Travels in Siberia (77 page)

Fourierist discussion group: Florinsky,
Russia
, 2:812; also Wood,
The History of Siberia
, p. 12.

a letter by Vissarion Belinsky: Berlin,
Russian Thinkers
, p. 173. Belinsky’s arguments so moved reform-minded young Russians that many had the letter committed to memory; it was not permitted to be printed in full until 1905. See Florinsky,
Russia
, 2:820.

Prince Dolgoruky: Strahlenberg,
Russia, Siberia, and Great Tartary
, p. 253.

Abram Petrovich Gannibal: Rasputin,
Siberia, Siberia
, p. 394.

Alexander Menshikov: Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, 3:339.

Natalie Lopukhin: Fries,
A Siberian Journey
, p. 161.

Serfdom, as an institution: Hill and Gaddy,
The Siberian Curse
, p. 76. Historically, a serf who ran away was regarded as free if he wasn’t caught within six years (Rasputin,
Siberia, Siberia
, pp. 80–81).

I have seen one of those: On the title page, it says,
“Puteshestvie, iz’ Peterburga v’ Moskvu
[no author listed],
1790. V’ Sanktpeterburg.
” There is also an epigraph:
“ ‘Chudishche oblo, ozorno, ogromno, stoz’vno, i layai’—Tikhlemakhida, Tomb II, Kn: xviii, sti: 514.”
The
Tikhlemakhida
is a translation of Fénelon’s
Adventures of Telemachus
, done by the Russian poet V. K. Trediakovskii; the epigraph means “A monster ugly, repulsive, huge, hundred jawed, and barking.” Very likely it is intended to refer to serfdom. After all the hard knocks the author and his book went through, the sight of the Houghton Library’s ex libris on his book’s endpaper, with the school’s motto, “Veritas,” gladdens the heart.

Herzen and his friend Nikolai Ogarev: Masters,
Bakunin
, p. 46.

“I am certain that three-quarters of the people”: Herzen,
My Past and Thoughts
, p. 271. Herzen published the chapters having to do with his exile in a separate volume, titled
My Exile in Siberia
. Sticklers for geographic accuracy might point out that Viatka, Herzen’s place of exile, was not technically in Siberia, being west of the Urals. Today Viatka is the city of Kirov. We passed through it on our way to Perm and Ekaterinburg.

refusing to say where he got it: Kennan,
Siberia and the Exile System
, 1:326. All the exile stories in this paragraph are from Kennan’s book.

a prisoner named Tumanov: Wood,
The History of Siberia
, p. 122.

Mikhail Bakunin: Details of Bakunin’s biography are from Masters,
Bakunin
. A close study of his escape from exile is Carr, “Bakunin’s Escape from Siberia,” pp. 377–88.

by leaving her behind: In fairness to Bakunin, he did later send for her. She met him in Stockholm, and their odd marriage continued, although in 1868 she had a child whose father was rumored to be Bakunin’s associate Carlo Gambruzzi. She was not with Bakunin when he died, in July 1876.

“ ‘Can one get oysters here?’ ”: Edmond de Goncourt, quoted in Herzen,
My Past and Thoughts
, p. xxxiv.

a revolutionary named Leib Bronshtein: Stephan,
The Russian Far East
, p. 69.

267 times as much: Shalamov,
Graphite
, p. 272. Shalamov expresses the weights in
puds
, a unit of measurement used in former times; one
pud
equaled about 36 pounds. The Decembrist prisoners (according, he says, to the memoirs of Maria Volkonsky) had a quota of 3
puds
of earth a day. Miners in the Kolyma mines had a quota equal to about 800
puds
a day. Three into 800 is about 267.

“I read memoirs”: Shalamov,
Kolyma Tales
, p. 344.

used fake ration cards: Some of these offenses are listed in Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, 3:255–56. Others are in Dallin and Nicolaevsky,
Forced Labor in Soviet Russia
, p. 175, and Diment and Slezkine,
Between Heaven and Hell
, p. 236.

“Don’t feed us Soviet straw”: Dallin and Nikolaevsky,
Forced Labor in Soviet Russia
, p. 22.

A woman got ten years: Conquest,
The Great Terror
, p. 284.

“Let’s remember his soul”: Asher,
Letters from the Gulag
, p. 54.

the Tibetan Buddhist High Lama: Forsyth,
A History of the Peoples of Siberia
, p. 330.

“Oh, it’s boring”: Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, 3:576.

