A few pages on was another remarkable letter; this one written to Yakushkin by the philosopher Pyotr Chaadaev in 1837. In it, Chaadaev wryly describes for his faraway friend the scandal surrounding the publication of his ‘First Philosophical Letter’, when the editor of the journal in which it appeared was exiled to Vologda, all Chaadaev’s papers seized, and Chaadaev himself declared insane. Chaadaev’s letter, Herzen famously commented, ‘rang out like a pistol shot in the dark night’ of Tsar Nicholas I’s reign. It set the terms for the polemics between ‘Slavophiles’ and ‘Westernisers’ that preoccupied educated Russia for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond. In it, Chaadaev lamented that Russian culture was ‘based wholly on borrowing and imitation’. ‘And yet,’ he mused, ‘situated between the two great divisions of the world, between East and West, with one elbow leaning on China and the other on Germany, we should have … united in our civilisation the past of the whole world’. In his letter to Yakushkin, Chaadaev commends the Decembrist for his courage in adversity and for the fact that he has set to serious intellectual work in his exile and imprisonment. With a hint that he has seen a copy of the letter Yakushkin wrote to his mother-in-law. Chaadaev immediately engages his exiled friend in high-level intellectual conversation, apologising for the fact that his first letter should be so full of préoccupations, but he is such a person of ideas that he cannot liberate himself from their influence; they are the whole interest of his life and the foundation of his existence. He wonders about the state of Yakushkin’s religious sentiments, lamenting his former ‘frozen deism’ and hoping that his current studies will lead to serious contemplation of the most important questions of the moral order, and that Yakushkin will have parted with the ‘small-souled doubt to which deism tends’, noting that the latest science is not at odds with religious belief, but rather that new discoveries in the field of electricity support the cosmogony of the Bible. Thinking of Yakushkin’s current location on the map, so far from the sources of current intellectual movements, Chaadaev comforts himself that the times they live in are so saturated by the fluide régénerateur that, given Yakushkin’s cast of mind, he will not be far from their influence however far away he may be in body. Ideas, Chaadaev writes, observe the law that everything flows towards the centre.
*
Next morning we walked a small way from Agafya’s back gate through the forest, along the river, under another turn of the gas pipeline and down towards the Khongor Ula spring in its grove of a thousand beribboned pines. We passed the Buddhist datsan in the forest at the foot of the hill with its brightly painted yellow, red and blue pagoda roof. Tall silver birches rose up behind the lamas’ tombs in the grassy grounds; pink azaleas, bagalnik, bloomed in the edges of the dark forest. The datsan in its wide meadow presented the only neatly organised scene in this town in which everything else seemed disarranged, frayed and flapping. The air was warm. The light touched the mountains and the arrangement of vast shadows made them look perfectly regular in size and shape.
Kneeling on a small wooden platform beneath a concrete bridge, people took turns to fill plastic bottles with spring water flowing from a rusted pipe. Since the 1830s, these ‘geomagnetic’ waters have been used for healing by the Russians of Siberia. Some of the waters give new energy; others bring on sleep. In the last years of his Siberian exile, Yakushkin was in Irkutsk, being treated for a painful and disabling swelling of the legs by a doctor named Dzhibovsky, who advised him to come to the Tunkin waters for a cure. The doctor treated his legs with a herbal essence so pungent that Yakushkin hesitated about visiting his old friends the Volkonskys and the Trubetskoys at their homes in the town.
Beyond the spring were the structures of a Stalin-era spa resort: an avenue lined with plaster statues of athletic workers, urns and a crumbling ceremonial staircase that led to a balustrade at the foot of a forest pathway leading up through the falls to a cascade. At a kiosk I bought a twenty-year-old brochure about the Sayan sanatorium, which claimed that most visitors to the resort are suffering from nervous-psychological exhaustion, adding that for many this condition is made worse by the great sufferings associated with their journeys to Arshan. On the dusty edges of the avenue, resting their heavy legs in the morning sun, old women sat on fold-out chairs, selling dried herbs from open plastic bags. I bought a handful of what I understood to be dried chrysanthemum petals from a sweet woman who told me she had recently retired from a career spent driving coal trucks to sell her herbal remedies in Arshan. ‘Good air,’ she said, waving her hand at the mountain and the sky, ‘good ecology.’ She told me to drop a few petals into my tea each morning to ‘freshen my head’. I wish now that I had bought the whole sackful of her magical blue-grey splinters.
‘If someone tells me a tree is sacred, I will touch it,’ Vanya told me, summing up his religious philosophy. At the last place of healing to which he took us, a spring of ‘living water’ on a bend in the wide Irkut, even the wire fence had been sanctified with knotted scraps of cloth and plastic bags. We paid a man in a hut, and changed into our bathing suits. We were the only visitors. Further along the riverbank, close to the forest edge on the empty field, was a lone tent, its canvas so rough and faded that it seemed a natural feature of the landscape. The mineral water, which poured thickly out of a wide shower head piped from the ground, came out of the earth at the precise temperature of the human body, smelling powerfully of iron. Its properties had transformed the concrete pad on which we stood into a satiny carpet of electric-green moss. It was hard to step out of the radius of the water into the cold wind that blew across the field, and I think I must have showered for too long in that blood-warm fluide régénerateur, for after a few miles on the long road back to Irkutsk, I felt weak and tremulous, close to that state of ‘nervous-psychological exhaustion’ for which Arshan boasts the cure.
Every traveller arrives in Irkutsk exhausted, Chekhov wrote home. For us, fatigue was a mercy, as the one-room apartment on the outskirts of the city which Vanya’s cousin had vacated for our use that night was a desolate place and we were glad to fall asleep. The next morning it was raining heavily. We drank tea infused with chrysanthemum petals in the tiny kitchen, and looked out through the branches of still leafless birches at the squalid ranks of Khrushchev-era apartment buildings through the window. It was not hard to imagine why this city, which is a nexus on the heroin route from Central Asia to Europe, has such a high rate of drug addiction and HIV.