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En Descendant Les Fleuves: Carnets de l'Extrême-Orient russe
Paperback
Series: La Bleue
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ISBN10: 2234064562
ISBN13: 9782234064560
Publisher: Stock
Published: Dec 1 2019
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.61
Height: 0.51 Width: 5.32 Depth: 8.47
Language: French
ISBN13: 9782234064560
Publisher: Stock
Published: Dec 1 2019
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.61
Height: 0.51 Width: 5.32 Depth: 8.47
Language: French
Travelling Downriver: Notebooks from Easternmost Russia
The journey we undertook towards easternmost Russia in the summer of 2010 fulfilled a longstanding urge we both had. Aside the appeal that this part of the world had always had for us, we had both heard rapturous descriptions of the beautiful, wild landscapes along the vast River Lena that can be travelled down from the town of Yakutsk all the way to its mouth in the Arctic Ocean, a long way north of the Arctic Circle. This book is the story of that trip.
It opens with our arrival in Yakutsk, the largest city in the world built on permafrost and whose buildings stand on stilts. Then our journey downriver along the Lena, a river not crossed by any bridges and whose bed sometimes stretches to dozens of kilometres. Our stop-offs in villages abandoned by the world. Reading on the bridge by the light of the midnight sun. Landing in the extraordinary town of Tiksi, a stricken, tomb-like, post-Soviet place on the shores of the Arctic Ocean - Tiksi which was closed to foreigners until the end of the Soviet Union. The first footsteps into the Tundra. Our return trip to Yakutsk in a clanking old crate of an aircraft. Leaving for Khabarovsk, much further south, along the River Amur, so near to China. A day spent in Birobidzhan, the first Jewish republic created by Stalin in 1929, where Yiddish is one of the two official languages. And finally Vladivostok, on the shores of the Pacific, just along from North Korea, China and Japan, Vladivostok-the-grey, whose name engenders dreams, but whose chaotic urbanism and abundance of motorised vehicles sometimes masks its beauty.
Whether it was due to the harsh journey required to reach them or the brutal realities they bore witness to, these places - which are anything but tourist attractions - acted as powerful motives to write. It very soon seemed obvious that we must not write a book with two voices but with two hands: the texts were written by one or other of us, or both of us, with - in these instances - a passage by one inserted in the middle of a text by the other. In fact, the narrative voice is always the same: a first person narrator that sometimes represents one of us, sometimes both of us - an I with four legs, four eyes and four eyes, a multiple sounding board.
The journey we undertook towards easternmost Russia in the summer of 2010 fulfilled a longstanding urge we both had. Aside the appeal that this part of the world had always had for us, we had both heard rapturous descriptions of the beautiful, wild landscapes along the vast River Lena that can be travelled down from the town of Yakutsk all the way to its mouth in the Arctic Ocean, a long way north of the Arctic Circle. This book is the story of that trip.
It opens with our arrival in Yakutsk, the largest city in the world built on permafrost and whose buildings stand on stilts. Then our journey downriver along the Lena, a river not crossed by any bridges and whose bed sometimes stretches to dozens of kilometres. Our stop-offs in villages abandoned by the world. Reading on the bridge by the light of the midnight sun. Landing in the extraordinary town of Tiksi, a stricken, tomb-like, post-Soviet place on the shores of the Arctic Ocean - Tiksi which was closed to foreigners until the end of the Soviet Union. The first footsteps into the Tundra. Our return trip to Yakutsk in a clanking old crate of an aircraft. Leaving for Khabarovsk, much further south, along the River Amur, so near to China. A day spent in Birobidzhan, the first Jewish republic created by Stalin in 1929, where Yiddish is one of the two official languages. And finally Vladivostok, on the shores of the Pacific, just along from North Korea, China and Japan, Vladivostok-the-grey, whose name engenders dreams, but whose chaotic urbanism and abundance of motorised vehicles sometimes masks its beauty.
Whether it was due to the harsh journey required to reach them or the brutal realities they bore witness to, these places - which are anything but tourist attractions - acted as powerful motives to write. It very soon seemed obvious that we must not write a book with two voices but with two hands: the texts were written by one or other of us, or both of us, with - in these instances - a passage by one inserted in the middle of a text by the other. In fact, the narrative voice is always the same: a first person narrator that sometimes represents one of us, sometimes both of us - an I with four legs, four eyes and four eyes, a multiple sounding board.
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