

Part II – Tells about his trip to St. Petersburg, in July, 2000, when he “suffered Russia-infatuation all over again.” He visited the Museum of the Arctic and the Antarctic, where by chance, he met the Museum’s director of publicity, Victor Serov. Serov was also a “guide who specialized in extreme adventure, and expeditions to most of the cold places on earth you can name.” When Frazier told him he wants to cross Siberia by car, Serov said he could help him. 

Part II also tells about another St. Petersburg trip that Frazier took in January, 2001, for the purpose of, among other things, meeting with Serov to plan the cross-Siberia trip. While there, he visited Peterhof, “the grand palace built by Peter the Great twenty-five miles west of the city on the Gulf of Finland.” His description of this visit is classic Frazier – avid, attentive, evocative. I particularly like his depiction of the Cottage Palace:

On the top floor was a snug, comfortably furnished room called the Morskoi Kabinet. (The name means “Sea Office.”) This was like a study or an aerie for the tsar. Its intricately patterned parquet floor and the green trompe l’oeil curtains set off the soaring distance in its windows. Through wood-mullioned double French doors leading to a small roofed balcony, one looked both downward and dizzyingly far across the gulf. On a table before the French doors sat a long brass telescope and a speaking trumpet; sometimes the tsar directed naval exercises from the balcony, calling orders to aides who relayed them to the assembled fleet. 

Part II also tells about a trip that Frazier took to Nome, Alaska, in March, 2001. From Nome, he flew to Wales, Alaska, and then from there went by helicopter to Little Diomede Island, in the middle of the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia. Frazier writes,

Little Diomede, the village, was a hardscrabble place if I ever saw one. At the time its population was 178. Its public buildings and houses ascended the island’s steep rock in a shallow out-of-the-wind indentation on its northwest side, one small structure mounting above another like the apartments of desert cliff dwellers. The village’s vertical access ways were zigzag staircases carved into the cement-hard snow. I walked and climbed around the village for a couple of hours, stepping into a store or office now and then to get warm. I saw a frozen seal on the floor of the vestibule of the tribal health building, and a polar bear skin hanging on a wooden frame, and two boys shooting a small black dog out by the village dump, and a guy carrying cans of soda pop on his shoulders into the general store when the cans exploded in the cold and sent soda cascading all over him and down the back of his neck. I spent a good while examining a walrus-skin boat on a rack near a launching ramp at the bottom of town. Almost nobody makes skin boats anymore. Splitting the skins and sewing them requires skills both physical and spiritual; you have to have absolute quiet in your soul to sew the skin covering to the willow frame. This twenty-foot boat, a museum-quality object, was obviously still being used.

That “I walked and climbed around the village for a couple of hours …” is so typical of Frazier’s approach to travel. He loves to nose around places, seeing what there is to see. And I’m happy to nose around with him.

Part III – Chronicles Frazier’s nine-thousand-mile road trip across Siberia, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, starting in St. Petersburg, August 5, 2001, and ending five weeks, two days later on the shore of Olga Bay, September 11, 2001. 

It unfolds like this: St. Petersburg to Pikalevo to Pestovo to Vologda to Velikii Ustyug to Esiplovo to Kirov to Perm to Ekaterinburg to Maltsevo to Pokrovskoye to Berezovyi Yar to Tobolsk to Omsk to Neudachino to Klubnika to Sekti to Chertokulich to Kargat to Novosibirsk to Akademgorodok to Kemerovo to Achinsk to Krasnoyarsk to Ust’-Mana to Kuskun to Kansk to Tulun to Irkutsk to Lake Baikal to Ulan-Ude to Chita to Chernyshevsk to Magdagachi to Svobodnyi to Blagoveshchensk to Birobidzhan to Volochaevka to Khabarovsk to Korfovskii to Bikin to Rudnyi to Olga Bay. 

What a trip! Here are some of my favorite moments:

Pikalevo, where Frazier and his two guides, Sergei Lunev and Vladimir “Volodya” Chumak, stop to buy bread and their van, a used Renault step van, won’t start:

When Sergei opened the van door, his cell phone, which he had said would provide a backup to my satellite phone, slid from the car seat and fell into a puddle. As far as know, it never worked again. And when he returned with a loaf of bread tucked under his arm like a volleyball – in most Russian stores, you bring your own shopping bags – he hopped into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and received not a sound in response. Multiple tries produced the same result. The van would not start. A red film of rage crossed my eyes. How could he not have done a better job of checking out this vehicle before we left? I held my tongue for the time being. He and Volodya persuaded the driver of a passing microbus to pull us for a jump start. They crawled under the bumpers, tied a rope to the frames of both vehicles, and with a quick tug we were running again. Volodya and Sergei acted as if this were just the normal way you start a car.

