The Man Who Loved Siberia Roy Jacobsen and Anneliese Pitz (London: Maclehose Press, 2023), 302 pp., ISBN: 9781529413038.
Accounts of travel in the remote regions of Eastern Siberia, particularly along the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, are not easy to find. The American Perry McDonough Collins was probably the first Westerner to descend 2,700 miles down the Amur—the ninth longest river in the world—to the Pacific in 1856. He was followed soon after (travelling in the opposite direction) by Thomas W. Knox, a journalist employed by the Russo-American Telegraph Company to explore the possibility of building a telegraph cable network that could connect America with Europe via the Bering Strait.
When that possibility ended with the laying of the first Transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, there was little reason for anyone to travel in this remote and hostile land. Tigers, mosquitoes, and endless forests and marshes made overland travel difficult. The constantly changing rivers—where sandbanks appeared and disappeared at random—were no less difficult to navigate. The irrepressible Reverend Henry Lansdell made it to the Amur in the 1880s, where he managed to collect some important ethnographica. Charles Hawes, like the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, made it to Sakhalin Island soon after, but found little to recommend this terrible penal colony. After that, few outsiders ever reached these remote areas.
The most recent books on the region include Dominic Ziegler's Black Dragon River (Penguin Putnam, 2105) and Colin Thubron's The Amur River: Between Russia and China (Chatto & Windus, 2021). Thubron's travelogue, all the more interesting because the author was eighty when he made his journey, makes some interesting observations on the extent of recent Chinese penetration into these largely untamed lands.
It thus comes as a very pleasant surprise to discover this new book, The Man Who Loved Siberia. Although his name is not on the cover, it was written by Fritz Dörries, a German adventurer and natural history collector, who spent over twenty years in the wildest parts of the Amur basin from 1877 to 1899 collecting and sending specimens to European museums. The credited authors, Roy Jacobsen and Anneliese Pitz, compiled the book from notes that Dörries wrote for his daughters when he reached the age of ninety in 1942 (the author did not die until 1953, when he was 101).
Dörries first set out for the East in 1877, when he was 25. He made an adventurous crossing of Japan's Kyushu Island by foot, collecting plants en route for a museum in Hamburg, before sailing over to the island of Askold off the Siberian coast. From here he began mapping the Suifun and Ussuri rivers and then parts of the Amur. There were no maps available at the time. “I roamed the regions east and south of Lake Baikal, along the border with Mongolia, in the Khentii and Yablonovy mountains, and travelled across the Sidimi Peninsula towards Korea through Suchan and Sjantalase,” he writes. He says his entomologist father showed him an illustration of a Parnassius nomion butterfly when he was four, and that he determined even then that one day he would seek out a live specimen of the hitherto uncaptured insect.
Over the course of the next 22 years—often in the company of his taxidermist brothers Edmund and Henry—Fritz Dörries more than achieved his objective. He eventually collected 61,500 butterflies from 996 species, of which 275 were new to science and several of which were named after him. In addition, there were 14,500 beetle specimens (1,490 species) and 4,500 flies, bees, wasps, and other hymenopterans (195 species), added to which were hundreds of plants, predators (including tigers), birds, and bird nests. On behalf of museums across Europe, Dörries also collected large numbers of ethnographic objects from the Nanaitsy (then called Gol'dy) and Nivkhi (then called Giliaki) living along the Amur, as well as items from Chukchi, Koriaki, Buriaty, Tungusi, Orochi, Ostiaki, and other peoples.
Dörries is very matter-of-fact in the way he describes the terrifying conditions he faced, in particular during the winters, when temperatures would often drop to 30 or 40 degrees C below freezing. Once, he realized a tiger had been sitting only yards away from him, patiently waiting for an opportunity to snatch his dog. Having shot a tiger on another occasion, he was skinning the animal when a group of Nanaitsy turned up asking to share his fire. When they saw the tiger, however, they quickly left the camp because their fetishes—oetzicho—had been exposed to the animal and were therefore useless. Such fetishes were carried in the hunters’ belts, wrapped in bearskin to keep them warm. The departing hunters dropped them on the ground and stamped them into the snow. “Thus, our ethnographic collection was further enhanced by the addition of another ten items, which would otherwise have proved almost impossible to acquire,” wrote Dörries.
On one overland return trip from Europe in the 1890s, he took a sleigh from Pavlodar (now in north-eastern Kazakhstan) via Altai, Krasnoiarsk, and Irkutsk, and then on to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. Taking into account the detours, by journey's end he had travelled almost 10,000 km, perhaps a distance record for an unbroken journey by sleigh.
On several occasions Dorries came across groups of escaped Chinese convicts (honghuzi), who he described as being infamous for their barbarity and cruelty to anyone they came across who could not defend themselves. After the mutilated bodies of a woman and her two children were found in a hut, he set off with a group of a dozen Cossacks to track down the culprits and, almost without batting an eye, ambushed and killed nine of them. There was no room for sentimentality.