Vyacheslav Molotov ambassador to Mongolia: Hosking,
Russia and the Russians
, pp. 531–32.

Penal Colony Number 10: David Remnick, “The Tsar’s Opponent,”
The New Yorker
, October 1, 2007, p. 66.

Members of a tribe called the Tungus: Ides,
Three Years’ Travels
, p. 31.

retreated into smoke-filled huts: Erman,
Travels in Siberia
, 1:201.

“delicate portion of my privy parts”: Fries,
A Siberian Journey
, p. 137.

“It seemed as though the walls and ceiling”: Chekhov,
The Island
, p. 121.

they put out his campfire: Arsenyev,
Dersu Uzala
, p. 90.

Dostoyevsky waxed lyrical: Dostoyevsky,
The House of the Dead
, p. 283.

“much pestered by gnats”: Bell,
Journey from St. Petersburg
, p. 86.

descending on young foals: Fries,
Siberian Journey
, p. 137.

suffocating reindeer: Stephan,
The Russian Far East
, p. 11.

paint them all over with tar: Erman,
Travels in Siberia
, 2:95.

The Lonely Planet guidebook: Vic Hawthorn,
Russia, Ukraine & Belarus
, 2d ed. (Oakland, CA: Lonely Planet, 2000), p. 569.

“sailed on the 8th day of June”: Armstrong,
Yermak’s Campaign
, p. 131.

Remezov Chronicle
: Ibid., pp. 27–28.

“then all the infidels”: Ibid., p. 140.

“a vision of a shining Christian city”: Ibid., p. 112.

Shaybani, a brother of Batu: Groussett,
The Empire of the Steppes
, pp. 393–94.

Shaybanids often fought with the Taibugids: Ibid., pp. 489–90; also Armstrong,
Yermak’s Campaign
, p. 2.

Hanefite teachings:
Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 86–87.

a lenient, even generous attitude: Izhboldin,
Essays on Tatar History
, pp. 105ff. See also Armstrong,
Yermak’s Campaign
, p. 61.

the founders of Russian noble families: “According to the avowedly approximate computations of [the historian V. O.] Kliuchevsky, at the end of the seventeenth century about 17 percent of the Moscow upper class was of Tatar or eastern origin” (Florinsky,
Russia
, 1:63).

convert to Christianity: Oliver Roy,
The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations
, pp. 28–29.

spent time in an ancient prison in Omsk: Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
, 3:50.

“Em Che Ess”: Men of this organization are seen all over Russia; it also makes public-service safety announcements on TV.

the most beautiful city in Siberia: Chekhov,
“The Crooked Mirror” and Other Stories
, p. 200.

goes back to John Quincy Adams: See Adams,
John Quincy Adams in Russia
. The ladies of Russia get no mercy from J.Q. For example, “After dinner came some additional company; among whom Princess Woldemar Galitzin, venerable by the length and thickness of her beard. This is no uncommon thing among the ladies of this Slavonian breed. There is at the Academy of Sciences a portrait of a woman now dead, but with a beard equal to that of Plato” (p. 141); also, “Count St. Julien was looking through his glass at the dancers and lamenting that the sex in Russia was not handsome . . . Oh, at Vienna not a guingette of chambermaids but would show more handsome women than all Petersburg could produce” (p. 343). (A guingette is a suburban tavern.)

too manlike, rough, and otherwise unattractive: Babey,
Americans in Russia
, pp. 81, 85.

“all the vague and shadowy delicacy”: Custine,
Empire of the Czar
, p. 498.

personally had won that war: Clay,
Life of Cassius Marcellus Clay
, p. 462: “I did more than any man to overthrow slavery. I carried Russia with us, and thus prevented what would have been the strong alliance of France, England and Spain against us; and thus was saved the Union!”

married Russian women: Stephan,
The Russian Far East
, p. 134.

as many as thirty couples at a time: Ibid., p. 140.

“Entirely too many of these women”: Graves,
America’s Siberian Adventure
, pp. 309–10.

turn on her heel and walk away: Blakely,
Siberia Bound
, pp. 130–32.

One article I read: Caroline Moorehead, “Women and Children for Sale,”
The New York Review of Books
, October 11, 2007.

Second River transit prison: Mandelstam died in the Vtoraya Rechka (Second River) transit camp on December 27, 1938. See Bobrick,
East of the Sun
, p. 450.

“people who believed in only one thing”: Kennan,
Siberia and the Exile System
, 2:361ff.

the country’s interim dictator: Mazour,
The First Russian Revolution
, p. 162.