Informal rest area on the Vologda road, somewhere between Pikalevo and Pestovo, where the trio stop to take a break and Frazier notices all the trash:

Here for the first time I encountered big-time Russian roadside trash. Very, very few trash receptacles exist along the roads of Russia. Thus rest area and its ad hoc picnic spots with their benches of downed tree trunks, featured a ground layer of trash basically everywhere, except in a few places, where there was more. In the all-trash encirclement, trash items had piled themselves together here and there in heaps three and four feet tall, as if making common cause. With a quick kicking and scuffing of nearby fragments, Sergei rendered a place beside a log bench relatively trash-free and then laid out our cold chicken lunch on pieces of cellophane on the ground. I ate hungrily, though I did notice through the cellophane many little pieces of broken eggshell from some previous traveler’s meal.

Russian trash is one of the book's subthemes.

While staying at a hotel in Novosibirsk, Frazier puts his laundry out to dry and the wind blows it away:

In the early afternoon, still with no sign of the guys, I decided to wash some laundry in the sink in the communal bathroom. After rinsing and wringing out the clothes, I draped them on the railing of the porch outside the TV room to dry. But I had forgotten the wind, which in just a few minutes had blown the clothes off the rail, whence they had fallen six stories onto the roof of the building’s entryway.

I ran to the elevator and went down to the first floor and outside. My clothes were in the middle of the entryway roof where I couldn’t possibly get them. I rode the elevator back upstairs depressed about the shirts, socks, and underwear I would be leaving permanently in Novosibirsk. But when I looked half an hour later, I saw that the wind had swept them away yet again, and they were now scattered on the sidewalk and across the lawn. People were walking around them. I hurried down and collected them. 

That scene made me smile. Frazier is a genius at converting seemingly mundane incidents into delightful narrative art. 

At a campsite somewhere beyond Krasnoyarsk, Frazier climbs the stones of the roadbed of the Trans-Siberian Railway, looks down at the rails, and senses the presence of ghosts:

As on the old Sibirskii Trakt, phantoms thronged along the railway. I pictured the flag-bedecked, celebratory trains that passed by here when the railway was first completed in tsarist times, and the soldiers of the Czech Legion in their slow-moving armored trains in 1919, and the White Army soldiers dying of typhus by the thousands along the route, and the slave laborers who laid the second set of tracks in the 1930s, and the countless sealed Stolypin cars of prisoners dragged along these tracks to the deadly gulag camps of the Soviet Far East. Osip Mandelstam, the great poet on his way to death, at the Second River transit prison in Vladivostok, had gone along this line. The ties and the steel rails and the overhead catenary wires all leading determinedly eastward still had a certain grimness, as if permanently blackened by history.

On the car-carrying train from Chernyshevsk to Magdagachi, Frazier looks out at the passing landscape and describes what he sees:

Quietly, I slid from the van and went to the passageway for a look outside. The sun had risen on a cool clear day in early fall. Our train was making a steady twenty miles per hour through taiga mixed with hayfields. During the night a heavy frost had covered the countryside. It rimed the leaves of the birch trees, some of which had already turned yellow, and made the needles and knobby branches of a tree I took to be a larch a soft white. 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. When the tracks went around a bend, the rest of the train was revealed extending far ahead. Our vagon was the second-to-last car. A broad hayfield we passed had just been cut. The short stubble, all frost-white, lay like carpet among the haystacks spaced regularly across it. In the cool morning air, the top of every haystack was steaming, and each wisp of steam leaned eastward, the direction we were going. 

That “At this speed I could see the trackside weeds curved like shepherds’ crooks by the spiderwebs attached to them” is inspired!

Part IV – Tells about Frazier’s first winter trip in Siberia. It’s a momentous trip because it takes him to something he’s always wanted to see – a lager, i.e., a Soviet-era prison camp. On March 6, 2005, he flies from New York to Anchorage to Seoul. From there he flies to Vladivostok, where he meets Sergei and Volodya. He spends a few days in Vladivostok (“Blackened ruts of ice ran down the middle of many streets and the sidewalks were all hard-polished snow”), then he and Sergei fly to Irkutsk (“finally, true Siberian cold”). After two days there, they take a train to Ulan-Ude (“sooty and gray, as before, but now fiercely cold”). From there, they travel by bus along Lake Baikal to the town of Ust-Barguzin, where they arrange to be driven to the city of Severobaikalsk, two hundred and thirty miles away, at the north end of the lake. Thence from Severobaikalsk (“as charming as any Soviet-era relic could be”), they go by train for about fifty-three hours, then by hired car for another eight to the city Yakutsk (“still a frontier place, still hanging on to the writhing wilderness by its fingernails”). In Yakutsk, he visits, among other places, the paleontology museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences: 

There were mammoth tusks curling like untrimmed parentheses, and mammoth teeth, and pieces of fossilized mammoth hide with fur still on them, and a photo on the wall of a famous “mammoth graveyard” along a riverbank, where thousands of specimens had been found.

