Echoes of the Past and Siberian Nature’s “Radical Otherness”: An Ecocritical Reading of Contemporary Travel Writing

This article investigates the relation of the self and the environment in two travel-ogues-one British, one French-that narrate and describe journeys to Siberia: Colin Thubron’s In Siberia (1999) and Sylvain Tesson’s Dans les forêts de Sibérie (2011), translated into English in 2014 as Consolations of the Forest. It examines the narrative strategies that these travellers use in order to engage with the land and fine-tune their senses to perceiving the “voice” of Siberia. The analysis is framed by Lawrence Buell and Greg Garrard’s ecocritical theories, specifically their analysis of the discourses of the pastoral and toxicity, and Arnold Berleant’s concept of “aesthetic engagement” (48). Within this framework, this study demonstrates how Tesson and Thubron negotiate between the echoes of the past they bring to Siberia, through intertextual and historical references, and the foreign frequencies they discover on their journeys. Both their journeys are informed by previous knowledge of the history and geography of Siberia, and are oriented by a quest for a predefined object. Thubron, who had already undertaken a journey in Russia during the Brezhnev era described in Among the Russians (1983), travels across Siberia after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the following question in mind: “[w]hat, I wondered, had replaced Communist faith?” (In Siberia 3). He navigates among the wreckage of Communism, in a devastated land made of graveyards, mines, and the ruins of prison camps that bear traces of past suffering. His narrative alternates between historical passages that display a scholarly knowledge of the history of Russia from the geological formation of Siberia to the Czarist era and the Soviet Union, bewilderment and unease at the version of history that some Russians support, relief amidst beautiful landscapes, and relentless attempts to come to terms with the horror of the Gulag.

Tesson’s Siberia is comparatively much less historical, and centres on the author’s readings during his stay and his physical activities around his solitary cabin. Unlike Thubron, he does not explore Siberia, but chiefly a walkable perimeter around his hut. As he is renowned in France for his aphorisms and his refined literary style, his aim is not only partly autobiographical but can also be seen as aesthetic, which contrasts with Thubron’s more self-effacing and journalistic approach to travel writing. Tesson presents his stay on the shore of Lake Baikal in 2010 as an inner quest to “finally find out if [he has] an inner life” (17). Written in the form of a diary, his travelogue is composed of literary references and philosophical musings, shrouded in self-deprecation, irony, and misanthropy, and a plethora of lyrical descriptions of nature.

The rationale behind the choice of travel writing for my study is threefold. In The Environmental Imagination, Buell takes a stance for the study of nonfiction, and especially travel literature, as a source of the “clearest cases” of environmental texts (8). Yet the ecocritical potential of travel texts has received scant attention. Foundational ecocritical readings have focused on American nature writing, mostly from the nineteenth century, such as those of Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Susan Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, and John Burroughs; on contemporary fiction and dystopias, such as those of Leslie Marmon Silko; and on ecopoetics. Contemporary travelogues are particularly suited to study the representation of place from an ecocritical point of view, since the genre abides by the first criteria Buell set in his first definition of “an environmentally oriented text”: “[t]he nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history” (7; emphasis in original). In addition, as they seek to translate otherness into familiar terms, travelogues exemplify the tension between the representation of the nonhuman environment as radically other and as romanticized by cultural expectations. This article borrows the term “radical Otherness” from Lisa Isherwood and David Harris, who crafted it in the fields of sociology and feminist theology to designate a space in which Others are neither...