His wife, Ekaterina: Mazour,
Women in Exile
, pp. 44ff.

later a saint of the Orthodox church: Figes,
Natasha’s Dance
, pp. 72–73.

Pushkin rhapsodized: Mazour,
Women in Exile
, p. 61.

Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in
War and Peace
: This is from the guides at the Volkonsky house-museum.

Tolstoy planned to write a book about the Decembrists: Vladimir Fyodorov, ed.,
The First Breath of Freedom
, trans. Synthia Carlile (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988), p. 312.

only three were over forty years old: Mazour,
The First Russian Revolution
, p. 221.

“a perfect galaxy of brilliant talent”: Sutherland,
The Princess of Siberia
, p. 3.

They began their young manhood: Information about the origins and development of the Decembrist movement may be found in Barratt,
Voices in Exile
; Barratt,
The Rebel on the Bridge
; Zetlin,
The Decembrists
; and the books by Christina Sutherland and Anatole G. Mazour cited above.

Ivan Dmitrievich Yakushkin: The source on Yakushkin I used is
Zapiski I. D. Yakushkina
[Memoirs of I. D. Yakushkin]
(redactor: Evgenii Yakushkin; 1905)
, which includes his memoir and selected letters. I do not believe an English translation of this book exists; it’s a charming and interesting book and would be well worth a translator’s time. The editor, Evgenii Yakushkin, was the author’s son.

“[We] were standing not far from the golden carriage”: Ibid., pp. 8–9. The translation is mine, with the assistance of Boris Zeldin.

An Arakcheev story: Herzen,
My Past and Thoughts
, pp. 40–41.

One day a small group of intimates: Yakushkin,
Zapiski
, pp. 11ff. Yakushkin devotes much of his memoir to the secret society’s beginnings and early years. He describes how he and some of the other founding members were careful to keep Pushkin, who was somewhat younger than them, in the dark about the society’s existence, and how it pained the future great poet of Russia to be left out. Pushkin was thought to be too talkative and emotionally volatile to make a reliable member. As Yakushkin describes his own encounters with the poet, the judgment seems to be justified.

Destutt de Tracy: His
Commentaire
was published in Paris in 1819. It was a translation of an English version published in 1811 in Philadelphia. Montesquieu had
argued in favor of constitutional monarchy, and Jefferson and Destutt de Tracy wrote their book in rebuttal; they did not want monarchy of any kind. See Dvoichenko-Markov, “Jefferson and the Russian Decembrists.”

“Of all of us he alone”: Yakushkin,
Zapiski
, p. 23.

Novosiltsov-Chernov duel: Mazour,
The First Russian Revolution
, p. 130; see also the account of Prince Y. P. Obolensky in Barratt,
Voices in Exile
, pp. 24–26.

“her affections . . . fixed on another world”: Buchanan,
The Works of James Buchanan
, 2:351.

“exorcist-like oaths”: Yakushkin,
Zapiski
, p. 24.

dampened his enthusiasm for the honor: Konstantin had also disqualified himself from being the next in line by divorcing his first wife and marrying a Polish countess. See Florinsky,
Russia
, 2:745–48.

“You can’t have a rehearsal”: Barratt,
The Rebel on the Bridge
, p. 64.

“We shall die”: Mazour,
The First Russian Revolution
, p. 164.

“pools of blood on the snow”: Sutherland,
The Princess of Siberia
, p. 103.

killed another high-ranking officer: Colonel Sturler, who was also trying to negotiate; see Mazour,
The First Russian Revolution
, p. 177.

“Voilà un joli commencement”
: Ibid., p. 178.

Sergei Volkonsky: Sutherland,
The Princess of Siberia
, pp. 104ff.

by starting to laugh: Zetlin,
The Decembrists
, p. 269.

Yevgenii Obolensky went through a religious epiphany: Barratt,
Voices in Exile
, p. 19.

threw himself at the tsar’s feet: Zetlin,
The Decembrists
, p. 234; also Mazour,
The First Russian Revolution
, p. 207.

“After about ten minutes”: Yakushkin,
Zapiski
, pp. 64–65.

turning the pages of his French-Russian dictionary: Barratt,
The Rebel on the Bridge
, p. 125.

dancing with the tsar: Sutherland,
The Princess of Siberia
, pp. 118–19.

“I wept like a child”: Yakushkin,
Zapiski
, p. 96.