Perhaps the most interesting assignments taken on by Dörries were two expeditions at the end of his career in eastern Siberia to capture alive and bring back to Europe two different species of deer. The first was to collect a small herd of twenty Dybowski's Sika deer for the eleventh Duke of Bedford, who was President of the Royal Zoological Society and who kept a variety of deer at his ancestral home of Woburn Abbey, England. When this was successfully completed, Dörries was asked to collect a group of six Siberian wapiti, which he personally delivered to the Duke at Woburn Abbey, having transported them along the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Finally, in 1897, Dörries returned to Hamburg for good, where he ran the insect house at the zoo of his friend Carl Hagenbeck, retiring when he reached the age of 81. To many people, Dörries's lifelong obsession with the frozen wastes of Siberia is incomprehensible. But let us leave the final words to him: “There is nothing more fulfilling than wandering in virgin nature, in the taiga and over the tundra, where winter is harsher, spring more intoxicating, summer more brilliant and autumn more colourful than any other place on earth. Siberia, to me, is a fairy-tale land.”
Nick Fielding
Burcot, Oxfordshire
A Life in Music from the Soviet Union to Canada: Memoirs of a Madrigal Ensemble Singer Alexander Tumanov, translated and edited by Vladimir Tumanov (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2019), 435 pp., ISBN: 9781574417555.
Upon encountering this review, you may be asking yourself the following completely understandable question: Why is an autobiography of a madrigal singer being reviewed in Sibirica? To be honest, I must admit that the same question came to my mind before reading this engaging, highly personal, and topical memoir by the Ukrainian émigré vocalist Alexander Tumanov, whose métier is the madrigal, a genre of secular vocal music that originated in the Renaissance era. In the interest of full disclosure, this book does not discuss Siberia or Siberian studies. As such, A Life in Music may not appear to fall within the purview of this journal. While acknowledging this fair criticism, I nonetheless believe that in these times of crisis and conflict in Ukraine and surrounding lands, reading an uplifting story such as Tumanov's can be edifying for those of us who study what used to be known as the post-Soviet space.
It is difficult to resist the temptation to use musical language when describing A Life in Music. Tumanov, in a lucid English translation by academician Vladimir Tumanov (whom I presume is Alexander's son, but is not identified as such in the book), regales the reader with a romantic and far-reaching personal epic that is connected by the common thread (dare I say note?) of choral music. Part Bildungsroman and part travel narrative, Tumanov's book is indeed an “inspiring portrait of one person's devotion to his art under trying circumstances” as the book's dust jacket description states.
In the abstract, Tumanov's tale of resilience, persistence, and the pursuit of his life's passion in the face of adversity is compelling. Given recent events, Tumanov's story is even more salient given that he was born in 1930 in the city of Uman, in central Ukraine. Tumanov describes Uman as a “small town…halfway between Kiev and Odessa.” Although he does not make this observation explicitly, the fact that Tumanov locates his birthplace between the Ukrainian capital (I do not fault Tumanov for spelling “Kiev” thusly despite the fairly recent prevalence of the Ukrainian spelling Kyiv) and arguably Ukraine's most cosmopolitan (I acknowledge and intentionally employ the pejorative Soviet meaning of this word) city during the period described in this section of the book enables us to learn something of Tumanov's sense of the cultural and geographical importance (or lack thereof) of his birthplace.
Befitting its autobiographical character, a sizeable part of this book's early sections is devoted to Tumanov's youth, a time during which his love for music and vocal performance in particular was nurtured within the confines of the Soviet single-party state. As is well known even to non-specialists, life in the Soviet Union during the Stalin years and afterward was marked by phases of sharp, loosened, and then renewed censorship of the arts, including music. While Tumanov's experience in this regard was not exceptional, his personal reminiscences add a personal perspective on life in a society that functioned simultaneously within and outside the control of the party-state apparatus.
Tumanov's claim to fame is that he was one of the founding members of the Ensemble Madrigal, or simply Madrigal in Russian. Created in 1965, the ensemble was co-founded by Tumanov and other musicians, most notably the composer and harpsichord player Andrei Volkonsky (d. 2008). The Ensemble Madrigal was instrumental (apologies!) in the emergence of a movement known as the Early Music Revival, which sought to perform Middle Ages (I prefer this term to “medieval”), Renaissance, and Baroque-era music in the Soviet Union. Along with Volkonsky, Tumanov and other members of the Ensemble Madrigal performed their music amidst the chilly cultural climate of the Brezhnev period. To anyone who is familiar with the Thaw of the Khrushchev years and subsequent reimposition of state control over the arts and other areas by his successors, it is not surprising that the performances of Tumanov, Volkonsky, and others in the group were eventually banned. While the Ensemble Madrigal continued to perform underground in clandestine concerts, the leadership of the group began to fracture under the pressure of censorship and the pervasive culture of paranoia and fear that many members of the Soviet intelligentsia (a term that I believe is appropriate to use in describing Tumanov, although he does not employ it to describe himself) experienced during this period.
As with a number of other dissidents (I also employ this term in reference to Tumanov and his colleagues, despite the fact that he does not use it in self-reference), by the early 1970s Tumanov faced the grim possibilities of imprisonment or internal exile. In 1974, after Volkonsky's emigration to Switzerland the year before, Tumanov left the Soviet Union for Canada. After completing his doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, Tumanov accepted a position at the University of Alberta, from which he retired in 1996.
The book's second half is devoted to Tumanov's new life in Canada, where his advocacy for madrigal musicians who still performed in the Soviet Union became an emphasis for him. As is the case with many émigrés, Tumanov's decision to leave Ukraine was both difficult and rewarding. As one reviewer states on the back of the book's dust jacket, Tumanov has produced a “vivid, cinematic book.” I happily concur and therefore can recommend this book to my fellow Siberianists for its contribution to our understanding of Soviet, Ukrainian, and émigré cultural history.
Christopher J. Ward
Clayton State University