In Yakutsk, they arrange to be driven the two-hundred-some miles to the village of Khanyga. From there, they go to the village of Tyoplyi Kliuch, where Frazier visits a museum about the gulag. Eighteen miles past Tyoplyi Kliuch, they turn onto a prison highway called the Topolinskaya Trassa. Frazier says, “I traveled many thousands of miles in Siberia, and this is the most remarkable road I was ever on…. If most Russian construction looks handmade, this road appears to have been beaten into the earth by hands, feet, and bodies.” They drive the Topolinskaya Trassa for 117 miles, ending in the village of Topolinoe. Frazier finds this drive so dangerous that, at one point, when they stop to take a break, he pens a farewell note to his family, “just in case.” He describes the road:

Farther and higher into the mountains, the road went over pass after pass. Each unnerved me worse than the one before it. In my mind I still picture them – guardrailless, downward sloping at the outward edges, sidewalk-narrow above drop-offs of thousands of feet, with Tinkertoy wrecked vehicles at the far, far distant bottoms. (My fear may have supplied the Tinkertoy wreckage, though I’m sure I did see a lost truck or two.) 

After an overnight stay in Topolinoe, Frazier and Sergei head back to Khandyga, traveling the prison road again. On the way, in the light of day, they see evidence of derelict lagers. They stop to check one out:

At first view the camp looked as I’d expected. There were the fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s, the ink-black barbed wire, the inch-long barbs shaped like bayonets. Some of the posts leaned one direction or another, and the barbed-wire strands drooped or fell to the ground; the fencing, and the second line of fence posts several yards beyond, and the low, shameful barracks with its two doors and three windows fit exactly the picture of a Siberian prison camp that one has in mind. Sergei had drifted off to the left to videotape the lager from the side. I went in by the front gate, which was standing open. When I was inside the perimeter, the camp lost its genericness and became this particular Russian structure of its own.

Frazier describes the lager in detail – the boards, the plaster, the roof, the floor, the iron stove, the bunks. He says, “This interior offered little to think about besides the limitless periods of suffering that had been crossed off here, and the unquiet rest these bunks had held.” He’s struck by the place’s “overwhelming aura of absence.” He thinks of Stalin: “By this metaphysic, the camp I was looking at, and all the camps along this road, and the road itself, were Stalin. His was the animating spirit of the place.” In one of the book’s most memorable passages, he writes,

The strange feeling of absence that prevailed in the frozen silence here had to do with the secrecy and evil of the place’s conception, and with its permanent abandonment, in shame, after its author was gone. Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind.

Part V – Tells about Frazier’s fifth and shortest Siberian journey – his trip to Novosibirsk in the fall of 2009. He visits, among other places, the Novosibirsk Regional Museum and the Novosibirsk State Art Museum. He takes in a movie, Tsar, about Ivan the Terrible, at the Pobeda (Victory) theatre. He takes the subway to a giant shopping mall. Here’s his description of the subway ride:

One morning I set out to find this mall. I had heard it was on the city’s outskirts, so I went down into the Lenin Square metro, boarded a subway train, and rode to the last stop. The weather was as cold as usual but the station was heated to stuffiness. A drowsy warmth filled the subway car, too – until the train emerged onto the bridge over the Ob River, supposedly the longest subway-train bridge in the world. I noticed the passengers all rebuttoning and adjusting scarves. After a few minutes, the car’s temperature dropped to the subzero cold outside, and everybody was breathing steam. In another few minutes, the train went back underground and the car became warm again.

The only part of the mall that he really likes is “right at the door, in the rush of heated air that pushed back against the exterior cold. Mixed with that air, a strong scent of Russian diesel blasted muscular alternative to the retail atmosphere.”

Of all the things that Frazier does while in Novosibirsk, my favorite is his visit to the Museum of Siberian Communications:

The humorous blonde woman with Nefertiti eyes who showed me around laughed about the huge old radios, the suitcase-size adding machines, the bulbous green telephone that had come from East Germany, the almost-primitive Yenisei TV set made in Krasnoyarsk, the Brezhnev-era TV that was the size of a desk and that everybody in the 1970s dreamed of owning, and the 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. 

I love that list, especially the last item – the 1950s TV with the “large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water.” What a marvelous detail! Travels in Siberia brims with such things – the Northern Lights diorama in St. Petersburg’s Museum of the Arctic and the Antarctic (“On the exhibit’s midnight-blue sky, iridescent Northern Lights began to pulse and flash in the dark”), the elaborate clock in the Cottage Palace (“on the clock’s large glass face were sixty-seven smaller clocks each showing the time in a different one of Russia’s sixty-six provinces and Alaska”), the walrus-skin boat in Little Diomede, the campsite oatmeal with “a few mosquito bodies in it,” Sergei’s use of the van’s windshield wiper as a squeegee, the ubiquitous bottle-bottom cups, the honey cure for laryngitis, Admiral Kolchak Beer, Severobaikalsk’s winter garden (“There were ficuses, banana plants, wild grapevines, cacti, pineapple plants, and lemon trees growing this way and that in the bath of heat”), the glass beach outside Vladivostock (“Each wave as it curled on the shore picked up a load of water-smoothed, shiny-wet glass fragments and then tumbled them and set them down and spread them out”), on and on. I haven’t come close to doing this great book justice. It’s so rich in incident and detail. Maybe in future posts, I can do better, explore it more deeply. My next post in this series will be on structure. 

Postscript: Portions of Travels in Siberia originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker: see “Travels in Siberia – I” (August 3, 2009); “Travels in Siberia – II” (August 10 & 17, 2009); and “On the Prison Highway” (August 30, 2010).