Russian archaeologists, citing the remains of inscribed crosses and chessboards found on Svalbard, claim that before the existence of a centralised Russian state or fleet, before merchant corporations or cartographical societies, the Pomor trappers, dwellers by the northern seas (po more), had been sailing their boats – lodyas and koches – up to the land they called Grumant for reindeer hides and fox pelts, and wintering in moss-caulked driftwood izbas on its icebound shores. Tales of their battles with scurvy in the Arctic darkness became fashionable reading in Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the light of fish-blubber lamps, the Russian trappers knotted and unknotted rope to keep their blood moving, and tried to resist the ‘witch-sisters’ who roamed the islands for prey. ‘The old trappers relate’, says one account, ‘that scurvy goes about there … in human form’, as an old woman with eleven sisters of dazzling beauty who chant an ‘awe-inspiring song’, enticing hunters to their destruction. ‘Here are no Church hymns, no ringing of bells. Here everything is ours.’ The last man to die would confess to the earth: ‘Mother, moist Earth … Receive my sinful body into thy keeping.’
There was one Pomor peasant who, though he had sailed lodyas as a boy, chose to turn south overland for Moscow where, in 1731 he enrolled in the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, claiming to be the son of a priest. Polymathic in the sciences and humanities, Mikhailo Lomonosov was sent to Marburg by the Imperial Academy of Sciences to study mining and chemistry. In 1738, he read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in German, noting the book in a report on his foreign studies to the Academy. Even when he had become one of the intellectual luminaries of eighteenth-century Russia, Lomonosov was faithful to his origins. The first geographer of the northern ocean, he classified icebergs and studied how the sea melts and freezes. Fascinated by the role of maritime trade in making the great imperial nations, he imagined Russia’s northern shores full of busy ports, and a route to the East that would fulfil Peter the Great’s dreams of power at sea. In 1765, the year of his death, a scientific expedition to the Arctic inspired by Lomonosov reached Spitsbergen. By this time, English travel fiction – Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver and Captain Brunt’s Swiftian imitation, Voyage to Cacklogallinia – was, at last, appearing in Russian translation. But more remarkable than these fabulous tales, said the head of the Archangel whaling company who had first heard the story, was Pierre Louis le Roy’s popular Adventures of Four Russian Sailors Washed Up by a Storm on the Island of Spitsbergen, which was published in multiple editions in French, German and English in the 1760s and 1770s. Unlike the Englishman Crusoe, he wrote when the first Russian version appeared, the ‘Russian Robinsons’ were real and, unlike his, their desert island was infertile and cold. For six winters in the 1740s, while Lomonosov was composing odes in Moscow about how Russian toughness would overcome the Arctic, the stranded Pomors survived on reindeer’s blood, scurvy grass and prayer.
We sailed slowly up the west side of Svalbard, in and out of fjords, for four days until we came to the ice sheet. When we were not hanging over the deck watching the sea ice roil and grind as the ship split it, we had fun reading scientific romances about the adventures of mad palaeontologists, like Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. When all the earth’s surface had been discovered, popular travel writers invented fantasy worlds beneath its crust. ‘We have made a magnificent discovery, my boy! We have proved that the earth is hollow,’ says Perry in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core, when his mechanical prospector, the ‘iron mole,’ lands in Pellucidar. ‘We have passed through its crust to the inner world.’ Then the macho hero, David Innes, son of a rich American mine owner, follows a ‘tantalising, prehistoric girl’ called Dian the Beautiful through the Land of Awful Shadow and the Mountains of the Clouds, observing the struggle for species dominance among evolutionary freaks by the seas of the Lural Az.
The light over the sea was intense, as though the weeks of unbroken day had gathered into one deep light. Marina was at the gangplank, holding my daughter’s hand while they waited; her hair gleamed, her anorak was red as the icebreaker’s hull. ‘Don’t judge us,’ she said as we parted, ‘we want this. We are equal in the permafrost – no money, no police – there is no equality left anywhere else.’ For geopolitical reasons, Russia is strengthening its presence on Svalbard again, marking out national territory, bringing more men up to work the mines. Meanwhile, Norway, NATO member since 1949, would like the rusting Soviet settlements to disappear. Russian fishing boats feud with Norwegian coastguards. And the white spherical objects visible on the mountains when the clouds lift are, Russia believes, something to do with the US Missile Defence System. As we drew out, we looked back at the miners just emerged from the hollow in the earth; they smoked, watching our southbound ship and the sharp mountains, in endless regress on the other side of the fjord.
THIRTEEN
Arshan and Irkutsk
‘What would you and I do in Moscow, Boris (or anywhere else in life)? A person’s essence cannot be broken down into pieces of daily life. Being a hero doesn’t get you an apartment …’
MARINA TSVETAEVA, letter to Boris Pasternak, 10 July 1926
I awoke from a brief jetlagged sleep at Tunka, where on moonless nights cosmic rays are caught in metal boxes. Patterned like giant beehives across the dry grass of the Buryat plain, the traps are mounted on ungainly struts of wood standing on pads of rough concrete. Inside the boxes are ‘Cherenkov light detectors’ – photo-tubes named after Sergei Vavilov’s most brilliant student, Pavel Cherenkov – that measure the energy of cosmic rays as they fall to earth in showers of charged particles. Bearing traces of cosmic time, signs of the interstellar gases they have passed through and collided with on their high-energy journey from black holes and unknown distant galaxies, the rays penetrate our atmosphere, participating in the evolution and mutation of life on earth. Physicists study them for insights into the structure and workings of the universe, the mystery of its origins.
The Tupolev landing at Irkutsk had made death seem close. Hours later, my spirit was blank and I still felt nauseous. Along the roadside, arrangements of dirty plastic flowers com memorated fatal car wrecks. The bereaved had bandaged the trees around each shrine with rags, shamanist prayer ribbons. Did these dirty scraps appease the spirits of the dead for the insult of a pointless end?
In the Baikal region, which Chekhov crossed on his way to visit the penal colonies on Sakhalin, he found all the landscapes he loved: the Caucasus, Zvenigorod, the Don. ‘Get the prosecutor to send you here,’ he wrote home, signing himself ‘your Asiatic brother’. He complained that Siberia was just too spacious to fit into a letter; it was a place to be felt rather than seen. After Zun Morino, where the land flattens out and the snow-covered peaks of the Sayan come into view, the arrhythmic wheezing of the Zhiguli calmed at last, the mid-morning sun warmed my face, and my eyes closed gratefully on the changing view.