Siberia, Siberia

In Siberia, Siberia Valentin Rasputin - one of the most gifted and influential Russian prose writers of the past thirty years - offers a sweeping account of and penetrating reflection on the Russians' four hundred years of experience in Siberia. In attempting to characterize this vast land as a whole, Rasputin begins with Yermak, whose Cossack detachments crossed the Ural Mountains into Siberia in the 1580s, and traces the rapid Russian exploration, conquest, and colonization of Siberia through the centuries to today. He looks at the peculiar physical and character traits of the Siberian Russian type, and at the gap between dreams and reality that has plagued Russians in Siberia. Rasputin examines six distinct areas of Siberia - Tobolsk, Lake Baikal, Irkutsk, the Gorno-Altay region, Kyakhta, and Russkoe Ustye - each of which, he shows, provides ample reason for Siberians, and all Russians, to feel at once proud and ashamed of their achievements in this vast land. This book will appeal to anyone interested in ecology, in Russian and Soviet history, in Siberia as a frontier comparable to the American West, and in Rasputin's views on history, religion, tradition, and language. This first English edition includes sixteen photographs and two maps, as well as an introduction and explanatory notes by the translators, Margaret Winchell and Gerald Mikkelson.