George Kennan (1)

When the first attempt to lay a telegraph cable under the Atlantic had failed, it was proposed to build an overland line to Europe via Alaska, Bering’s Straits and Siberia. There already was a line from the mouth of the Amur river to Europe, and so the Russo-American Telegraph Company needed to build the line along the coasts of the Pacific Ocean. To this end, an exploring party was sent to Siberia in 1865-1867, consisting of several individuals eager for an adventure. The second show more successful attempt to lay the cable under the Atlantic made this project obsolete, but Kennan’s book is no less interesting for it. It’s full of anthropological observations, humorous passages and details of life and travel in Eastern Siberia in the mid-19th century.

During the three years the author spent there, he traveled all over the Kamchatka Peninsula and along the coast of Asia from Okhotsk to Anadyr, mostly by dog sleds. Often they were compelled to run besides their sleds to keep any feeling in their legs, and quite a few times they actually had to camp in the open in the middle of a snowy plain. In the beginning of winter they put three upright sledges together to form a sort of wigwam, shoveled the snow from the ground in between the sledges and lighted a huge bonfire in front of it, which went out during the night anyway, and so they woke up at midnight with frozen legs, despite wearing furs and sleeping in furry sleeping bags. Later removing the snow from any area became impossible, and they erected a tent on the snow, using the sledges to block the wind. Once during a heavy snowstorm they were snowed in to such a degree that they began to suffocate during the night and had to cut the roof of their tent to get out; they had to spend the next ten hours huddled on their haunches in a circle to try to keep their faces from being plastered with clouds of snow driven across the plain. Another time they discovered that a narrow line of beach between the sea and the rocky coast was occupied by a wall of frozen snow, and so they had to use their axes to cut a road in the side of this wall. But there were compensations, such as incredible auroras and the no less incredible hospitality of the local people, considering the precariousness of their circumstances. However, although Kennan found life in winter hard there, in the summer he was bored when he had little to do other than hunt, socialize and wait for the supply ships from America to arrive, and so he couldn’t wait for the winter to arrive again and make traveling by sledges possible, so that he could renew his exploration. When the second attempt to lay the telegraph cable under the Atlantic proved successful, instead of boarding the ship to San Francisco, George Kennan chose to travel to Moscow via postal horses and then to America via Europe, to make a trip around the world, but unfortunately he decided not to include an account of that in his book, since trips across Russia from the Pacific had been described before already.

I found this not a fast, but a memorable read. show less

A fantastic read about a place and a time that I had never given much thought. Dog sled travels with Cossacks and "Chookchees" in NE Siberia in the service of the Russian-American telegraph company. Doing recon on a line from "Behrings Straight" to the Amur River. What daring and dash from all parties involved. Dealing with -60F in a storm and sleeping in the snow. And I complain.....

Remarkable juxtaposition of a good humored and erudite narrator with a harrowing tale of travel and labor in the wilds of Kamchatka. Crammed with incident, hardship, narrow escapes, extreme weather, ethnography, and simple observation of a place and time unimaginably distant from out own.

This book is five stars for the compiling, editing, and first-hand research done by the editor- Frith Maier. She should have won an award simply for that; but this book was actually just her master's thesis. It contains a ton of references, footnotes, historical background, and additional details. The journal itself is, eh, not that informative. The editor also includes some excerpts from Kennan's letters, speeches, and articles that are helpful. I read a lot of travel works by Americans show more traveling in Eastern Europe and Central Asia during the mid-1800s which are found copyright-free on Gutenberg and other resources. The editors reference a few and I'm eager to read the one by Arthur Cunynghame as well as those of British explorers. This account is quite bland, it's simply shorthand journal entries with very few stories. The stories that are there are interesting, however, and Kennan had a big influence on future Russian thinkers, including his distant relative George Frost Kennan, the diplomat. I'm very glad the editors took the time to piece together this for historical reference so that it would not be left to the dustbin at the Library of Congress.

Kennan is the first American known to have traveled in Daghestan, in 1870. He was already publishing a book on his time spent in Siberia, and his travels and lectures from this trip would propel him into being the first American "expert" on Russia. I lived for two years in an area just south of where Kennan traveled. I lived with actual Lezgins, and while he writes about Lezgins it's not clear he traveled far enough south to actually encounter many. Be that as it may, Kennan gives the reader exposure to several mountain cultures in the late 1800s, when Russian attempts as passification were really just beginning and the Georgian kingdom was in decline, having already capitulated its authority to the Russian state.

Meier does a good job vetting the locations Kennan scrawls in his journal, traveling there with a translator and filmmaker Chris Allingham to retrace his path. Their own journey shows up only in the foreword, afterword, and a few footnotes. Meier has published a book on his own adventures hiking around Central Asia that I'm sure is an interesting read. Kennan spent some time in Scotland before traveling on to St. Petersburg and downriver all the way to modern-day Makhachkala. He encounters a Georgian prince who was taking an account of the province and settling disputes in various villages, helping Kennan along almost as a guide. From there he traverses to Tbilisi and then makes his way to Grozni (Chechnya) before making his way back across the Black Sea to modern-day Istanbul. (The most amusing anecdote of the book, for me, came when he successfully orders a cup of Turkish coffee and throws the concoction out as if he'd been duped into buying fake coffee.)

I recommend this book if you're interested in the Caucasus, it's probably a must-read. There are very few glimpses into the old culture there recorded in English, and his account is worth checking out. show less