Siberia

Just started reading Rob Lilwall’s Cycling Home from Siberia. I’ve always been fascinated by this immense expanse of land east of the Urals. It probably started in Geography lessons at school - and maybe Siberian Khatru by Yes. What was it about the place? The mysterious ‘glamour’ of the Trans Siberian Railway on its southern edge, the dismal gulags of the Stalin era, the fact that it takes up three-quarters of Russia's land area but only a quarter of its population. It has the world’s deepest lake (Baikal), fifth longest river (Yenisey) and coldest temperature ever recorded (−71.2°C). I think it's all of these but really it's the emptiness and remoteness that fascinate me. Take the state of Chukotka. It’s bigger than France but only has 50,000 inhabitants. I’m also really interested in the explorers who mapped it. But ultimately I’m not sure I want to go there. I think I’d prefer to experience it through others’ eyes rather than its grim, mundane reality first hand.

Top 10 books (an esoteric list if ever there was one)

- Dervla Murphy Siberia by Accident
- Dervla Murphy Silverland: Journey Beyond the Urals (another cyclist, written in her 70s)
- Colin Thubron In Siberia (a classic)
- Jeffrey Tayler River of White Nights: a Siberian River Odyssey (like Thubron, a Russian speaker)
- Colin Angus Lost in Mongolia (it starts there but mostly takes place in Siberia)
- Piers Vitebsky Reindeer People (British anthropologist’s extended studies of the Eveny people)
- Andy Home Siberian Dreams (about Norilsk, one of the grimmest, remotest, coldest, most polluted cities on earth).
- Anton Chekhov A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire (a trip he made to Sakhalin in the 1890s)
- Vladimir Arseniev Dersu the Trapper (from the early 1900s, later made into a film by Kurosawa)
- Joanna Kavenna’s Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule (not so much about Siberia as the Far North)